The Making of a Black Middle-Class Family
COOMBS, ORDE
National Reports THE MAKING OF A BLACK MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY BY ORDE COOMBS 3 ROSA JONES HOLLOMAN She sits in the morning room of her daughter's house on Fessenden Street in northwest...
...The children started to arrive...
...They were eager to learn but had not been properly prepared...
...Her eyes are rheumy from the toll of years, yet her voice is strong and her hearing is good...
...Four years earlier, Dr...
...We would get a lot of students from the country...
...Because Rosa had to pay her own way by working in a laundry...
...I'm the only one left...
...She not only found a way but a husband as well...
...Rosa, and Nellie, survived childhood, and with Nellie's death last year, Rosa alone remains...
...He cares and he works hard for other people," she says simply...
...But I don't know, and I only want to say what I know for sure...
...Robert Sheldon Jones set out to raise a family...
...On June 12, 1912, Rosa Jones and John Lawrence Sullivan Holloman were married on Robert Jones' farm in Albemarle County...
...With his death on May 6, 1970, a 53-year career as pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Washington came to an end...
...John L. S. Holloman Jr., the son of Rosa and John Holloman and the grandson of the slave Robert Shelton Jones, was sworn in by Mayor Abraham Beame of New York as the new Director of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, the highest paid civil service job in New York City...
...Robert Jones had always wanted a son, and following the death of his only boy he kept hoping for one as he added to his family...
...He felt that hard work had been his life when he was a slave, and that if he could work hard for someone else, he could work harder for himself...
...There was a lot of sadness because they had been sold, and my father promised that he would come on back to Virginia as soon as he could...
...In 1909, Rosa Jones left Virginia for North Carolina...
...It was his penchant for education that made him take advantage of what schooling could be found in the area for blacks...
...When his wife died, he became both father and mother to his daughters...
...We were close," she says of her sister...
...She had been offered a position at Waters Training Institute in Winton, and though she had given some thought to continuing her education, she decided she could not turn the job down: Her younger sister Nellie was going to enter Hampton in the fall, and money would be needed to pay her tuition fees and upkeep...
...But when he got near to Charlottesville, he jumped on a train and came home as if he had traveled all the way in luxury...
...That is always a good combination...
...But in 1862 or '63 the Dabneys sold my father and his younger brother to a plantation in Tallahassee, Florida...
...All of my father's people were slaves on the Dabney plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia...
...We knew that people cared and we knew that no matter how bad it could get????And remember around the turn of the century it was very bad????we would do better every year...
...After a few years, he was able to buy a piece of land from a man named Worthenbaker, which he cultivated on his own time...
...It can be done now if professionals will remember that they are part of society, not above it...
...he made good his promise...
...Well, as you know, there was a war going on, but that was way before my time...
...What does Rosa Holloman think of her son's new position...
...While at Waters, where he had also been a student, John developed a gift for speaking in rural churches...
...she needed five years to complete Hampton's four-year course...
...Her hair is white, but her face is still smooth...
...he was a great one for discipline and education...
...I've been blessed, I know...
...You must remember that I am 85 years old...
...From what I can find out, there wasn't too much disruption where my Orde Coombs, a free-lance writer, is currently studying the American black middle class on an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship...
...he came home one day in fine style...
...She is Rosa Jones Holloman, the daughter of former slaves, born November 7, 1888...
...We lived in Washington, we raised our children here, and we saw them become men and women we were proud of...
...To this day I am not sure why they did it...
...Born in rural Bertie County, North Carolina, in 1885, the oldest of 10 children, he became head of the family at age 16, when his father died...
...She must be right, for on April 3, 1974, Dr...
...It always seemed to me to be such a big responsibility, but I knew that if I did the best 1 could, I would find a way to help those who needed help...
...She tells of the past, including the time before her birth, calmly enough, although much of it is obviously painful for her...
...Rosa recalls...
...Holloman had announced his commitment to service and change in an article in the American Journal of Public Health: "A national health program which would address itself to achieving and securing a healthy life for all Americans should be designed now...
...He didn't believe that anything was impossible, and he gave all of us that belief...
...He was a small man and very disciplined and controlled...
...Waters Training Institute was entirely supported by missionaries from the North...
...Covered up this spring morning because she has not been feeling very well lately, the old woman is watched constantly by a full-time nurse...
...She had been an alert and diligent student, and her father was easily persuaded that she should leave home to pursue her studies...
...From this union came five children: Carolyn, Jessie, Marjorie, John Jr., and Grace...
...Pressed for a sharper definition of the individual she lived with for 58 years, she responds: "An achiever...
...They seemed to think that we could do wonders for their children, that we would teach them noble things and that they would find their way in the world and that God would always be with them...
...Then she says loudly: "The arrival of those colleges in the South saved us...
...John Lawrence Sullivan Hollo-man was a teacher of mathematics and Latin at Waters...
...And we would look at the faces of the parents who brought them...
...A stroke two years ago diminished her strength, so that many of her waking hours are now spent in a wheelchair...
...All of the children went to the county school in Albemarle, erected after the slaves were freed, and in 1904 the 16-year-old Rosa was sent away to Hampton College...
...When asked if she has fond memories of those days, first she smiles and mutters to herself...
...Eventually, he was channeled into the ministry and trained at Virginia Union University, a Baptist school in Richmond, Virginia...
...father's family lived, and at the end of the war...
...Physicians are licensed by and are privileged to serve society, and the health of the nation must be accepted as a nonprofit national endeavor for the ultimate benefit of mankind...
...Don't ask me how he planned to do that...
...My husband was an achiever...
...Robert Shelton Jones and Carolyn Freeman Jones had seven children, two of whom died in infancy ????the only boy, named after his father, and a girl named after her mother, who died giving birth to her...
...My father didn't know the meaning of not working," says Rosa...
...He had walked from Tallahassee to Charlottesville????it must have taken him months...
...Asked what she remembers most about her husband, Rosa Holloman says: "His devotion to us, to God, to the goodness in man...
...Still it's lonely being the last of your generation...
...He would come home from the fields bone tired, and then he would begin to ask how things went, if we had taken care of this, if we had learned that...
...He courted and married Carolyn Freeman, who worked as a cook for the Wingfield family, and soon he began working for the Wingfields, too...
...National Reports THE MAKING OF A BLACK MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY BY ORDE COOMBS 3 ROSA JONES HOLLOMAN She sits in the morning room of her daughter's house on Fessenden Street in northwest Washington, and struggles with tears as the memories come surging back...
...Five daughters, Minnie, Sarah, Louise...
...Maybe they were short on money or something, and I seem to remember being told something about a gambling debt...
Vol. 57 • June 1974 • No. 13
