>> [MUSIC] My mother spoke her mind
whether you wanted to hear it or not,
whether you agreed with her or not.
One of the things that when I do public speaking,
I speak at different churches and groups,
and one of the things that I can tell them
was that in all my life,
I never heard my mother disrespected.
There was a very vile habit of calling grown women by
their first name or calling
them girl or Auntie or whatever.
At no point did any person black or
white call my mother anything other than Miss Hattie.
That was all I don't know if they some of
them knew that I had a daddy and they knew who he was,
but they knew Miss Hattie.
Nobody called her anything other than Miss Hattie.
So one of the things that I really learned from her and I
know this is not quite on the question you asked,
but one of the things I learned was
that if you respect yourself,
and respect your own principles.
You can get other people to respect you.
They may not like you, but they have to
respect the fact that you are
still true to your principles.
And that was the one thing that I noticed,
like I said, we didn't always get along.
But she spoke on mind. She spoke
what she believed to be true.
She started a Black history collection
got when I was in elementary school.
And at that time, there was
no other Black history collection in
the state, not at Speelman,
not at Moorhouse, not at any of the large universities,
but she collected books by
Black authors about Black people.
And there were times
when the library was closed on Sunday,
I know that's hard to imagine now.
But the library would be closed and
we'd get a call from some student at Speelman,
who was trying to do a paper or somebody at Mars Brown,
and somebody told him about Miss Hattie.
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