There have been so many women who have impacted my personal history that I thought I would take a moment to reflect on a few of them.

Of course, there is my dear mother who died 20 years ago already. She had a way of making each of her eight children feel special and I think that has a lot to do with the fine, responsible lives that her children have lived.

Of all of her children, I sometimes think that she worried about me the most because it seemed that I was headed nowhere in particular very fast. When I went to Alcorn State University in 1975-1977, she would send me a weekly letter with a column from the Milwaukee Journal’s Green Sheet that summarized what had happened in Milwaukee the week before. She also included a $5 bill so that I could get something special to eat. She continued that tradition a year or so later when I was working on the Congressional campaign of Evan Doss who was running for the seat now occupied by Bennie Thompson, which includes Jackson, Ms and Hinds County. I worked for $25 per week and lived in a very old un-air conditioned boarding house in Port Gibson where Doss was the tax assessor/collector, the first African American to hold that seat.