Growing up in Michigan, Akua Duku Anokye, associate professor of Africana Language, Literature and Culture at Arizona State University, never realized how connected her community was to its African-American roots.
Moreover, she rarely felt alone. Being in a crowd, she found faces with similar features and skin tones. She could easily talk to people about topics relevant to the African American community.
It took a move across the country for her to truly appreciate what she had.
Seventeen years ago, masters degree in hand, Anokye relocated to Glendale — in that day, a place virtually devoid of African-Americans. She was, in fact, the only one in her neighborhood.
“If you saw another African-American, you’d be surprised. We would literally hug one another,” Anokye said during her address, “African-American Pioneers of Arizona,” Wednesday, Feb. 10.
Sponsored by Arizona Humanities and Sedona Public Library in the Village, the lecture at Sedona Winds Retirement Community focused on oral histories of prominent figures in the Arizona African-American community.
Anokye has been collecting such histories for the last 15 years.
“At the time I started this project, it was because of this experience,” Anokye added, referring to her move to Arizona, but also to her acquaintance with students at ASU.
“Our young people didn’t know enough about Arizona and the people who came before them …. The opportunity it has given me is I can now be a chronicler.”
And chronicle she has: From cotton pickers that reveal an agricultural side of the state many do not know about, to artists and political figures in the civil rights movement — Anokye has documented it all.
In 2002, she interviewed Eugene Grigsby, a professor of art at ASU contemporary with the Harlem Rennaissance.
The following two years, Anokye interviewed Betty and Jean Fairfax; the latter still resides in the Phoenix area. She is 96 years old.
Though childless, the Fairfax sisters defined what Anokye called “community mothers,” acting as caretakers of people who might otherwise slip between the cracks of a community with few outreach opportunities for African Americans.
“Miss Betty was such a phenomenon,” Anokye said, adding that when Betty Fairfax first came to teach at Central High School no one wanted her there. By the time she left — at 92 years of age — the school did not want her to retire.
The newest Phoenix-area high school is named after her, in fact. Her sister Jean, on the other hand, is still very much involved in civil rights advocacy.
There are other figures, of course:
Almond, Irvin and Linda Cutright, cotton pickers; Clay Dix, ASU West educator and social worker; Calvin Goode, former Phoenix city councilman; Carol Coles Henry, equal opportunity activist; C.T. Wright, past president of Lincoln University; and Esther McElroy, one of the first African American students to attend ASU.
Then there is the first African-American judge in Arizona’s history, Jean R. Williams, interviewed by Anokye in 2009.
“To live to see an African American elected as president was just astonishing to her,” Anokye said.
According to Anokye, Williams was a combination of class and fiery resolve. After seeing Barack Obama win the election in 2008, she told Anokye, “I don’t care if I get an invitation or not, I’m going to the inauguration.”
Fortunately for Williams, she got the invitation.
Fortunately for us, Anokye was there to document Williams’ perspective.
