The morning after the first riots on dark highways of
Charlotte, N.C., protesting the shooting and killing of a black man, Keith
Scott, by a CMPD police officer, Reverend Brenda Tapia was sipping a cup of tea
at a sidewalk café on Main Street of the quaint college town Davidson, NC, 20
miles north from Charlotte, NC. I
spotted Reverend Tapia like a garden of Black Eyed Susans, bright and resilient
in a patch of Piedmont red clay; she was wearing an earthy yellow and brown
African shirt that soaked up beautifully her dark skin and contrasted perfectly
with the red bricks that lined the streets and houses of pedestrian-friendly
down town.
We were groggy from the news of the night before. Quickly,
she informed me that a perturbed friend had called her to ask, “What are you
going to do about kids and the riots?” She shrugged her shoulders, leaned
forwards and said, “I have been working on that problem my whole life”.
Shortly after that, as if on cue for a celebrity watch, four
separate Davidson college functionaries stopped by our table, greeting Reverend
Tapia, and chatting briefly. Although in retirement from her Davidson duties
for ten years now, Reverend Tapia remains a legend.
Reverend Tapia is a Davidson native. Apart from going to
Howard University for a degree in psychology, then working as a counselor in
Washington, DC, later attending Johnson C. Smith Seminary and working as a
pastoral counselor in Atlanta, GA, and before being ordained in the Presbytery
of Charlotte in Charlotte, NC, she has called Davidson home most of her life.
She grew up in a large extended family in strictly
segregated Davidson. Today, college life and culture spills into the downtown –
outsiders have brought in tolerance to diversity that Reverend Tapia initially
worked very hard to weave in from within just 20 – 30 years ago. Back then, a
“plantation mentality” still hung over the town and college; “Yes, Missah” she added quirkily to make sure
I understood her point. Her great grandmother was born a slave and remained on
until she was eight years old in Davidson.
While she grew up in a protective extended family, where as
the first grandchild she was “spoiled rotten” with love, her first vivid
memories of town life in Davidson are of racism, some of it including Ku Klux
Klan violence. She didn’t even know what was going on and her family tried to
shield her from the truth, but one of her first memories was getting the
newspaper from the newspaper receptacle one morning as a five year-old in the
1950s, and seeing a burning cross planted in their front yard, highly visible
facing the main road that lead in and out of Davidson.
The week leading to this event, her uncle was a local host
of an international church meeting. He was the only local person in the entire
group – as a result, he was also the only black participant. This “odd”
situation confused the white folks in a town where everyone knew everyone – why
was this black Davidson man being treated like a student and not acting like a
servant, as he was supposed to, amongst all these white foreigners? On the last
day, one of the participants needed medical attention, so Reverend Tapia’s
uncle lead the injured person and some others to a medical office. While in the
waiting room, he sat in the colored section. A young Swedish lady thought this
was ridiculous, so she playfully (and naively) left her “whites only section”
and went to sit on his lap …. and even licked his ice cream.
It didn’t take long for the whole town of Davidson to find
out about this “egregious” act. Later that night, at the good-bye party of the
event, a bullet whizzed by Reverend Tapia’s uncle’s head. Not long after, his brothers quickly and secretly took him into hiding. The next
morning, the burning crosses were put in the front yard of Reverend Tapia’s
house, the Dean’s office and the football field of the college. When I asked if
she thought the European church event participants knew of the repercussions to
the black man and his family for a young white lady sitting on his lap,
Reverend Tapia said, “Of course they never learned what happened; they flew
back to Europe the next day”. They had no idea what raw and primitive
associations the white townspeople made with the playful gesture and how
violently they would react.
But, for Reverend Tapia, that was when her journey started.
That is also why she asks, one to two generations later,
“Do the Charlotte rioters of today really know who they are and Whose they
are?” Reverend Tapia has suffered oppression, segregation and racism since the
day of her birth. She also has a very strong family, and faith in God. Her
Afro-centric Christianity tells her that God is everywhere. She hopes the
rioting youth understand that, or at least find strength and guidance from
either God or family but preferably both.
That is why she started the Love of Learning Program at
Davidson College.
In the late 1980s, while she was Assistant Chaplain at the
College, she was asked by a Committee to help increase enrollment of black
American students up to 100 (up from typically two), and increase the number
black faculty from five to ten. The ultimate goal was to “create” black PhDs,
who would want to come back and teach to make sure that each student would have
had at least one black professor while getting a degree at Davidson.
When the committee approached her to ask if, with that in
mind, she could develop a two-week enrichment course for black students, she
merely laughed. After she recognized that her sporadic and genuine laugh was a
faux-pas in white Corporate America, she couldn’t help but add in her typical
semi-humoristic way, “Let me first ask my Boss”, and when her literal boss, who
was sitting beside her, gave her a weird look, she pointed her eyes to Heaven.
The committee understood she would work on this, but needed to think first how to
do this best.
Starting in 1987, she developed Love of Learning, not a
two-week crash course, but a five-year intensive four-week summer program,
which offered academic enrichment for local black high school students. Based
on her personal experience with her parents, as well as with her work as a
counselor in Atlanta, she decided the program would have to involve the parents; therefore the students would come back every other Saturday from
September to May with their parents. She worked on self-love, and self-awareness. She wanted the students
to really understand who they were. She wanted them to learn to love themselves
as much as God loves them. She also explained the practical, social and
cultural realities of racism to them.
Black Pride was also a component of Love of Learning. She
decided to bring to her group of students what she thought had been lost with
de-segregation of schools: an academically stimulated and caring all-black
community. She explained that when her all-black high school closed and she
went to academically challenging classes in majority white schools in the
1960s, she witnessed how her former black teachers and principals were demoded
to petty jobs, and also that her white teachers did not bother to critique or
even correct her work – instead it merely received a quick grade. She felt the
humiliation for herself, her family and her former teachers and principals. She
also felt lost, for while her parents set high standards for their children,
they were not sure how best to relay it – by default they neglected the
components of love and pride.
Love of Learning would offer her flock of students
stringent critique, but also tough love, and black pride, as well as sense of
black community with an intellectual and moral elite they could look up, so
that they could tackle and excel later on in academia – be it black or white. Her program was a
success; her alumni cherish her professionally as much as personally.
As one
of her first students, Thea Rhinehard, explains, “the most important feature of
Love of Learning was an environment where we encouraged to embrace our
blackness as a positive. Remember, the world tells black children that they
must minimize their blackness, keep it quiet, and gain respect by assimilating
into the larger, white culture.
“Brenda
tried to teach us that blackness wasn't shameful, wasn't a liability, wasn't
something to swallow to make white people be nice to us. She taught us that we
could be proud of our history, our heritage, ourselves. We learned about black
luminaries, social structures and all sorts of things that aren't taught in
schools. History books are written by the victors, not by marginalized people;
some black churches try to fill that gap, but Brenda went all out to help us
see a richer, more complete view of ourselves and a more fleshed out
understanding of our country.”
Reverend Tapia developed hatred for white people when she
had to be transferred to a majority white public school in North Charlotte –
there she felt ignored by white teachers. Then, she developed hatred for black
people while attending Howard University by experiencing racism by some other
blacks against her own very dark skin – she even made me note that she was so
black, her lips and palms were black; in some black cultures being very black
is asset but in others, it is a liability. As she grew, she realized
that a part of racism comes from a lack of spirituality, which to her is basic
love. If we find love, first in ourselves, we can heal individually and then as
a group when we can learn to come sit at the Table together – in the Biblical
but also worldly, real and practical sense: not just Jesus’ Table, but also the
corporate board room table, the surgical, classroom or dinner table.
Reverend Tapia has also had very practical (and somewhat
absurd) racial instances to deal with. She learned from those experiences, and
repeats that we can turn “stumbling blocks into stepping stones”. With the 2016
Davidson College Homecoming Queen and King being black and sporting “Black
Lives Matter” sashes at the Half Time of the football game, we can trace the
stepping stones leading to the success of many black students in and from
Davidson, directly back to Reverend Tapia.
Reverend Tapia never boasted the quantitative success of
her Love of Learning program, instead, Thea Rhinehard states, “Brenda can count many PhDs,
attorneys, community leaders, political operatives, etc. amongst Love of
Learning graduates. But the degree count isn't what's most important to me.”
After sitting with Reverend Tapia for almost three hours,
her approach, accomplishments and status become alive and impressive. While the
topics covered come from sad and deep places, it is her special light and
twinkle that you carry away most from her; she is the kind of person you want
to steal horses with.
