By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 5, 2022 – One of the best decisions I have made during four-score years on this earth was when I became a naturalized citizen of the United States on Thursday, September 17, 1981. I relocated to Washington, D.C., from the country of my birth, The Bahamas, in February of 1975 because of what I have in the past referred to as “affairs of the heart”. However, I did so reluctantly, but it was the only option open to me if I wanted to save my marriage to my first wife, Camille Brannum, who was a native of D.C.
Camille and I were married in D.C. in June of 1973, and after our marriage we moved to The Bahamas. She had a Master’s Degree from Howard University and was teaching in Brooklyn, New York, when I met her while she was on vacation in Nassau during the summer of 1970, so she had no difficulty finding a teaching job shortly after she moved Nassau.
She was an English teacher at C.C. Sweeting High School for two years, but for various reasons, Camille did not like living in The Bahamas and in December of 1974 she informed me that she wanted to move back to D.C. I shall never forget the night I returned home and she informed me of her decision. Gladys Knight & The Pips super hit song “Neither One of Us (Wants To Be The First To Say Goodbye)” was playing on the stereo and when it ended, she said, “Honey, we have got to talk. I have decided to move back to D.C.”
I loved Camille with an insane passion, and when she suggested that I join her in D.C. I decided to do so. I moved to Miami — where my mother Violet Brown lived with my Aunt Amanda Fox and her husband, Lawrence Fox, at 1510 N.W., 69 Terrace — in December of 1974 and then on to D.C. in February of 1975. Because Camille was under contract with the Ministry of Education, she remained in Nassau until schools closed in June for the summer.
Unfortunately, we separated in 1976 and were divorced in 1978. I would have returned to The Bahamas at that time, but I had a very good job with the Publications Division of the Institute for Services to Education (ISE), which was established by the late President Lynden Johnson ostensibly to upgrade the standard of education in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs.)
After President Ronald Reagan stopped funding for ISE in 1981, I was encouraged to apply for citizenship by officials in the Office of Education who were pleased with the work I did with the Publications Division of ISE. To be employed with a U.S. Government at the GS4 pay scale level you had to be a citizen of the United States. I followed the advice given and submitted my citizenship application, but by the time it was approved, I had been hired as News Editor of The Washington Informer by Dr. Calvin W. Rolark, who founded The Informer in 1964.
A dynamic individual with an engaging personality, Dr. Rolark, in my view, was one of the most committed Black leaders in the United States during his era, although his accomplishments in the civil rights movement did not receive as much national acclaim as he deserved. In addition to being Publisher of The Washington Informer, he was President of the United Black Fund Inc. (UBF), a nonprofit grant-making agency that at times was referred to as the Black United Way because it provided funding annually for more than 60 D.C.-area-based agencies.
As The Washington Post reported in an article written by Jacqueline Trescott on December 16, 1988, “…Rolark presides over some of the most visible power bases in local civic affairs. With those platforms, as well as “Sound Off,” his three-times-a-week radio show on WYCB-AM, and his 25-year marriage to Wilhelmina Rolark, an attorney and D.C. Council representative from Ward 8, Rolark is a person on the outside with a special inside track.”
Indeed, Dr. Rolark and his wife Wilhelmina Rolark, who was elected in 1976 as the representative for Ward 8 on the D.C. City Council and served four consecutive terms, were the quintessential power couple in D.C.
One of Dr. Rolark’s major accomplishments as Publisher of The Washington Informer was winning the right for The Washington Informer to become the sponsor of the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.
The Washington Informer began sponsoring the D.C. Spelling Bee during the 1981-82 school years after the late Dr. Mary E. White, Supervising Director of D.C. Public Schools Division of Instructional Services, Department of English, sought participation for D.C. Public Schools students in the Scripps National Spelling Bee held annually in Washington, D.C.
According to an article published in The Washington Informer, “Many years prior, The Washington Daily News sponsored the local spelling bee. Subsequently, The Washington Star purchased the Daily News, and ceased sponsorship of the spelling bee. For more than 15 years, District of Columbia public, private and parochial school students could not participate in the national competition for lack of a sponsoring newspaper.
“Dr. White appealed to Dr. Rolark, a friend and supporter of the D.C. Public Schools and Publisher of The Washington Informer, who volunteered his publication to serve as the sponsor. With that, he brought in his daughter, Denise Rolark, Managing Editor of The Washington Informer, to assist in coordinating the District’s first spelling bee along with Dr. White and other D.C. Public Schools officials.
“The first city-wide spelling bee was held at Backus Junior High School in March, 1982. The winner was a sixth-grade student, John Krattenmaker, who attended Mann Elementary School. Unbeknownst to Dr. Rolark, John was not permitted to participate in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee held the following May because The Washington Informer was not a daily newspaper, a requirement of the Scripps National Spelling.
“Dr. Rolark, who was a member of the board of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a trade organization of nearly 200 African American-owned newspapers across the country, concluded that the national spelling bee was maintaining an inherently discriminatory policy that prohibited African American newspapers from participating in the National Spelling Bee since there are no African American-owned daily newspapers in the U.S. In urban school districts, where the majority of the student population is African American, students who might otherwise be eligible to participate in the spelling bee would be precluded from doing so if the white-owned daily newspaper elected not to sponsor the local bee.
“Dr. Rolark called in his legal counsel and wife, Wilhelmina J. Rolark, who threatened Scripps with an injunction that would forbid the national competition to take place in the District of Columbia until the court ruled on the merits of the case alleging discrimination. Scripps complied, and changed its rules to allow weekly newspaper sponsorship in the national competition. That year, the Loudon County Times, a weekly newspaper based in Loudon County, Virginia, and the only other weekly newspaper to participate along with the Informer in the national spelling bee that year, produced the national spelling bee winner.
“Each year, more than 2,000 students enrolled in nearly 200 D.C. schools — including private, parochial, independent, charter and home-schools — participate in The Washington Informer City-Wide Spelling Bee.”
Currently, The Washington Informer also sponsors the Prince George’s County, Maryland, annual Spelling Bee, the winner of which also participates in the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Dr. Rolark was more than my boss. We became very close friends, and his nickname for me was “My Main Man.” When the FNM became the Government in 1992 and the new Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham encouraged me to return home, Dr. Rolark tried to discourage me from leaving, but when I convinced him that it was “time for me to return home,” he threw a party for me that indelibly remains one of the pleasant memories in my mind.
Unfortunately, when I returned home in 1993 my plans did not work out as I had anticipated and I returned to D.C. in 1994, after having edited the Freeport News for slightly more than a year. However, I returned to The Bahamas “permanently” in 1996 and again became Editor of The Freeport News. I subsequently moved to Nassau to become Editor at The Guardian.
When I was News Editor of the Washington Informer, I attended my first Scripps Bee in 1983 and was so impressed by its potential to have a tremendous impact on the educational system of The Bahamas that I promised myself that whenever I returned to The Bahamas, I would make a concerted effort to convince those responsible for the administration of education in the country to support my idea to annually select a spelling champion to participate in the Scripps Bee.
Back then, newspapers were the primary sponsors of competitions through which Scripps National Spelling Bee contestants were determined, and when I became Editor of the Nassau Guardian in 1997, I discussed my idea with the late Kenneth “Six” Francis, the then Publisher and General Manager of The Guardian, and he threw his full support behind my initiative.
Fortunately, at the time Dion Foulkes was Minister of State for Education. As everyone in The Bahamas should know by now, whatever skills I possess in my chosen profession of journalism were nurtured and developed by Dion’s father, Sir Arthur Foulkes, who was News Editor at The Tribune when I joined that newspaper’s editorial staff as a trainee reporter in May of 1960. I later joined Sir Arthur at The Bahamian Times in 1965 after it was established several years earlier by the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) to promote its political message among the Bahamian electorate. So, I have known Dion from since he was a little boy who distributed copies of Bahamian Times on Saturdays and consider him to be a “brother.”
My “brother” Dion did not have to do much to convince the then Minister of Education Ivy Dumont, who later became Governor General of The Bahamas, to fully support the first Bahamas National Spelling Bee, given her life-long commitment to the educational development of young Bahamians. A good friend of mine, Agatha Dean Delancy, and Tonya Adderley, who were both then employed by IBM Bahamas, helped to convince IBM’s then General Manager Felix Stubbs to become a principal sponsor along with The Guardian of the first Bahamas National Spelling Bee in 1998.
As the saying goes, the rest is history.
I have taken this “mental stroll” down memory lane because I woke up this morning in in a very sanguine mood, and as habitually do, during my morning meditation I thanked my Lord and Savior for granting me another day on his earth. I also thanked him for being in the driver’s seat of my life, especially during the past two years when the dismal cloud of eviction induced a seemingly perpetual state of depression while worrying about the back rent that I owed my landlord.
My situation was made glummer by the fact that when my diplomatic status was withdrawn after the Free National Movement (FNM) won the May 10, 2017, general election, I submitted a proposal to the FNM’s Foreign Minister Darren Henfield to continue doing what I did as Press, Cultural Affairs and Information Manager at the Bahamas Embassy in D.C. on a contractual basis. I was subsequently told by the then Bahamas Ambassador Sidney Collie in 2018 that an amended proposal had been approved.
It was never implemented, however. I was subsequently reliably informed that its implementation was personally blocked by former Prime Minister Dr. Hubert Minnis, for whatever reason I do not know. What made this revelation more piercingly painful was that this blatant victimization by Dr. Minnis was around the same time he spent an outrageous amount of the people’s money furnishing an apartment in Brussels for Maria O’Brien, Bahamas Ambassador to the Kingdom of Belgium and Head of Mission to the European Union.
This scandalous waste of the people’s money clearly warrants a formal investigation, given the fact that Foreign Affairs Minister Henfield claimed in published reports he knew nothing about the money that was spent, even though he accompanied Prime Minister Minnis on his “official visits” to Brussels.
But God is good. As I noted in the opening paragraph of this article, one of the best decisions I have made in my life was becoming naturalized citizen of the United States in 1981. Because of my citizenship status, I was eligible for help from a D.C. Government program that assists residents of D.C. who have been impacted by COVID-19. My application for assistance from the D.C. Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) was approved and ERAP has paid the back rent that I owed.
What’s more, as Grand Bahama continues its recovery from the devastation caused by Hurricane Dorian in September of 2019 and the ravages of COVID-19, THE BROWN AGENCY LLC will continue to augment my income by offering my PR services to clients in Grand Bahama.
Yes, God is indeed good.
CAPTION: Dr. Calvin W. Rolark Sr. and his daughter Denise Rolark Barnes (Roy Lewis/ The Washington Informer.
CAPTION: From left to right: Karen Carter Richards, Shannon Williams, Francis Page, Jr. Denise Rolark Barnes and Janis Ware (Photo by Shevry Lassiter)
