In every era, some people have the vision and imagination to pursue the improbable. One such person, Mary T. Washington of Chicago, was the first black woman to become a certified public accountant, which she did in 1943.
I mention Washington not only because she died on July 2 at age 99. I mention her because she was only the 13th black person to become a CPA. She had to brave resistance on two fronts, racial and sexual. One wonders how a black woman from that era, when blacks were scarcely allowed to work even as bookkeepers, could attain the highest level of public accounting.
I suppose it was the same reason that Gordon Parks, one of 15 children from a dirt-poor black family, rose to the pinnacle of photojournalism. Parks would not take no for an answer and gained celebrity at Life magazine starting in the late 1940s, at a stellar publication whose stable included Nina Leen, Alfred Eisenstaedt and many other photographic luminaries.
Parks proved to be an outstanding photographer, artist, author, novelist, poet, painter, lecturer, and biographer. He also was cofounder of Essence magazine.
Not too many years later, along came Ralph Johnson Bunche, who demonstrated his brilliant training and talent for diplomacy, another unprecedented arena for blacks of that period. Bunche became United Nations under-secretary-general and negotiated the armistice agreements between Israel and four neighboring Arab nations. For that accomplishment, he won the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize in 1950.
My point is that when we say the words black achievement, we need to remember the people who pioneered in the truly exclusive fields, the fields where it's hard for anyone to enter, much less excel. All too often, the discussion begins and ends with sports and entertainment.
Come to think of it, those are exclusive fields, too. Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton (first black to sign an NBA contract), Arthur Ashe, Althea Gibson ....
Dick Gregory was the first black comedian to use humor to underscore the idiocy of segregation, discrimination and America's brand of apartheid. Gregory was an iconoclastic humorist who bent his mixed audiences in half with laughter aimed at their own foibles.
"I had nine children," Gregory quipped recently with a straight face. "I named one of them 'Mister' because I decided some white man in the South was gonna respect my boy by calling him Mister Gregory." Gregory long has prospered in a very hard shop.
Orrin Evans, a distinguished black Philadelphia journalist, became a pioneer in his field and helped pave the way for other black reporters. That movement gave birth in 1975 to the National Association of Black Journalists, now more than 4,000 members strong.
A diminutive woman named Sadie T. Alexander became the first black female to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania law school in 1927.
Thurgood Marshall won many civil-rights legal battles and led the pivotal case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka to a successful hearing before the Supreme Court of the United States. President Lyndon Baines Johnson nominated Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967, where he served with distinction for 24 years as the court's lone black justice.
Hispanic lawyer Alberto Gonzales was named United States attorney general by President George W. Bush in 2004, the first Hispanic to reach that lofty plateau. He had been a member of the Texas Supreme Court and served as White House counsel to Bush in 2001.
Many resourceful people through the years shaped their lives in ways that underscored a simple truth: All people really need is an opportunity.
As long as people think outside the box, are willing to work hard and utilize their vision and imagination in restricted fields of endeavor, America will prosper and grow.
All this reminds me of a little prayer often uttered by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the churches of the old South: "Lord, we ain't what we oughta be, and we ain't what we wanna be, we ain't what we gonna be. But thank God, we ain't what we was."
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