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aunt harriet MAY 2018
A supplement to Eagle News
Getting to Know
By Lorna Oppedisano
W
hen Michele Galvin Jones was in the fourth grade, she was assigned a history project. She was to present a report on an important individual who was greatly admired. The choice of who to feature was up to her. She went home and told her mother, Joyce Stokes Jones, about the assignment. “Well, why don’t you pick Aunt Harriet?” her mother suggested. Michele grabbed an encyclopedia and flipped it open to the page containing a passage about Harriet Tubman, fondly known to the family as Aunt Harriet. Michele and Joyce are great-greatgrand niece and great-grand niece, respectively, of the famous abolitionist. Much to Michele’s dismay, there were only about 10 sentences about Aunt Harriet, accompanied by a small photo. “How am I going to make this very exciting?” she asked herself. In the end, Michele chose to research and present on Sidney Poitier for the project instead, since there was a myriad of information available on him. “Then it hit me,” Michele said. “And, then, I learned that I should never have squandered that opportunity to share with my classmates and my teacher about the relationship with Aunt Harriet.”
Meeting Aunt Harriet
Though she realized the importance of being related to Aunt Harriet and her distant relative’s historical significance in her “fourth grade mind,” Michele remembered, to her, it was more “Mom’s project.” Joyce learned she was related to Harriet Tub-
man when she was about 7 or 8 years old. Young Joyce went to story hour at Booker T. Washington Community Center, and the storyteller began the session by saying, “We’re going to talk about this wonderful woman named Harriet Tubman,” Joyce recalled. When Joyce returned home later that day, she told her mother about the stories, to which her mother replied, “That was your aunt.” “Of course, at that time, I was a little girl and didn’t realize how famous she was,” Joyce said. Years later, in 1968, Joyce wrote the “Black Heritage,” a weekly column for the Syracuse Herald Journal that highlighted noteworthy African America figures in American history. She also produced a children’s segment on African American heritage for Channel 9 the same year. In 1972, Joyce produced and directed shows for WCNY on issues in the African American community. Around the same time, in the 1970s, Joyce began to research Aunt Harriet, to expand her own knowledge of the famed abolitionist, and bring that knowledge to her family and the general public. She wanted to delve deeper, and expand beyond those 10 sentences Michele found in the encyclopedia. “I wanted to put our history in the public,” Joyce said. While she did frequent the Onondaga Historical Association, a lot of the research was done outside of the Central New York area. Her travels brought her to places like Annapolis, Cambridge and Bucktown, Md., just to name a few. Along the way, she conducted presentations of her discoveries to communities, congregations and student groups. The pieces began to be documented with the 1985 documentary Joyce produced, called “A Aunt Harriet l Page 3
Photography by Alice G. Patterson