Golden Rule Apartments in the North Capitol Street neighborhood has been my home for 42 years. When I retired in 2004, President Bush gave me a picture of him and me to take with me. I was in the White House on September 11, 2001, and will never forget how we were evacuated and I had to walk all the way home to my home in Golden Rule Apartments. I worked at a number of different places, including at the White House for 7 years. To support the family, I held down 2 jobs for more than a decade over my 50 years of working, mostly in the food service industry. We had 3 children and also helped raise my husband’s brothers and sisters, so at times we had up to 9 children in the house! I had a number of jobs before getting married in 1962. Shortly after graduating from high school in 1959, I decided to escape segregation and the brutally hard work of picking cotton, so I moved to Washington, DC. But we couldn’t go to the theater used by our white neighbors-just one of the many ways we were hurt by segregation. I also have fond memories of enjoying going to the movies as a kid. I remember my mother canning 40 or 50 cans or jars of blackberries, peaches, green beans, okra and more each year, so we would have food throughout the winter. We worked really hard picking cotton, sometimes in 100 degree heat!īesides the other crops, we also had a vegetable garden where we grew all sorts of fruits and vegetables. My father was a sharecropper for a white farm owner and we all helped with the cotton, corn, and sugar cane crops. I grew up on a farm with 10 brothers and sisters. Life can be a pretty hard road sometimes, especially for African-American seniors in my generation. Having We Are Family there to help out with food, transportation, or even just a friendly visit means so much to us. However, it can still be really hard to get by sometimes. Like me, many of my neighbors worked all their lives, and now have small monthly retirement checks. As a community senior, We Are Family’s work is terribly important to me as well as my elderly neighbors. My name is Easter Brown and I am the Vice Chair of the We Are Family board of directors.
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