It proved to be no issue on a day Ballard confessed to feeling 100, but looked 30 years younger in a vibrant yellow shirt set off by the bold colors of the official sash of the National Council of Negro Women.
She’s been a member of the group since the Springfield, Clark County Section was founded in 1948, 13 years after the national organization, which this year marks its 85th anniversary.
Though not always active in NCNW, Ballard maintained her membership and sense of connection through its purpose: the advancement of racial equality.
For more than an hour over Zoom, she told a series of stories of the sort that might be passed on by a village elder – stories she had reviewed in advance daughter Maryemma Hall, whom she’s staying with during the pandemic.
I’ve name them “Stories of Life with an Asterisk.”
Elementary education
In the 1920s, Grayhill Elementary on Springfield’s west side “had maybe one or two children in one class that would be black,” Ballard said.
But because the Calamese household on West Pleasant Street was steps away, “we were able to use the playground just like it was our own when school was not in session.”
And when it was, the neighborhood influence was felt.
"There was no cafeteria at that time, and the PTA (not the government) would come in the mornings and make breakfast for the needy children
“But anybody could eat. Those not in need kind of wanted that breakfast, too, sometimes.” In like fashion, the graham crackers and milk sold at mid-morning were provided for those without the means.
Snyder Park, where there was a cafeteria, had a similar program.
Credit: Submitted Photo
Credit: Submitted Photo
School started there in the customary way.
“You got the information in your home room about any school activities, and particularly extra-curricular activities.” So, when the announcement came about a meeting to organize a Girl Scout troop, she stayed after school to attend.
“Shortly after I got there, one of the leaders came to me quietly and said she didn’t think I’d be happy with that troop. She suggested that I might just try to go to the Clark Street YWCA (a black YWCA) and see about their girl scout troop. She did not know then when they would have their meetings but (said) I could check that out.”
"I guess I was innocent enough not even to catch on to what it was all about. But I didn’t go to the Clark Street YWCA, because that was a number of blocks from where I lived, and I would have to walk to and from, and probably alone.
“There were other things, other extra-curricular activities, that somehow, as I said, someone would say quietly,” much the same thing.
The rule and its exceptions
At Springfield High School, she encountered other "subtle ways to encourage me not to belong to certain things. “if you went to join the main choir of the school, you were quietly guided to join a separate choir named for Marian Anderson,” a celebrated black singer.
“Of course, we knew enough about Marian Anderson, (and) we knew that was an honor to us. But still, we knew it was keeping us from joining the school choir.”
There was one exception to the rule.
“The pianist of the main choir was a Negro girl, because she had had music training since she was a little girl.”
In the larger community, the economic sorting out of the Great Depression masked some aspects of segregation.
"I doubt if we had any more than one Negro restaurant, and mainly, they were restaurants that were used by working people who just had to be away from home at lunch time. You went out of necessity.
“But the white restaurants, including the dime store, were white only to be able to sit down.”
But, again, at least one black face was seen.
“I didn’t realize it at the time that the person who did the special chocolate and other cakes for the dime store lunch counter was a Negro baker, Mrs. Bradford. They were members of the Lytle family.” Despite segregation at the lunch counter, “shopping was not a problem.”
Nor were segregated drinking fountains.
“We didn’t have that problem in this area because we didn’t have all that many drinking fountains,” Ballard said. "Whenever you traveled you came across that kind of thing.
Not long after graduation, she would have reason to travel.
But first, came marriage.
A most memorable meal
Alice Calamese married Henry Lawrence Ballard in 1942, a marriage lasted until death parted them 41 years later.
Just as she had grown up in New North Street AME, "His whole family was dedicated to Second Baptist,” she said. So, she migrated there.
Her marriage also brought her close to Sadie Dunham Glanton, who founded the local section of the NCNW in 1948.
Glanton’s husband, Fred, “was something of a father figure to my husband, whose father passed away when he was 11 or 12,” Ballard said.
Marriage wasn’t the only change in the cards.
“We were out of high school around the time of World War II, and he was a service man,” Ballard said.
“The Army wives from various parts of the country wanted to be near their husbands as long as they could,” she said.
There were Army quarters to live in when they were at Ft. Sill, Okla., but they were expensive.
“So, we would be roomers in various people’s homes,” black people’s homes.
For company, Army wives “would spend the day together when the service men were not able to be in town,” Ballard said.
"Once, two friends and I, one was from California … we decided to go out for lunch.
In Oklahoma “we could not go to white restaurants, so we went to a restaurant in the neighborhood.”
Credit: Submitted Photo
Credit: Submitted Photo
And that led to a neighborhood disturbance.
The friend from California “just happened to be blonde and light complected,” Ballard said. Not long after they had placed their orders, “two white policemen came in to the restaurant and came straight to the table and asked us what are we doing there.”
The officers “assumed that the blonde lady was white and that we had some no good reason” for having lunch together in a black restaurant.
“The owner came over and said, there’s no trouble.”
They were nonetheless told “to leave immediately and not come back if we did not want to be arrested.”
“We had no car, so we were walking back to our homes, frightened after being threatened.”
Decades later, it remains one of Ballard’s most memorable meals.
A strange pecking order
“There were very, very few negro officers,” Ballard said, because the Army had been “very careful about how many negroes they allowed to go to officers' training school.”
But “with it being war time, somebody realized that it would be very wise to send service men overseas into battle without officers of their own color that they could relate to. So, they set up special officer training stations, and, fortunately, Ft. Sill was one of the places. That’s how my husband became an officer.”
After completing that training, 2nd Lt. Ballard and his wife were on their way to a new station in Needles, Calif., when they came across a part of the racial landscape that brought them up short.
Black servicemen often referred to California as “God’s Country,” a place of less discrimination, Ballard recalled. But in the desert Southwest, “we began to see these ‘Whites Only’ signs."
“Of course, we inquired about it, so we didn’t get into trouble.”
The response: “Oh that don’t mean you, it means Indians and Mexicans.”
Asked about living in those times, Ballard said, “probably I’m not the best person to ask. I think we had been pretty much raised to adjust our thinking to it – to not let it change the way you lived, and to live your life.”
“Anger doesn’t get you anywhere is the way we were raised,” she added. “So, I guess we were pretty well brain-washed.”
But when the Ballards had children, that began to change.
The definition of Christian
There is, of course, a sense of family pride that goes with child-rearing.
But in raising daughters Maryemma and Elida Cora, and their cousin, Gail Ann, the Ballards felt the burden of many black parents, Ballard said: "To make sure that the children were , in every way, desirable to be around, so you couldn’t use cleanliness or any of those things as an excuse for not treating them fairly.
She also decided that “belonging to things like the NCNW, the YWCA and (like organizations) working on change and betterment for the races” was something “I wanted to be a part of.” (Les Femmes des Charities was another.)
To ensure the children could explore their interests, Ballard became a Brownie leader and a PTA mother. Even before they went to school, she encouraged their interest in baton twirling and tried to get them enrolled in a baton twirling classes.
At that time, the black Clark Street YWCA did not offer the classes, but the white YWCA on East High Street did, just as it had a swimming pool that Ballard recalls admitted one black person, swimming instructor Georgiana Webb (later Freeman).
“They simply said, 'We’re in the process of transition to having just one YWCA, the downtown one, but we’re not there yet. And so, no, we can’t accept them in class.”
Ballard replied: "Well I guess what you’re saying is that Christian doesn’t mean the same thing to you as it does to me. I brought them here because it was Young Women’s Christian’s Association, and that meant they would be accepted.
“That information got to the board, and I was invited to be on a committee” to aid in the transition, Ballard said.
“They did not get the baton lessons, but eventually they let them join the dance classes.” “So I guess.”
Unhealthy asterisks
“When I was secretary of the PTA, one of the regular PTA meetings that we had included having the parents visit their children’s rooms. And, of course, we had more than one child, so part of the time my husband went to one classroom and my I went to another.”
At one of the rooms, seeing a list of the children “my husband noticed certain children had an asterisk in front of their names, so he questioned that. So, he came over to the room where I was, and he looked at the list and the asterisks were in front of Negro children’s names.”
The answer from the school staff was that the asterisks were on the list by requirement of the health department.
Epilog
At the end of my Zoom interview with Ballard, Twyla Clark, an NCNW member who had arranged the meeting and listened in had moved to tears.
“I am just so elated, delighted and honored,” she told Ballard. “The way that you have -- your poise here today -- is really something for us younger ones to sit and look at and listen to.” Asked to further explain, Clark said: “What struck me was (that) she has all along been about change and about upward mobility. Even then, she knew if she was going to improve her life and her children’s, it was going to be about change.” Which is the same reason Clark, much more recently, joined NCNW.
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