By Patrick O’Neill
Two prominent members of the Garner community have died during this pandemic. One, former Garner Mayor Ronnie Williams who's death Sept. 12 at age 72 was reported by The News & Observer. The other, Helen Sturdivant Phillips, a woman who kept Williams busy as an activist member of the Garner community.
Born January 15, 1927, Mrs. Phillips, who died June 2 at age 93, was always proud of the fact she shared a birthday with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man I consider the greatest American who ever lived. Mrs. Phillips, who turned 2 the day King was born, may be the greatest Garner citizen who ever lived.
No, Mrs. Phillips never got elected to public office, and she was not rich and famous, but she was someone who delighted in standing up for the rights of others, for speaking truth to power, and for being a voice for those Jesus called outcasts.
Born a sharecropper's daughter, Mrs. Phillips lived in our town at a time when African Americans were considered second-class citizens, or worse, less than human. She lived through Jim Crow, facing discrimination and racism in then-segregated Wake County.
In a 2011 speech Mrs. Phillips delivered at The Town of Garner's 1st annual Martin Luther King Birthday celebration, she captured the essence of what life was like for a Black woman growing up amidst racism in Garner and Wake County.
"I hate to talk about my own hometown, but I got to tell it," Mrs. Phillips said to laughter in that 2011 speech. "Garner had two local restaurants," she said, never divulging the names of the two restaurants. "You could order your food at the side door and you waited and picked it up at the back door."
Blacks -- then known as "Coloreds" -- could not eat in Garner's segregated restaurants.
When Mrs. Phillips got a job in downtown Raleigh, she would catch a Greyhound bus near "the big tree" on Garner Rd. "We'd flag the bus down, get in the bus, give the man a quarter, go all the way back to the back, plenty empty seats (in the front of the bus), couldn't sit there," she said.
Her white co-workers would send Mrs. Phillips on food errands to the F.W. Woolworth's lunch counter. "How much is that pie a slice?" Mrs. Phillips said she asked the server. "Ten cents," the woman answered. "'You can buy it, but you can't eat it (in here).' Hudson-Belk was the same way. You had the bathrooms segregated, water fountains was segregated -- coloreds here, whites here."
Once as a child, Phillips complained to her mother because she was thirsty, and she wanted to drink from the "whites only" water fountain -- the colored water fountains were often broken. Said her mother: "Just you remember, we are colored, and we have to drink from the colored water fountain."
Rex Hospital was also segregated, Mrs. Philips said. "You could work there," she said. "You might get sick. You might get hurt, but you couldn't be treated there. You had to go to St. Agnes Hospital, the only hospital for blacks."
But as she grew older, Mrs. Phillips saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and things kept changing for the better, and then she lived to see the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first African American president.
All the while, Mrs. Phillips stayed hopeful: "Deep down in my heart I knew one day, if I lived, I would be able to drink from the white fountain. I would be able to sit anywhere I wanted to sit. I would be able to have freedom of speech, to express myself. I had that confidence that one day, if I continued to live, if God would spare me to see that day."
“I knew one day — one day, we were going to be free. I am so glad the Lord let me live to see this day, that I can stand before you, and say, ‘I’m free. I’m free. Thank God, we’re all free.’”
She told herself, "One day, Helen, you'll be able to sit where you want to sit, you won't have to go to the backdoor, and you'll have freedom of speech. And once I got the freedom of speech I've been speaking ever since."
Mrs. Phillips was active in local politics, and she made sure to make her opinions known. In an interview I did with Mayor Williams when he honored Mrs. Phillips during Black History Month, he told me Mrs. Phillips would call him "several times a week," and he appreciated her "motherly-like support." But most importantly, Williams praised Phillips for her strong commitment to Garner, her citizen activism and her willingness to persevere in her causes.
"What I've always admired about Mrs. Phillips is her drive to accomplish what she sets out to do," Williams said. "She has been a leader in Garner as long as I've known her. She's been an activist. She's been a promotor of Garner, and she is the best example I know of anyone who deserves to be recognized and honored during Black History Month."
She may not win every battle, but "she's working toward winning the war," Williams said.
A widow, Mrs. Phillips married Graham G. Phillips on March 14, 1953. She was a mother of eight children. In the program from her funeral, her daughter, Sherry Phillips wrote: "Helen loved people, politics, watching the news, and most of all voicing her opinion. She loved the Town of Garner, and also loved the people in Garner. She spent many years advocating for the needs of the citizens of Garner.
"... Helen especially loved gardening, which consisted of planting flowers, mowing her lawn, and ensuring each flower was strategically placed."
In a 2016 speech titled: "Why are we still marching?" that she wrote for Garner's Martin Luther King birthday celebration, Mrs. Phillips said, "More than 50 years since major Civil Rights changes became the law of the land, the fight for basic justice is still being waged. Voter suppression laws have passed in the N.C. General Assembly. Major budget cuts have hit education, health care and nutrition programs."
While racism and white supremacy have not gone away, Mrs. Phillips did live to see the blossoming of the "Black Lives Matter" movement with millions of Blacks and whites marching together throughout the nation to decry police killings of African Americans.
Ahead of her time, Mrs. Phillips simply told the truth.
"Segregation is no stranger to me," she said. "I continue to embrace whatever comes my way. We, as a human race, must continue to strive for justice and equality for everybody. Martin Luther King's life and legacy, rooted in love, grounded in nonviolence, teaches us whatever happened in the past, and what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, we, at the end of the day, we should know we are all God's children and members of the human race.
"I knew one day -- one day, we were going to be free. I am so glad the Lord let me live to see this day, that I can stand before you, and say, 'I'm free. I'm free. Thank God, we're all free.'"
Mrs. Phillips said it was her hope that "the people can all live together in peace and harmony. Not that you're black and I'm white; I'm poor, you're rich.
"Because we breath the same air; you breathe the same air that I breathe -- God's air. And once it's cut off that's it. We have got to learn to live together and think about one another because when we die and leave this world that's it. We need to learn how to live together down here with one another. What hurts me hurts you. That's the way I look at it."