Elizabeth Warren – Opportunity & My Mom 6

Her message is opportunity – that the USA has been a land of opportunity for everyone and that those opportunities cannot continue to be eroded.

Something she shared about her background was so similar to my Mom’s background, that I called Mom to discuss it the day after.

Warren shared that she’d married at 19 (like my Mom) and went to college to become a teacher.  A federal grant she received during that time had 10% of its interest forgiven each year if one taught in schools in a particular district.  She said it was an NDEA grant (National Defense Education Act*).  I remember my Mom got a federal grant with the same terms.  It turned out that the entire grant was forgiven if she taught in a low-income school district for a number of years.  This worked out perfectly for my Mom because she wanted to teach in an inner-city, low-income neighborhood.

When my Mom went back to college, I was in the 8^th grade.  I never knew what had prompted her to return to college.  Talking with her after hearing Elizabeth Warren, I asked her.  In asking her, I learned more about her motivation than I knew before.   

Mom said that she decided to try to go back to college because of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination.  When she saw the images of him being shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel, she was struck by how he’d given his life fighting for opportunities and freedom for Black people.  She thought, “If he can die for us, what am I going to do?”

She went down to Harris Teacher’s College and took the placement test, telling no one in case she failed.  She didn’t know how she would pay for college but she stepped out on faith.  She aced the test.  Mom told me that Mother (her mom, my grandmother) was so excited when she told her.   “You know your sister and brother will follow you as you lead the way.”  That is what happened – my uncle (R.I.P.), and my aunts all ended up going to Harris Teacher’s College. Four of them, including my Mom, got their Master’s degrees.  They all became educators – three are now retired, two still teach.

My mother could not have gone to college without the grant.  When that door opened for her, it opened for our extended family (some cousins were motivated to go to college) and close friends. 

Elizabeth Warren went on to law school.  She talked about the loving assistance she got when her aunt helped her with her children.  My mother talked about my grandmother driving way down from Kinloch, the small city out in the county to pick her up from school sometimes.  She shared an especially telling story about how she got the money to buy her textbooks which she remembers costing $124.  I won’t share that story here, let’s just say it was a family effort.

A couple of people commented during the gathering with Ms. Warren that “they wish they could get such forgiveness for their loans” and lamented the fact that our public university was becoming more like a private, elite institution because it was charged with raising so much of its own funding.

Federal programs like NDEA, Head Start, Model Cities and OIC (Opportunities Industrialization Centers) ushered a lot of people into the middle class in this country.  They provided opportunities that my family is still reaping and raised the bar in our expectations of what we could do/should do with our lives.

I believe that if Ms. Warren continues to talk directly to people across the state and shares her personal story, her fight for consumer rights (which she does not divorce from consumer responsibility), and her passion for the duty of the government to provide opportunities for working and middle class Americans, she can be elected as the Senator from Massachusetts.

In the meantime, I had an unexpected conversation with my Mom and added more knowledge and stories to our family’s history.  Thank you, Ms. Warren, and thank you, Mom.

(*NDEA was signed into law on 9/2/58 with the express purpose of increasing the # of students attending college and of boosting science proficiency.)