2018 Lenten Program, Day 39

DAY #39, March 30, 2018
Portsmouth

THE EMERSON REED FAMILY
Valerie Cunningham

He was not the first nor the last high school graduate to miss a senior prom. There would be at least one of the Negro students attending Portsmouth High School in those days who would go to the prom. Usually it would be the Black girl, escorted either by her older brother or by the son of her mother’s friend who lived in Newburyport or Portland. That’s just the way it was. Not even Emerson Reed, a popular student and a track star, could cross the color line to dance with a White classmate. Emmy had convinced himself that going to the prom was not that important.

Education and honest work, on the other hand, always have been highly valued aspirations among African Americans. Emmy’s grandfather, Samuel Reed, had come to New England out of southern slavery as a child in 1865, a time when most of New Hampshire’s former slaves (and memories of them) had died. Samuel had access to public education and became Portsmouth’s first Black mail carrier. His son, Ralph, Emerson Reed’s father, trained to become a skilled worker at the naval shipyard. Meanwhile, Emmy’s mother, Mary, worked at home as a seamstress and she re-caned chairs to supplement the family income. When Emmy finished high school, the family still had the two older brothers in college, so his option was to apply for the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC), a federal public work relief program that let young men learn a skill and earn a monthly allowance. Upon acceptance into the program, Emmy was sent to a CCC camp in New Hampshire. However, when he arrive there, the director said he had not been informed of Emerson’s race and that the New Hampshire camp was designated by federal law for Whites only. Emmy was told he had to go to the CCC location in Maine that was for colored only.

This was legalized segregation, like in the South! Emerson Reed had known the racial tensions of de facto segregation as a normal way of life while he was growing up in small-town New Hampshire, those undefined inconveniences could be managed with preparation and persistence — or strategic evasions.

Emmy discovered leadership skills while living in the Maine woods with young men whose normalcy had been shaped by the institutional racism that restricted urban ghettos. And he overcame culture shock after enlisting in the still-segregated military service only to find himself being dehumanized by crude and angry White men, then shunned by suspicious Black men who seemed to think he was from “another world”. But Emmy made the best of his opportunities.

Whether succeeding in the CCC, helping to integrate the military, advancing to the first African American shop supervisor back home at the shipyard, or serving as a founding member on the shipyard’s Equal Employment Opportunities board, Emmy would be ready. So, it was in 1958 when he served as president of New Hampshire’s first branch of the NAACP and helped the community meet the housing crisis created by the opening of Pease Air Force Base. As the new racial “balance” challenged the status quo across the region, Emerson Reed, as NAACP Legal Redress Officer, became known as a voice of reason, ready to take legal action when needed. His skillful interactions with the public and the press helped set the tone for the peaceful integration of area barber shops, housing rentals and mobile home parks; and on July 4, 1964, as the U.S. Civil Rights Act went into effect, it was non-white Emmy and wife, Jane, who were seated with their non-black UNH friends in the historic dining room of a landmark seaside hotel that, until that star-spangled moment, had not allowed African American guests or workers on the premises.

The Reed family tradition of pro-active community service continued when a daughter succeeded Emmy as president of the local NAACP. Sheila is now a member of the national organization called Coming to the Table – oh, and the DAR.

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