Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 30, 1994 TAG: 9412060002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALMENA HUGHES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
"Been to the conference, have you?"
"Yes, I have."
"What's that all about?"
"It's the first gathering in this state of African-American women to address various issues and interests that are pertinent to us. We're having seminars, guest speakers, events, vendors and a lot of networking and interacting with each other. It's a wonderful experience."
Five hundred of us registered for the conference in the hotel and adjacent Richmond Centre, and 900 of us attended the banquet featuring Essence magazine editor-in-chief Susan L. Taylor. Still others did not attend the conference but came to examine and buy the vendors' wares or to attend the free guided historical heritage tour.
Conference coordinator Kenneth S. Johnson said he sees no contradiction in his being at the women's event's helm. The president of Johnson Inc. Marketing and Promotions, whose clients include the National Baptist Convention of Christian Education, Sony Music and Polygram Records, worked with an advisory committee and staff of approximately 25 women and the Richmond Chapter of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women Inc., to pull together the highly successful assembly - all within two months. He said he plans to present it annually.
"I wanted to do it because I felt like I owed it to African-American women - those who raised me and provided the support and inspiration that helped get me to where I am today. But also to all African-American women, because behind every strong man there is a good woman," Johnson said. "I made sure that all the speakers and seminar leaders knew this wasn't a male-bashing conference. This was about positives ... about love."
Positives such as in seminars on how to improve our health and beauty, our family relationships and ourselves, our economics and employment, and how to broaden our historical, political and philosophical perspectives.
Positives such as banter between old friends choosing the colors of their complimentary totes: "I'll take a red one, and she'll have the yellow to match her - ahem - high-yellow skin." Or between strangers discovering common interests and moving towards becoming friends.
Positives, and love, and energy and inspiration from a roster of diverse and dynamic keynote speakers.
Maybe it's melanin, but at age 71 actress/author/activist Ruby Dee looked more like a well-preserved 50. Her resonant voice was surprising in one so petite; her acuity and humor amazing as she fielded questions from the audience or read from her book, "My One Good Nerve" (Third World Press).
"I'm a reader ... a phrase flinger, a slang slinger, a big-tome, hardcover lover," Dee rapped to a rapt audience during her afternoon keynote address. Indeed,
During a one-on-one interview, she sorted her sentences like select produce:
"I feel that this is an important conference. It's time for African-American women to begin to network and collaborate and think about future. We, as a group with special mental and spiritual capacities, have something unique to contribute to this country and to the world," Dee told a reporter.
"I think one of the biggest issues facing us is how do we remain true to our divine selves, as well as continue to be nurturing and [to be] the bulwark against pain we have always been. We have to learn to care about ourselves although we've so long been taken for granted and not adored," she said.
At 8:30 the next morning, keynote speaker Linda C. Byrd-Harden's "Good morning, my sisters in the struggle" initially drew from the audience a less-than-rousing response. But by the speech's end, sisters had tears in their eyes and love and new-found respect for each other in their hearts.
Byrd-Harden, the Virginia State Conference NAACP executive secretary who in 1987 became the first female CEO of a State Conference in the NAACP's history, described herself as an ordinary country girl who grew up never being told that she could do anything important. She called success not dollars and cents, but respect.
"What's wrong with the younger generation is the older generation," Byrd-Harden asserted. "Our young girls are looking for love in all the wrong places because we aren't making time to give them the unconditional love they need and to teach them the rites of passage to womanhood."
She urged the audience to really look at the women around them - a veritable spectrum of colors, shapes, ages, sizes and styles - and get past the "she-thinks-she's-cute'' mentality; past the "she-sure-didn't-get-that-job-standing-up'' mentality.
"We are sisters in the rainbow. Let's recognize, accept and learn to love ourselves,'' Byrd-Harden said.
Essence magazine's editor-in-chief Susan L. Taylor's inspiring editorials are estimated to monthly reach almost 5.1 million readers. But can anyone really be that up, that vital, that warm and open, that together? Guess they can, because Taylor was.
Taylor told the capacity crowd that life is not easy, but it is simple; it only requires the courage to find and acknowledge what needs fixing and fix it. She challenged the audience to pick an issue and do something about it. She also urged them to take "quiet time" to meditate and reenergize, and to surround themselves with people "who like you and believe in you."
She led the crowd in a mantra from the Negro National Anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson:
"Shadow beneath thy hand, may we forever stand. True to our God, true to our native land."
Rain poured on the final day of the conference, and the sisters - mostly wearing white as befit a universal prayer breakfast - made an ethereal moving mural against the morning's foggy gray. The head table and room were filled with women representing the diversity of African Americans' religious beliefs united by a common spirituality.
"It is fitting to end this conference in prayer because we, as African Americans of all people, know its power," said keynote speaker Patricia Goode Champ, pastor of 31st Street Baptist Church.
"The key to being all we can lies in our ability to find and bond with our sisters and to develop supportive relationships," Champ said, urging us to pray for our men, our children and ourselves.
by CNB