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Not Afraid to Fight

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Not Afraid to Fight Pages for All Ages: Not Afraid to Fight Some words and phrases to know before you read • mistreated • Confederacy, • a company • triplet sons • humiliation Confederate • deserved • gruesome • clients • U.S. Civil War • argue in court • divorced • private school, before a judge • slavery public school • to experience • lawyer • civil rights, • sociology labor rights • in honor of Mahala Ashley was born in 1912 in Montgomery When Mahala was five years old, she got her first County, Alabama. Back then, most of the White good understanding about lawyers. One of her uncles people there liked to call Montgomery County “the died in an accident at work. The company where the cradle of the Confederacy.” That showed they felt accident happened was supposed to give her aunt proud that the Confederate Army came out of and cousins some money because her uncle died on Montgomery County in the 1860s to fight in the U.S. the job. The company said no. Another uncle hired Civil War. The Confederacy fought to keep slavery a lawyer who made the company do the right thing legal in the United States. Even after they lost the and give the family the money they deserved. Many war, people who supported the Confederacy kept years later, Mahala wrote that this “was perhaps the coming up with new ways to keep treating Black first spark of my desire to become a lawyer.” people like slaves. Other forces helped turn her into a lawyer, too. Her parents fought hard to make sure she and her sisters had good educations. The family moved into the city of Montgomery so the girls could attend a private school for Black girls there. Back then, public schools for Black people in Alabama stopped at sixth grade. When Mahala was ready to go to college, she had to leave Alabama to do it. She got her first college degree in sociology from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. A few years after college, Mahala took a job at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, working with Black sociologist Monroe Work. She also got married briefly, for less than a year, to Henry Dickerson, and the couple had triplet sons. For the rest of her life, Mahala would be known by the name Mahala Ashley Dickerson. Professor Work was famous for two large studies. One was a list of seventeen thousand books and articles 16 Western Friend, May / June 2021 about Africans and African-Americans. The other was a list of all known lynchings in the U.S. from 1912 through 1938. A lynching is a gruesome event in which one group of people captures, tortures, and murders someone while other people watch. Most lynchings in the U.S. have killed Black people. Mahala Ashley Dickerson helped Professor Work with these studies for six years. When Professor Work died in 1945, Dickerson moved his research to Howard University in Washington, D.C., and continued to work on it. At night, she attended Howard University Law School. Dickerson became a lawyer when she was thirty-five. had been waiting for.” One month later, she moved to She moved back to Montgomery and became the first Alaska for good. She opened a law office in Anchorage, Black woman in the Alabama State Bar. That meant built a home on a large property north of the city, she was the first Black woman lawyer allowed to argue and made friends with the Quakers in the area. She in courts in front of Alabama judges. The first time continued to experience racism in Alaska, but even so, she tried it, a security guard at the court wouldn’t let she said that Alaska was “the best place in the world, her enter the lawyers’ section of the courtroom. He the best people, the most beautiful place in the world.” thought it was a “Whites only” section. Other lawyers in the courtroom set things right that day. After that, Mahala Ashley Dickerson received many important Dickerson kept working as a lawyer until she was awards during her lifetime, in honor of all the good ninety-one years old, fighting for the civil rights and she did by fighting for people’s rights. She died in 2007 labor rights of poor people. “I’m just not afraid to at the age of ninety-four. fight,” she said. “Whenever there’s somebody being In 2020, Alaska Friends Conference bought a large mistreated, if they want me, I’ll help them.” piece Dickerson’s land and her house. Alaska Friends When she was thirty-eight, Dickerson married Frank are making new plans for the Dickerson Friends Beckwith, a lawyer and politician from Indiana. The Center there. It might become a place where people couple decided to move to Indiana with Dickerson’s keep fighting for a world where nobody is mistreated. sons, hoping that racism in Indiana wouldn’t be as bad • Think of something that seems unfair to you. as it was in Alabama. Years later, Dickerson said she How do you help yourself live with unfairness? would never forget “the humiliation my clients and I, and my race in general, suffered” in Indiana. When she • Think of a time when a group of people disagreed entered restaurants and hotels in Indiana, they would about what would be fair in a situation. Can you not serve her. When she had a medical emergency and explain all their different ideas about fairness so was rushed to the hospital, they wouldn’t treat her. that they all make sense? Worst of all, when she went to the Quaker meeting in • If a person wanted to live a life of peace, and Indianapolis, they wouldn’t let her join. they also wanted to fight for justice, what kind of In 1958, after seven years of marriage, Dickerson and fighting could they do? Beckwith divorced. Dickerson decided to get away for a while. She took a vacation to Alaska. She described Portrait of Mahala Ashley Dickerson from the Anchorage her first moment in Alaska like this, “When I hit the Museum at Rasmuson Center, fair use reproduction. Alaska soil and smelled the air, I knew it was something I landscape by Errin Casano, public domain. Western Friend, May / June 2021 17.
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