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VY: Let's back up a little bit because I definitely want to talk about that. Let's talk about your parents when they met. How did they meet?

MM: Oh, I should go back further. Because my mother went to Oberlin College, so she was with Mary Jane Kerr, and then she goes off, and she goes to pick a college. She doesn't know how to pick a college, so she said, "This one seems like the kind I want. It's the first college in America to accept Blacks and women." "Oh, great." So there she went; she went to Oberlin College. And in her senior year, they had an assignment for sociology. The sociology course said, "Pick a topic for assignment, and it has to be researched." So she worked with two children of missionaries, because that's what she wanted to be, and they decided, well, let's see if the values of the founding fathers of Oberlin still exist. So one took the townspeople, one took the faculty, and Mother had the students. And when she was interviewing the students, she found the Black students could never go the Spring Dance because the Spring Dance was a formal dance and you had to dance with six different people and you had to have these six different names on your dance card. But there weren't six Black couples, so her group decided to integrate. So the two men on there, they danced with the Black gals, and Mother, and then found another woman, they danced with the Black men when they had to change partners. And the next thing she knew, she was called into the office of the dean to explain herself. So she did that, and the lady said... well, if you can imagine, 1925, you're on the dance floor, and all these Black and white people were dancing together. So, I mean, even in the '50s that would have been a shock. Can you imagine what it is in the 1920s? Well, anyway, she went to see the dean, the dean said, "I am, have to investigate what happened last night, and I want you to answer me yes or no. Do you understand? I don't want any other word other than yes or no. Is that agreed upon?" And my mother said, "Yes." She said, "This was an organized activity, wasn't it?" Mother said, "Yes, but..." "That's it, interview over, you're excused." So my mother thought it was all right because the dean led her to believe she's investigated, she found it was a group project, fine, all right. Then while she was doing missionary work in Montana, Christian missionary work, she gets this from the Christian Society in Boston saying, "They've taken away your scholarship to medical school for advanced, too advanced views on the race question." Because they wouldn't get other funders to give to them if they would fund people to do things like that.

VY: This is all because of the dance?

MM: Well, that was pretty dramatic in the 1920s.

VY: Sure.

MM: So she lost her scholarship for that. But this is the theme all in motherhood were -- as a dating person, she was following, speaking up for the Blacks in America. So that's why it's like a tradition. If you speak up for somebody, you might get shot down one way or another. And we were trained as children to speak up for others that were being mistreated. But we became middle class, unlike most people, because of this Mary Jane Kerr trying to make her visibility welcoming to other people and showing that her different ideas would work, and she was a kind, upper-class lady.

VY: That is so interesting because she was able to kind of move in, I guess, different circles or be a little more successful because of how this other woman taught her to just be, basically behave differently.

MM: Yes, exactly. Isn't that amazing?

VY: Yeah. So your mom did, she moved forward and --

MM: Oh yes, and she had one year of medical school, and then she got a master's and my aunt's laughing, they say she was on the stage, she didn't realize she was the only woman on the stage. You know, in the 1920s, how many women get their master's? And she did research for the Wistar Institute, which still exists, you know, it's now a cancer research place. And my daughter, since she's named after her, looked up and she found papers written by my mother in the 1920s while she was working at the Wister Institute.

VY: Did she make copies?

MM: She did and she showed the little animal called the Daphnia that was used, like white mice are today, Daphnia were used because it was a crustacean, it was a little, like, water flea that jumps around, and it has live births. And it's orange and you can see through it, and you can see all the little Daphnia babies, and you can see them being born. But if they are threatened and something's bad, they become male. And they can become male and female depending on the situation. But it's an interesting animal. By putting other things in the water to test, she was working on a project to see if they could use the Daphnia to test whether one was pregnant or not.

VY: Was that her project?

MM: That was one of her projects.

VY: Was it one that she came up with?

MM: No, no, everybody was looking for it all over the world, looking how do we tell if a woman is pregnant or not.

VY: I never heard that before.

MM: Yeah. So they take her urine and they would put it in there, and seeing if the Daphnia would be able to tell if the lady were pregnant or not, but that was one of her assignments. And while we were younger, the Wister Institute had a laboratory and I would walk to the laboratory, or my mother would drive me in the car and I'd stay over there. And there were these salamanders and all these microscopes and dead animals, pickled, in all these different forms. It just was a very interesting, unusual upbringing.

VY: Well, okay, so that's fascinating.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.