By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 24, 2024 – My niece Rachelle Munson, who is a lawyer in Orlando, Florida, was in the Washington, D.C. area over the weekend and she spent several hours visiting with me on Saturday afternoon. Our discussions unlocked a vault of treasured family memories of our interactions over the years, especially while she was growing up in Miami, Florida, with my aunt Amanda Elliott Fox and her husband Lawrence Fox.
Rachelle is the eldest of my late sister Elthreada Brown-McPhee’s five children – all of whom, except the youngest daughter, Sonia – were born in the United States.
Aunt Amanda and Uncle Lawrence relocated to Miami, which was then rigidly segregated, in the mid-1940s and worked for a number of years as domestics with wealthy families on Miami Beach. They did very well for themselves and in the early 1950s built a three-bedroom home in Liberty City. At a time when segregation prohibited Blacks from living in certain areas of Miami – and, indeed, throughout Florida — Liberty City became a thriving community for middle-income Blacks
Aunt Amanda and Uncle Lawrence’s new home became home-away-from home for me when I started travelling to Miami more frequently as a teenager in the mid-1950s when a round-trip ticket to Miami cost less than $20.
Meanwhile, after my sister Elthreada “dropped out” of Government High School, she moved to Miami to live with Aunt Amanda and graduated from Miami Northwestern Senior High School and subsequently from Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas.
My mother, Violet Elliott-Brown, who was two years older than Aunt Amanda, eventually also moved to Miami in the 1960s after Aunt Amanda and Uncle Lawrence assisted her in getting a job as a live-in maid with a wealthy family on Miami Beach. When she got another job as a maid that dd not require her to “live in”, she moved in with Aunt Amanda and Uncle Lawrence. This was around the time after I started my journalistic career as a trainee reporter at The Tribune and I was able to travel to Miami more frequently; hence, I got to spend more “home time” with my mother.
I am immensely proud of my niece Rachelle. After graduating from the University of Florida with Bachelor of Arts in Speech and Communications in, she received her Doctor of Law JD from the University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law
She is currently a Senior Assistant Attorney General in the Administrative Law Bureau of the Office of the Attorney General in Tallahassee.
Rachelle goes to Nassau frequently to see her sister Antionette and her family and her youngest sister Sonia. During her visit, she brought me up-to-date on “family matters” in Nassau, and although I read both The Nassau Guardian and The Tribune online daily, I was not aware that Antoinette’s eldest daughter Marechan Burrows, my grandniece, was the first runner-up in the Miss Universe Bahamas 2024 contest on Sunday, May 12, at Atlantis Showroom in Paradise Island. Rachelle showed me a lovely photo of her participating in the competition on her cell phone.
Belated congratulations Marechan.
