In the eighteenth century, a forebearer of Helene Slater, a slave named West Ford, was educated by his owners in defiance of the law. Born into the 20th century, Helene had a legal right to an education, but events and social attitudes forced her to struggle and sacrifice for more than thirty years to get a college degree.
     Helene's story is a case study in the profound impact of the Depression on upwardly mobile African-American families. Her father, a Blackfoot Indian who had built a successful business in Philadelphia, was financially ruined by the Crash and, unlike the majority of white families of similar affluence, never recovered. His academically gifted daughter, then in college, was thrown into the labor force at a time when women of color, regardless of aptitude or merit, could not rise above a clerical position without the intervention of influential and powerful persons. White employers frequently commented on her unusual abilities, but they never considered promoting her to a management position. The racism she encountered led her to an early, if short-lived, interest in the communist party, which before the advent of the Cold War and the rise of McCarthyism, attracted many intellectuals and religious people who hoped to build a classless and more tolerant society. And, as Helene is quick to point out, during those years Russia was an ally of the United States and the heroic underdog in the war with the Nazis. Not a rebel at heart, Helene decided during the post-war years that Communism was either wrongheaded or dangerous.
     Like many accomplished African-American women of her generation, Helene is unsympathetic to the feminism of the latter part of the 20th century. The malice and animosity she encountered she identifies as racism that she regards as being the more intractable problem. Yet Helene shares something with many white professional women of her generation, she never made much money. She tried valiantly, but never quite recovered the comfortable middle class life she had known as a child, despite entering the professions, despite establishing her own business and making a success of it, despite always working multiple jobs, despite her many awards. That her considerable achievements were not rewarded with financial remuneration testifies to the profound economic gap in American society for those who are allowed only second-class citizenship.
     For Helene, the crushing limitations which gender bias exerts in the American workplace was overwhelmed by the dehumanizing humiliations of racism. While keenly sensitive to racial slights, her opinions on the causes and cures of prejudice are not without contradiction. Possibly because she is an eldest child, she credits her own determination and perseverance for all she has accomplished and is blind to the positive aspects of affirmative action.
     In the intensity of her aspirations and her determination to get a fine education and to find employment worthy of her considerable abilities, this extremely able woman's arduous quest is eloquent testimony to the burning desire of African-American women for higher education and meaningful work, for achievement and recognition. Helene's lonely struggle is a heroic refusal to accept race as destiny.

HELENE SOUTHERN SLATER
Bootstraps

Pop had done very well in business until the stock market crashed in 1929, and then he lost his business, and he lost both our house in Pleasantville and our home in Philadelphia. I was still in high school, and I remember when we were getting ready to move out of our beautiful fourteen-room brownstone on Christian Street. Pop was standing on a ladder, taking down our crystal chandelier. I was so afraid he would fall and hurt himself. I kept saying, “Poppa, please be careful. Don’t fall, Poppa. Don’t fall, Poppa.”
     He didn’t fall off the ladder, but we lost everything. The only thing Pop still owned for a while yet was a building where he had a paint store, and he made an apartment over the store, and that’s where he took my grandmother, my sister and me to live. I overheard him say that if he didn’t have kids he would kill himself. He had a very tough time, and he never really recovered financially.
     In September 1931, I left home to start college. Howard University was known as the capstone of Negro education, the best school that colored people could attend. Of course, anybody going off to college in those days was supposed to have money. If there were scholarships, I never heard of any. I don’t know where Pop found the money to send me, but he did.
     There was racism in Philadelphia when I was growing up, the public schools were segregated, but I didn’t seem to suffer any bad effects from it as a child because of the way my father sheltered and nurtured me. But in Washington, D.C., the capital of our country, racism wasn’t subtle. It was blatant and practiced openly, and there was no mistaking the meaning of it. Heck’s department store had different water fountains for white and colored. I was allowed to buy a hot dog at Hecks, but I couldn’t sit on a stool at the counter to eat it, I had to stand up. The Diamond Cab Company wouldn’t pick up Negroes. Many times Diamond drivers passed me by. Colored people weren’t allowed to attend the World Series, although an exception was made for the nephew of Haile Selassie. He was a student at Howard and he was as brown as I am, but because he was a member of the royal family in Ethiopia, he was allowed to attend the World Series. I was getting a good education at Howard, and I dearly loved that university and college life, but in the nation’s capitol I was learning about racism too, and that wasn’t any fun, no fun at all.
     Somehow or other, Pop found the money to keep me at Howard for two years. Then one day a check from him bounced. The money had run out.
     I stayed on in Washington for a while after I left school, lived with my aunt and uncle, and I got work babysitting and house cleaning—the only jobs I could find. Mostly what I remember about that period is how badly I needed an overcoat, and how hard it was to save enough to buy one.
     I had not given up on my dream. No, not at all. I was determined to get a college education someday, someway, but honey, I had no idea how hard and how long a struggle it was going to be before I finally held that diploma in my hand.

     When I couldn’t find a decent job in Washington, I decided to move back to Philadelphia because I thought my chances were better there.
     Home in Philadelphia wasn’t what it used to be. Pop had lost the paint store and the building, and he was working as a door to door salesman for Real Silk. He and my stepmother and my sister were living in a teeny, weeny frame house. I lived with them, shared a room with my sister.
     For six months or so after my high school graduation, I had worked for the Philadelphia Tribune. I loved newspaper work. I loved the deadlines, knowing that I had to have my material ready by a certain time. I loved knowing that I was responsible for what was going to show up in the newspaper, for what people were going to read. I liked the immediacy of journalism. I wrote an article, turned it in, it came back to me from the typesetters, I proofread and sent it back, and I could go downstairs from the newsroom and watch the newspaper being printed, watch these long sheets of newsprint racing along the presses and, at the end of the run, being folded, all automatically. I was fascinated with the whole process, the world of communications.
     Working for the Tribune had taught me a lot about the newspaper business. My experiences there led to my love for the press, my enthusiasm and belief in the power of communication, a love that has lasted all my life. During the few months that I worked there, the publisher’s wife, who was the women’s editor, went on vacation, and I was asked to do her job. There I was, eighteen years old, just out of high school, in charge of the women’s pages of the Philadelphia Tribune. I put the page together, placed the articles, wrote the heads, did whatever proofreading was necessary. It was a responsible position for somebody so young, and I had been very honored and proud.
     After I came home from Washington, the Philadelphia Independent hired me as a staff reporter, a job that paid nine dollars a week. To make extra money I wrote feature articles and general news stories for the Philadelphia edition of the Baltimore Afro-American, and the Philadelphia edition of the Chicago Defender. These were all black newspapers.
     One of my assignments for the Independent was to interview Crystal Bird Fauset, the first black woman elected to the Pennsylvania legislature. She has passed on to glory. I remember her as a brave woman, and she had a long political career. She founded a women’s democratic club to get more people involved in politics. I joined the organization, and without any help or financing from anybody, I started a publication for this group. It didn’t last very long because our organization didn’t go on very long. In politics, programs for Negroes and poor people are short lived. But that little publication caused a commotion at the Philadelphia Tribune. A story about it appeared on the front page.
     I was very gung-ho about communications, but education was still my first priority, and I started taking courses at night at Temple University.

     When an offer came to become assistant to the editor of a new magazine being launched in New York City, I took it. Here I had a chance to go to New York City and work on a glamorous magazine. This seemed such a wonderful opportunity. I was so enthusiastic.
     There was a little glamour attached to that job. My picture was on the cover of one issue. The National Beauty Creator was promoting a hair style called the “Finger Wave,” and I was asked to pose with my hair done in this new style. But mostly life was hard. The salary was peanuts, barely enough to cover the rent for a furnished room on Fourteenth Street at Seventh Avenue, and no money at all left over to pay for college courses.
     It was a lonely life, too. In those years a respectable woman had to have an attachment to a particular person to go about. A respectable woman might eat alone in a coffee shop or a diner, but she didn’t in a nice restaurant, and she didn’t go to night clubs without an escort. I didn’t have anybody to squire me around town. I didn’t have money to do anything. I was always working or sitting around my room reading books. Colored people are very … the word I use is hinky. A woman didn’t join a group unless she had friends in that group. I had no relations in New York, I had no close friends in town, so I had no entré into activities. I didn’t meet anybody at the magazine who became a friend. I didn’t go to church. I should have because I was very lonely, but I didn’t. Life had been so good up until the Depression, and the lonely way I was living now was such a change.
     So what happened? Before leaving Philadelphia, I had taken a civil service examination, but I lived and worked in New York City for a couple of years before a letter arrived in the mail offering a job with a new agency, the Workmen’s Unemployment Compensation Board. Of course I took the job. A government job was a lifetime job. The idea of the security appealed to me. I wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not I would have a job next week. That was always a concern at the National Beauty Creator because that magazine didn’t know from week to week if it was going to come out or not. It was a now and then creation, and it folded less than a year after I left.
     In 1936, I moved to Harrisburg into a furnished room and started work at the Unemployment Compensation Board as a clerical. I had a white woman supervisor, Miss Brisdale, who said to me one day, “You are an unusual colored girl.” I said, “Miss Brisdale, you haven’t complimented me. If you told me I was an unusual girl, I’d be complimented. But you said colored girl.” People were very prejudiced. It always came as a surprise to them when they were forced to recognize someone with dark skin as being intelligent. This supervisor noticed that I had ability, but she didn’t recommend me for promotion. I don’t remember getting any raises, and there were no opportunities for advancement. It was very discouraging and depressing.

     In 1941, when the war came, I was back in Philadelphia working for the State Employment Service. This was another clerical job. Only a handful of positions were open to colored people.
     After Pearl Harbor, the war effort started and most people went into defense work. I was restless working at the State Employment Service, and I was unhappy living at home with my stepmother. I passed another civil service examination and was offered a clerical job with the Civil Service Commission in Washington, D.C. The salary was one thousand and twenty dollars a year, and that was good money.
     Returning to Washington D.C. meant going back to segregated bathrooms, colored and white drinking fountains. It’s hard to put into words, what it feels like to experience this kind of repeated, daily humiliation, this institutionalized racism, this open practice of bigotry, and right in the nation’s capital. If you are raised to think well of yourself, as my father had raised me, if you have any self-esteem, you can’t help feeling the constant insult and attack on your dignity as a person.
     I stayed with the Civil Service Commission until the prejudice got too much to bear. The insults and injuries pile up and pile up. They eat away at you until you can’t stay still. You get restless and have to do something, change something to try and find some sense of relief. I took another exam, passed it, and got an appointment to the War Manpower Commission. This was another clerical job. A professional or management position was impossible to get without a college degree, and I still had a lot to go through before I reached that goal.

     During the war I married a soldier. My husband continued to live at Camp Lee, where he was stationed, and I stayed on in Washington, D.C. Giving up my job and becoming an army wife didn’t occur to me. I was always interested in school, school, school. And not long after my wedding, I entered Howard University School of Law.
     I also started a new a new job under the Lend Lease program, working as a statistical clerk for the Soviet Purchasing Commission. Yes, I went to work for the Russians. World War II was going on like crazy. You have to remember that at this time the Russians were our allies. Until the United States entered the war, the Soviets were fighting the Germans and taking all the beating. In 1943, the Russians were losing to the Germans and they were losing a lot of boys and their people were suffering. The Lend Lease Program was created so the Russians could buy material to rebuild the oil refineries, bridges and blast furnaces that were being destroyed by German bombs. Jobs came open at the Soviet Purchasing Commission. The money was very good, so I requested permission to leave the War Manpower Commission and go to work for the Russians.
     The Russian government proved to be a very different kind of employer. The U.S. federal government wasn’t a very demanding employer. Standards were not very strict. It’s the same now, and the same criticism applies to people who work for city government and state government. Supervisors were not very exacting, it wasn’t important that you have all your data correct. Figures didn’t have to add up exactly. Names didn’t have to be copied correctly. With the Russians, everything had to be accurate, exact. The Russians did not tolerate lateness or flimsy excuses like ‘I missed my bus’ or ‘I overslept.’ If you called in sick, you had better be sick and laid up in bed because a Russian doctor came to your home to examine you and to help you. Their doctors were mostly women, they didn’t speak English, but they came with a stethoscope and a thermometer and a blood pressure machine and they knew their business.
     The Russians paid a higher salary and working conditions were better than I had known when I worked for federal and state agencies. They were not at all prejudiced against colored people, and because of that working with them was a pleasure. The offices took up two buildings. One building had a dining hall. A time came when that building was temporarily closed for painting and repairs. This meant that I had no place to eat lunch nearby because coloreds weren’t permitted to eat in any restaurant in that section of Washington. Just to eat lunch I had to travel to Fourteenth and U Street. That was a quite long distance and I was late coming back to work.
     Naturally my boss remarked on my lateness. I explained the situation. He said, “From now on, go as far as you have to go, take as long as you have to take.”
     The plain truth is, I was treated so well that I was delighted to be working with these people. They were like students I had met at Temple University who were members of the Young Communist Club—white people who weren’t racists.
     My job at the Soviet Purchasing Commission lasted until the end of the war. I never joined the Communist Party, I was never politically involved with communism, but working for the Russians had been a beautiful experience in many ways. They practiced non-discrimination, they practiced fairness. They didn’t make any big deal out of it, they just did it. They were demanding employers, but I felt very safe with them.
     The end of my job with Lend Lease meant that I had to leave Howard University again. Again, without completing my studies or getting the degree that I wanted so much, so very much.

     I was thirty-three years old in 1946 when I returned to New York City. Coming to a place like New York with nothing held out for me, nothing ready for me, was dumb. But my marriage wasn’t going all that well, and I wanted to get away from all the overt racism in Washington. I had heard about the higher education system in New York, and I hoped to establish residency and qualify for free tuition at a good school like City College.
     In those days there was a baseball club known as the New York Black Yankees. Mr. James Semler owned the club, and through his girlfriend, I got a job as his secretary. I didn’t stay long. I was always looking around for something better, little better pay, better treatment, moving on to what I hoped was a better situation, advancement. Fairly soon I found a job with the Teachers’ Union. This organization was the predecessor of the United Federation of Teachers. The TU hired me as a statistical clerk, and I found a second job at night, doing clerical work for a dollar an hour! A dollar an hour! Wow! That was good money!
     A series of clerical and bookkeeping jobs followed. In those days a woman working for a business wasn’t a clerk or a bookkeeper, she was a “girl”. I was working as a “girl” for a coal company in Brooklyn when I heard about The New School for Social Research. So many people who had accomplished something in life were in some way attached to The New School. It still has this reputation. The New School seemed very inviting. Its professors wrote the most respected textbooks. They were outstanding people. If you went to The New School, you didn’t say you studied sociology and used Clifford Smut’s textbook; you had Clifford Smut as your professor. During the war years, The New School was particularly anxious to help people who had been chased out of their countries by the Nazis. I thought that was a wonderful attitude for a school to have, and I wanted to be associated with it. I started attending classes at night.
     I was making another try for that degree. I wanted that degree so badly, don’t you know?

     In 1955, at the age of forty-two, I got my bachelor of arts degree in public relations. For me that wasn’t enough. I kept on taking courses, courses, courses, even after I married for the second time, and I accumulated one hundred and twenty-seven credits towards a post-graduate degree. I’ve been taking courses all my life.

     Chester Slater, my second husband, was someone I had known from childhood. His family and my family had been friends back in Philadelphia. In 1955 we married. I’m not sure why except sometimes I think it was just because we had known one another from childhood. A lot of people talk about the good old days. For some of them it just means they wish they could be young again, but for those of us middle-class colored folks who lost everything in the Depression, the old days really had been better.
     Chester and I ... Unfortunately, that relationship didn’t turn into a beautiful marriage, and eventually we divorced. But it was while we were married that I formed my own business. Chester had an agent who we called “Mr. Ten Percent” because he collected ten percent of every check that Chester got. I said, “You know what, Chester? We don’t have to pay him ten percent. All he’s doing is getting you jobs. I can do the same thing.”
     So I made up my first brochure. It was about Chester. I put his picture on the front, and I wrote a slogan, “From Bach to Boogie,” and I sent this brochure out to a whole bunch of night clubs. We got so many job offers that I said, “Chester, we ought to go into business. You don’t need all these jobs.” Chester took the ones he wanted, and we found other musicians to fill the rest. That was the beginning, in 1955, of Southern-Slater Enterprises, Public Relations and Agents, with me as president.
     We found jobs for many musicians. I wrote press releases about what we were doing, and the publicity led to other jobs. Over the years I have done public relations for many individuals and organizations. I always belonged to a sorority, and if we were going to have a conclave (that’s what we called our annual meetings), I would prepare the promotional materials and send out the press releases. Goodness. People got so excited when they saw themselves or their organization mentioned in the newspapers. When I was starting out, very few people knew what public relations is about or how to do it. There were thirty-seven black newspapers in the United States. If you wanted to reach the black community, you had to know what these papers were, where they were, who the editors were.
     I was active in public relations the rest of my working life. I started out helping people find work, and then I worked for organizations, like Chi Eta Phi, the nursing sorority. Over the years I’ve had some distinguished clients. Shirley Chisolm put together a children’s organization and I did public relations for it. One of my last jobs was the public relations for the Arthur Ashe tennis benefit. This event was held in Madison Square Garden and used tennis matches between celebrities as a gimmick to raise money for college scholarships. David Dinkins, when he was Manhattan borough president, participated, as did Andrew Young, who was then the mayor of Atlanta, Georgia.
     I built my own business that I was proud of, but I wasn’t making all that much money. I still needed a second job. But at least I now had my bachelor’s degree and could qualify for professional positions. I took an examination, passed it, and became a home relief investigator for the welfare department, the first job I ever had that came with a pension.

     After the government eliminated home relief investigators, I became an attendance teacher for the Board of Education. Although I retired from that position, a principal suggested I come back to work as a classroom teacher. I passed the qualifying exam and received a teaching license, and taught fourth grade. The reason I wanted to teach was that, as a truant officer, I had observed that children hated to go to school, and I thought that many teachers had no idea of the home conditions of their students.
     Later on, I got a second license to teach foreign born adults, and I taught English and citizenship to immigrants in night school. This fine program was available free of charge, sponsored by the Board of Education. It had been in existence for over a hundred years, until recent years when it was closed down, another good program that became a victim of budget cutting.
     I was very active as a volunteer in many organizations that I thought were worthwhile, such as the New York Howard University Alumni Club and the National Association of University Women. I served as President of the New York Howard Alumni Club from 1975 to 1979, and president of Metropolitan New York Chapter of the National Association of Media Women in 1971, 1979 and 1984. I always worked at least two jobs, and I kept the public relations business going, and I did freelance journalism until I was eighty-three years old.
     As a journalist, the story that meant the most to me was reporting the building of the monument to Dr. Mary Bethune in Washington, D.C. Dr. Bethune’s statue was to be placed in a park near a statue of Abraham Lincoln. The statue’s position meant that Mr. Lincoln’s back would be to Dr. Bethune, and to avoid that slight, the Lincoln statue was turned. This was a big story, the turning of Abraham Lincoln’s statue so that he would be face to face with Dr. Bethune. Many people attended that ceremony, which was a very moving event. The Amsterdam News printed my story about this important event on the front page and gave me a byline. That’s what I consider my favorite, my best story.
     I worked until I was seventy-nine years old. I don’t have a bank account to show that I worked all those years, but I still value education above all else because that is something that stays in your mind, and even if you lose everything else, that can’t be taken away from you.

     Most of my life I’ve had to fight against wrongheaded attitudes, mostly white people’s ideas about colored people. There are a thousand little ways that bigots build a hostile environment that gets heavier and heavier. White people have no idea what it’s like to be colored. You are turned away every place you go. Every direction you look, people turn their heads or move their seats or say something ugly. The atmosphere of hatred is like a continuous pressure that weighs on you, holding you down. The hatred is expressed in a hundred little and big ways. The trouble with many colored people is that they don’t stick up for themselves, they never complain, they accept what is done to them. But I wasn’t like that. I could never keep my mouth shut.
     I remember a trip I made once to Richmond, Virginia. At the airport on my way back to New York City, there were two bathrooms. A sign on one said “White Ladies” and further down the corridor was another that read “Colored Women.” The people in the balcony who were watching must have got a shock when I walked into the White Ladies bathroom.
     I did it because I wanted to see if the white ladies’ bathroom had gold fixtures, but you know what—it was exactly like the one for colored women. Of course no white woman would know that her bathroom was not one bit nicer because none of them would dare step into a colored women’s bathroom.
     Ah, life is funny, funny, funny. Funny to talk about, not to live.

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