www.Liberty Fund D.C.

The full text of this statement was placed in the Congressional Record in 1984 by Rep. Nancy L. Johnson to focus public attention on her four-year battle to become a full-fledged member of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution.

I am a black woman, and I have many different nationalities and races in my background. After a three-year struggle, I recently became a member-at-large of the Daughters of the American Revolution, one of the oldest and largest women's organizations in the country. Until 1977, it had been all white.

Eligibility for membership in the DAR is based on descent from a man or woman who assisted the colonies during the American Revolution. Although I was qualified, the decision to seek membership in the DAR was a difficult one to make. Later, as I sought membership, many stumbling blocks were put in my way that tested sharply my resolve and my reasons for wanting to become a member.

The thought that I might be eligible for DAR membership occurred to me as a little girl growing up during the depression. My parents would reminisce about their childhoods and show us scratched tintypes and faded pictures taken of relatives many years before in a time which must have seemed happier to them. One picture that hung prominently in the living room of our house was the source of a lot of childhood curiosity and later adult speculation for me and my brothers and sisters. It was a large portrait of my mother's grandfather, a white man, dressed in a civil war uniform. The picture had been in the family for many years and was passed onto my mother by her mother, a black woman, who married the man's son.

One day in 1939, as I stared at the picture of my great grandfather and wondered about his past, I heard my parents saying that the Daughters of the American Revolution would not let the famous opera singer Marion Anderson appear in Constitution Hall. I had heard my parents talk about her at other times, and they admired her because she was one of the most famous and accomplished woman of her time, or anytime.

Still too young to understand the full meaning of racism, all I could think of was that the DAR had some kind of nerve. "Who do they think they are to tell someone like Marion Anderson she can't sing in some old building." I said to my mother, "I bet if we could trace our ancestry, you would be able to join the DAR." She smiled and said nothing, which was her way. It was a thought I never forgot, although it happened forty-one years before the genealogical research was done that would have qualified her for membership.

The stories that my mother and grandmother told of the years before the turn of the century and their early lives in the cramped cabin quarters of a New York Harbor coal barge were passed down to the grandchildren. My nephew, Maurice Barboza, a young man who likes to get to the bottom of things, set out in 1978 to learn more about great grandfather Gay and his involvement in the civil war. He uncovered the trails of white and black ancestors from the banks of the Penobscot River through Dedham and Boston, South Street in New York, battlefields in Virginia and the coal piers of Bermuda Hundred now barely visible along the James River.

After more than two years of intense genealogical research, Maurice found that my great grandfather, John C. Gay of Union, Maine, lost his life during the bloody Virginia battle of Cold Harbor and that generations of my mother's family not only served the country during the revolutionary war, but helped settle colonial towns in Massachusetts and Maine as early as 1630. He had successfully woven the fabric of our ancestry into a beautiful tapestry of races, colors, places and personalities.

My nephew was anxious to have his research certified, and this led to his acceptance as a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. The SAR is the older male counterpart of the DAR, and eligibility standards as far as descent from a patriot are the same as they are for the DAR. When we celebrated his acceptance and the culmination of many months of travel and research that unlocked a large corner of our family's history, I felt that joining the DAR would be a splendid way of honoring the memory of my mother, who had died five years before.

As a member of the DAR my mother's name, Ida Gay Santos, and the name of her father's great great, great grandfather, Jonah Gay, would be listed in DAR records for posterity so that future generations would know that they were remembered and loved by a caring family. Besides all of my mother's female descendants would be eligible to join the DAR for as long as there is a DAR.

While I honor my revolutionary war ancestor who is white, I also feel that as a black woman, I am standing in for those whose black ancestors served during the revolution, but who may never know it. I hope that in a small way -- as a DAR member -- I will be able to honor the more than 5,000 black patriots who lost their lives or eventually lost their dreams of freedom after fighting for independence. Their brave and selfless contributions were not wasted because they demonstrated to future generations the vitality of black people whose bodies and minds -- though abused and manipulated by racism -- still could fight for freedom, even if it was another man's freedom. This spirit remained constant from generation to generation through years of slavery and civil war and years of second class citizenship and world wars. My brothers and husband all served in the segregated army and navy during World War II.

As I was growing up, my family did not know any DAR members or at least I do not think we did. There were a few very old families in our rural neighborhood that we liked very much, but no one ever mentioned the DAR. The pictures and articles that we would see or read over the years helped to shape our opinion of the DAR, an opinion that made me think that I would be spanning a large gulf in seeking membership. So when I began to look into the DAR it was without the social bridges that many white women already have to help pave the way for their membership.

My parents were humble people. My father, Oviedio Santos, who was of African and Portuguese ancestry, came to this country as a young boy from the Cape Verde Islands. He worked on the docks at the Erie Lackawanna railroad station in Hoboken, New Jersey and ran a coal barge in New York Harbor where he met my mother. When they went on land, he found work at the railroad yards of New Haven, Connecticut where he bicycled to his job. He eventually moved his growing family to Plainville and worked in New Britain factories. When he was not shoveling coal into factory furnaces or working with machinery, he cultivated some of the most prosperous vegetable gardens that kept his family fed. People came from the town and surrounding areas to buy his produce, especially the big red strawberries that were plump from the top of the box to the bottom. As children we sold them at a roadside stand in front of the house.

Current events were important to him, Roosevelt was "his" president, and he read everything he could get his hands on. His children were sounding boards for his strong political views when the family gathered around the radio on those bitter-sweet evenings to hear news of the depression or impending war. A man of little formal education, he talked politics with everyone in town, including the lawyers and politicians he would help get elected. His biggest dream -- not unlike many immigrant fathers -- was to have one of his children become a lawyer. Despite a hard life, this dream came true. A tough and crusty man at times, whose penetrating eyes said more than words, he urged his children to "stand up for your rights! Vote! Be good citizens!" A little bit of papa got me through the DAR ordeal no doubt.

My mother raised eight of her own chi1dren and more than 40 foster children, who still think of her as I do -- as mother. Besides doing the cooking, cleaning, and silently worrying about us all when the bills came due and the money was tight or when we were sick or when my brothers went away to war, she turned our yard into a rainbow of colors with roses, marigolds, elephant ears, lilies, creeping flox, gladiolus, irises, and other flowers that made her the envy of the town. When strangers stopped to ask for bulbs or clippings, my mother was always ready to oblige and explain how each flower she gave away should be planted and cared for.

Today where our home once stood, there are three gigantic and graceful weeping willows that she raised from seedlings. They remind me of her silent strength and unspoken protectiveness. They shaded four generations of her family on warm summer afternoons. With a house always full of children and many tough times, she was the calm in the eye of a storm, a trait that townspeople who meet me to this day will remark about. While papa would raise his voice when we disappointed him, mama always remained serene. She never attended a day of school in her life, but was taught to read and write by her father during daily sessions on the deck of the barge. Although my mother was a quiet woman, I found that she could express her feelings so well in the many letters she wrote to me when I left home as a young woman to try to make a living in Washington. I still read those letters.

My mother was the child of parents whose backgrounds were so different that they should never have met, fallen in love or been married -- not in 1898 anyway. Her father, Alphonso Gay, was a white Maine sea captain who sailed three and four masted coasting schooners -- Yankee Clippers -- with names like the Ruth S. Hodgdon and the Laconia from Maine to Virginia and points in between. Her mother, Rosa King Gay, was a young independent black woman of native American blood whose father was aged and mother worked the gardens of Bermuda Hundred, Virginia with the men folks to keep her family going. The family had been there since the civil war.

My grandmother kept her head up in her black world and in my grandfather's white world, despite running into the predictable barriers. I know now from conversations with my older sisters that she carried many scars that were not apparent to a child. But it did not stop her from truly caring about the multitudes of people she met in the up-side-down life of the transient South Street docks. She was always there when someone needed her whether it was to take in a homeless child or go to the aid of a mother nearing birth.

Despite her rough exterior, my grandmother was the mellow woman who told me and my sisters and brothers some of the most wonderful stories as we sat by her rocking chair and watched her smoke a corncob pipe. But it is the odor of baking biscuits and her over-protective cat that I best remember about grandmother's house, and not the swirls of tobacco smoke. My grandparents were never very far from each other or from their beloved daughter. When my grandfather died in 1927, he was in my mother's house at South Washington Street where It grew up. My grandmother, Rosa Gay, was at his side. She died in 1942 at New Britain General Hospital where my mother died in 1975.

When I think of what my parents and grandparents meant to me and my sisters and brothers and how they embodied in so many ways the traits that helped build this country, I could not reach any other conclusion but that this was a background that deserved to be recognized. My family is truly an American family that embraces with pride its black, white, native American and immigrant heritage.

strike ~~Black Revolutionary War Patriots Foundation~~ and insert instead, National Mall Liberty Fund D.C.