Doing The Right Thing

Her voice. It comes at you like an instrument, each note building off the first, gathering into a crescendo a point made, a question answered and the next issue brought to the surface.

Patricia Reid-Merritt can talk. Professor, activist and a down-home sister girl from Philadelphia, it seems natural that she is the author of “Sister Power: How Phenomenal Black Women are Rising to the Top” (John Wiley & Sons, $22.95).

The book examines the lives of 45 African-American women congresswomen, educators, editors, CEOs who have, within the past decade, joined the ranks of American power brokers. What Reid-Merritt wants to know and what she wants to talk about is simple: Now that black women are gaining authority, what do they intend to do with it?

“I am a child of the ‘60s and ‘70s. During that time we talked a lot about getting power and what we would do with it,” she says. “Then in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it became clear that not all black people in power were about helping out the folks. I looked at black women, the newest group to the power table, and I was interested in knowing what they were going to do.”

Her interest, in part, is self-driven. Reid-Merritt herself is one of those phenomenal black woman. More than 20 years ago, at age 25, she was appointed a professor at a college in New Jersey.

She struggled with wanting to do “the right thing,” connecting back to the African-American communities that had nurtured her and helped her succeed. She wanted to do her job well. And she wanted to make sure that she left a door behind her open for others to follow.

But there were no role models. So Reid-Merritt did what each of the 45 women she interviewed learned to do as well. She carved out her own path. She earned a doctoral degree and rose through the ranks of the college hierarchy. She now is a professor of social work and African-American studies at Stockton State College in Pomona, N.J.

She started an African dance program for the kids in her community. She mentored where she could and networked when she needed the mentoring. She raised two children, often by herself. And through it all, she held on to her faith.

Her path, she says, was natural. Grounded in family, faith and community, it wasn’t enough for her to succeed. She had to make sure that others could follow.

Not everyone buys into her collective spirit and sisterhood talk. In her book, Reid-Merritt writes about a group of women who believe that they earned their success individually and have no obligation to a larger community.

“You have no right to act like you have achieved by yourself and have no responsibility,” she says. “We have to pull these sisters’ skirts and call them on that.”

While success means responsibility, it often also means paying a hefty price, Reid-Merritt says.

Powerful black women often find themselves called brazen, pushy and worse.

And while power often works as an aphrodisiac for men, it seems to have the opposite effect for women.

“I had a woman tell me, ‘Yeah, I’m successful and men respect me. But no one will hit on me.’ Well, when you are single, you are going to want someone to hit on you at some time,” Reid-Merritt says.

Divorced and remarried herself, Reid-Merritt understands that price. She has watched with admiration as some women simply learned to be flexible and carve out different paths.

But it’s the next generation that drives Reid-Merritt. While her own children grew up in a middle-class household, she could not protect them from racism or discrimination.

“When people looked at my children, they see a black face. They can’t separate them from those they are so worried about, those from tough inner-city neighborhoods.”

“We now have this bourgeois black generation that says they are raising their children to not have to be black or white. Well, give me a break. This is America. As a black child, someone will try to diminish him,” she says.

What she shared, what the 45 women she interviewed shared, was a strong sense of self built up by parents and a community that acted as a buffer when each of them was struck by the racial divide of America, she says.

That is why she spends time directing dancers at Afro-One Dance, Drama and Drum Theatre Inc.

“People say to me, ‘You are a professional. Why are you messing with those kids?’ But that’s why. They are kids. It’s not about dance, it’s about expectations,” she says. “They know that Miss Pat expects them to do well.”

Staff illustration by Molly Quinn