Reflections/Jonathan Gramling
Looking Back
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.
And I remember both my mom and my dad thank the late Betty Franklin-Hammonds for employing me at the Madison Urban League when they met her in the mid 1980s. Looking back, I sometimes feel I took a year or two off their lives because of the anxiety I caused.
And Betty was a history maker in my eyes. The Madison Urban League was just on the other side of bankruptcy when she took the helm in 1984 and turned it around through aggressive fundraising and renegotiating the amount the League owed to its creditors and then paying the balance through a second mortgage taken out against the League’s building on Gorham Street. Just think, if there had been no Betty Franklin-Hammonds, quite possibly, there would be no Black Business Hub on S. Park Street or even the Urban League headquarters on S. Park Street for that matter.
And in the late 1980s, it was Betty who spearheaded the Urban League’s studies on the disparity of grades between Black students and the student population as a whole. Betty, who had a master’s in social work, supervised two UW-Madison field placements from the School of Social Work, who poured over student grades at Memorial High School and issued a report. The first report was politely received by the MMSD board and then filed.
And so the Urban League, Betty and another social work student, repeated the effort detailing the disparities at Memorial once again. This time, MMSD realized the issue was not going away. The report detailed what all too many African American students were experiencing and everyone anecdotally knew.
What happened as a result was the whole equity initiative led by the late Dr. Virginia Henderson was created. The school district took the issue out of the Urban League’s hands took ownership. Virginia often said that if there hadn’t been a Betty Franklin-Hammonds, there wouldn’t have been a Virginia Henderson, pretty high praise.
And I remember working with Betty to develop a program called Project Involve, which created a couple of family liaison workers at Lincoln Elementary School, the first iteration of these positions at the school district. And again, when MMSD took these positions as their own, Betty and I helped train them.
There were other things that Betty with her husband did for children. Dave and Betty owned several apartment buildings. Well they would host a dinner at the South Madison Neighborhood Center for the children who lived in their apartments and would give out money to the students for the As and Bs that they achieved. Betty did many things to promote education outside of the limelight.
I have always been disappointed that this community has not recognized Betty’s legacy in any meaningful way outside of the Betty Franklin-Hammonds Scholarships that her widower Dave set up at the Urban League. Betty’s legacy deserves more.