Word: mother
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Faced with death, they wanted above all else one last communication with a home they had reluctantly left, to fight a war they did not understand. Hurriedly, sometimes awkwardly and unconsciously sententious, always with compelling urgency, they scribbled: "Dearest Mother . . . Dear Dad . . . Dearest...
...long as the Negro fathers were in the U.S. Army and acknowledged paternity, the mothers received support allowances. In the British provinces $85 a month was comparative riches. But when Negro soldiers were demobilized in the U.S., allowances ceased; some Negro fathers neglected to make any other provision. Then the social pressure of British provincial respectability became unbearable. Said one British mother of a Negro's child: "I am shunned by the whole village. . . . The inspector for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has told my friend to keep her children away from my house...
Some returning British husbands were willing to forgive their erring wives if the infant evidence was removed. Mothers sought to have their children adopted. "If I only had someone to take the baby for me and look after him . . ." wrote one mother, "but it must be someone kind-you see I love...
Adoption, however, was all but impossible. Like British village matrons, British charitable institutions were turning up suddenly race-conscious noses at illegitimate mulatto babies. Even when the father and mother were married, U.S. custom sometimes intervened to prevent reunion. The League of Colored Peoples asked one Southern Negro father if he wanted to take his white wife to America. "Brother," he replied, "if I did, I would have to leave her in New York when I went home...
...Kentucky's Dean, Sarah lived with her mother and two sisters on a 250-acre farm near the campus, raised a tobacco crop of her own as a sideline. Dressed in her shabbiest farm clothes ("I figured the poorer I looked, the better price I'd get"), she drove the crop to market in the farm truck, sold her high-quality tobacco at twice the price of ordinary grades...