R
emembering Jeanne Hopkins Lucas
If we’re lucky during our growing years, there may be someone or something that impacts our lives profoundly that like me, at age 54, you might remember them or it, as though it were yesterday.
There are many of us now who were touched in some way, large or small, by Jeanne Hopkins Lucas – even from way back in the late 60’s. Just like my friend, Calvin Mitchell.
Calvin and I were looking through his Hillside High School Yearbook (1974) and couldn’t help traveling down memory lane. (This was some time before Jeanne left us.) Calvin almost started to preach about his love for Jeanne Lucas, and how she saved his life with her kind talks about learning, just being himself and not worrying about trying to fit in, but more importantly, helping him to develop an understanding about what life would require later on. That’s pretty much how I remember the young and vivacious fresh-out-of-college Spanish teacher who seemed to fit with the young, but also command the respect that the older teachers got. Maybe it was just the times when respect for your teachers was a requirement. Step aside from showing respect for those in positions of authority, and your backside would know it for days on end!
My earlier memories of Jeanne seem to stick even more than those, which are more recent. Even though she was Mrs. Lucas, our Spanish teacher, there was always a way that she was reaching the entire classroom on an even more personal level. Like the day, she told us how she made her Kool-aid with juice and fruit. Now everybody – and I mean everybody! – made and drank that cheap five-cent powdered drink. We’ve graduated to tea now. But once in a while, I still make mine that way on those occasions when I want to rekindle some memories from the good ole days.
Times in her Spanish classroom at Hillside High School on Concord Street could be special. As young and impressionable teenagers, we got from Jeanne Lucas what we needed – a cool teacher, who could reach you on so many levels.
Remembering her as an adult was special too. Once you pass that magic age and enter into the time period where you get labeled a senior citizen, you get excused for some of the things you might say, or may even believe you’ve earned the right to say them. Jeanne could be hilarious sometimes, and you couldn’t tell if she said some things for the effect or if she was serious. Anyway, she never changed. From Spanish teacher to elegant and very sophisticated African-American woman to State Senator, she was still visible in community sessions where fighting for the rights of her school age youth or people within her community came real close behind her adoration for her family.
And so I, like many of us will never forget Jeanne Hopkins Lucas, a woman of class with a smile so large it could capture an entire room, a woman who could scold with that smile and leave you wondering what just happened, a woman of dignity and grace.
Rest In Peace, Senator and Friend, Mrs. Jeanne Hopkins Lucas.
Yvonne Sanford Dunlap
