This is Part I of a four-part series from my Changemaker Interview with community leader and activist Penny Franklin.  Though she doesn’t really like to be called a “leader”, she has clearly led her community in some very important initiatives to address racial injustice.  This first part of the series centers on quadrant 1 of the “Homegrown Solutions for a Patchwork World” framework.  You will learn about Penny’s early life and motivations for change.  Please watch, listen and read, and stay tuned for the remainder of the conversation to be published every few days over the next couple of weeks.

 



































Penny was born and raised in Christiansburg in Montgomery County located in southwestern Virginia.  She is “number four” among the seven children in her family.  She grew up in a segregated community, but schools integrated when she entered the third grade.  Her experiences as a young child in the first wave of integration had a big impact on her that she credits with developing her need to push hard on issues related to racial injustice.
As a young adult, her father went to Youngstown, Ohio as many African Americans did in the 40’s and 50’s to find work not available to them in the South.  There he met and married Penny’s mother and brought her back to “Goose Holler” to live and raise a family.  Penny remembers her mother saying that “God had this little piece of heaven ready for her.”
Raised in Ohio, her mother had not experienced the kind of segregation that dominated the South.  She did not know, or care about, unwritten rules like “Black people aren’t allowed to try on clothes in a store.”  She faced down discriminatory practices with a determined “Who said so?”
Penny credits her strong mother with engraining this perspective firmly into her belief system.   
“Who said something can’t change or something has to be a certain way because of race or socioeconomic situations or whatever?… Ignore it. Change it. Do something different.”
This attitude would serve her well in the difficult years to come.  Penny’s early schooling was troublesome and ineffective.  Before integration, the segregated school she attended for grades one and two was overcrowded and the teachers were “distracted” by concerns of what was to come.  After integration, children were bussed to schools outside of their home neighborhoods and no one seemed happy about it. After two years of schooling with her neighbors and friends,
“All of a sudden we were separated and thrown into a world that was not good. I learned very little… I would make up stories of being sick, not feeling good, do things to try to make myself sick.”
She’d try to convince her astute mother that she didn’t feel well so she would not have to go to school where she was so unhappy.  This sometimes resulted in her having to walk to school since she had intentionally missed the bus. 
Penny avoided school for good reasons. 
Her teacher treated her with open disdain and did not understand or care to address her needs as a student. Students had to literally fight to get by, and Virginia History made Penny partcularly uncomfortable. 
I wasn’t really sure why I didn’t like it, but I just did not like it. I remember that book. I remember the smell of that book. The pictures in that book were basically black and white sketches, maybe a little tint of color to some of them.