The Ultimate “Mama Bear”

My mother spent decades working for education and justice. The fruits of her labors are now being rapidly destroyed.

A little over one year ago, in early July 2022, my mother, Betty Belle Cleland Cherry, died at the age of 99. She’d been suffering from the ravages of severe dementia for well over ten years, had difficulty walking or speaking more than a few words at a time, and as far as I could tell, was no longer able to recognize my wife or myself when we visited her in the memory-care unit where she lived. She’d become, through no fault of her own, a mere shell of the powerhouse she’d once been. Were she alive and powerful right now, she would not be happy. On the contrary, she’d doubtless be shocked, appalled, disheartened, and infuriated by what’s going on in this country. But first, some background.

Betty was born on a farm in northern Ohio in an area which, in her own words, was in many ways more a part of the nineteenth century than the twentieth. The family lived seven miles from the nearest town and were somewhat isolated and self-sufficient. They grew a great deal of their own food, raising vegetables in the summer and canning them for use in the winter. She and her two brothers attended a one-room school until the eighth grade. When the children weren’t in school, they were put to work on the farm and had few chances to go out and socialize. She was extremely intelligent, however, and after graduating from high school she attended Blackburn College in Illinois where she majored in physics. Her college career was interrupted by World War II, when she enlisted in the Navy and trained fighter pilots Stateside on simulators. After the war she attended Ohio State University and later went to work at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, were she met my father, a New Yorker who’d recently earned a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Duke University.

My mother came from a family of devout old-school Presbyterians who did not drink, smoke or use foul language, but were not above pulling pranks and practical jokes of various kinds. Her paternal grandfather was an itinerant preacher who was highly educated and spoke several languages including Hebrew, while her grandmother was heavily involved in the Temperance movement. They had little time or use for art or music, which they apparently considered frivolous pursuits, but nonetheless had a great respect for learning and made sure that every one of their nine children (my grandfather and his siblings) attended college. They were, in short, the most ethical and honest of people, working hard, practicing what they preached, and minding no one else’s business but their own.

Therefore no one was judgmental or made a fuss when Betty married a Jewish man from the East Coast in 1953. After the wedding, my parents moved to Virginia where they both taught at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), a Historically Black University. Back in Ohio they’d become close friends with an interracial couple who later went on to help organize the 1963 March on Washington, and their work in Hampton further galvanized their interest in the burgeoning civil rights movement. They made a number of enduring friendships, both Black and white, and were deeply affected by the unequal treatment given to their Black friends whenever they’d leave the relative security of the campus.

Following their four-year stint in Hampton, they moved first to Pittsburgh, PA, and then to Lancaster, PA, where my father taught physics at Franklin & Marshall College. They were still involved in civil rights work, engaging in direct action when called for. My mother also volunteered as a committeewoman for the Democratic party during election days. My parents were very encouraged by the slow but steady progress made by the civil rights movement and were overjoyed when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. During this time, Betty became a bit stir-crazy as a full-time mom and began tutoring math to women from the public-housing projects.

Betty had two main passions in life — gardening and libraries — and her tutoring experience led her to return to school at the age of fifty to earn a teaching certificate, and at fifty-six to earn a master’s degree in Library Science. My father and I could not have been more proud to see her collect her diploma, and also to get hired at the high school in Lancaster to work as a librarian there, a job which she held until her retirement 15 years later.

She was devoted to helping people read and gain access to knowledge (and equally devoted to making sure that they behaved themselves while so doing. I attended that same high school and fielded more than one complaint from students about being thrown out of the library by my mother for being too noisy!) Nonetheless, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, she would be incensed with current trends. For one thing, she would be extremely disturbed by the increasingly adversarial relationship between parents and teachers which has been developing over the past several decades. In the Sixties and Seventies, generally speaking, it was accepted that those two groups were on the same side — the jobs of both were to educate, guide and look after the interests of children. If a child were to be disciplined by a teacher or school official, the parent would generally assume that the child deserved it unless the discipline was particularly harsh or cruel (such as corporal punishment, for example.) However, starting, I believe, in the Nineties, things began to change. A friend who is my age and taught science in Nevada middle schools for over thirty years corroborates this. Former students of his — now adults in their twenties and thirties — would frequently stop him on the street and tell him how much they enjoyed his class and what a great influence he’d been on them. In the early days, he could count on support from the parents in his effort to educate the children. Later on, however, parents (and school administrators) were increasingly at odds with him, questioning his teaching methods and limiting the types of activities he could do. Children would occasionally call him nasty names after being told to do so by their parents. (“My dad says you’re a Neanderthal!”) He eventually took early retirement because he’d had enough of the abuse.

This shift seems to have coincided with the overall distrust of government which began after the Watergate scandal, continued over the Reagan years encouraged by Reagan himself (“Government is the problem”), and has been further promoted by subsequent Republican administrations. Emerging groups like Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021 by a group of conservative women in Florida, touting “parental rights” (and recently lauded as “Mama Bears” by that state’s governor, while apparently attacking wheelchair-bound teenagers with his blessing — see James Finn’s story on Medium), have taken this to the extreme with comments about not “co-parenting with government” and so forth, but miss the point that a large percentage of teachers are parents themselves. Would those teachers be interested in harming, indoctrinating or grooming their own children? Hardly — so why would they do that to someone else’s?

I won’t rehash the fuss in recent years over imaginary demons such as Critical Race Theory and the apparently “shocking” comprehensive sex education curriculum, but suffice it to say that this all plays perfectly into the hands of the reactionary political forces who wish to curtail personal liberty, not to celebrate it. The recent efforts of groups like Moms for Liberty to promote revisionist history, suppressing discussion of uncomfortable subjects such as slavery and the Holocaust, bear this out. Ignoring the facts does not make them go away, and knowledge is power. Withholding it from those who need it most does not constitute protection; on the contrary, it creates a society of Stepford citizens who are ignorant, easily manipulated, and unable to make informed decisions, which is exactly what the reactionaries are looking for.

This is why Betty would have been most enraged by the book bans and looming punishments of school librarians in states such as Florida and Texas. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/29/houston-school-district-libraries-book Banning books is only a quick step away from burning them, and to quote the author Heinrich Heine, “Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” Betty, coming from her conservative background was not, for example, particularly comfortable talking about things like sex education, but nonetheless understood its importance and would never have prevented me as a child from learning about it. (In fact, a seventh-grade Sunday School class about that very subject was once held in our living room!) She wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about LGBTQ+ people but would never have advocated banning them from sports teams or denying them health care (a move which ironically removes power from parents and transfers it to the government.) Her only complaint about gender-non-specific pronouns would have been that they didn’t conform to existing English conventions but she nonetheless understood that languages sometimes have to evolve to serve changing societies. And if some smarmy, simpering, self-promoting, sociopathic politicians had threatened her in any way over this, she most likely would made them go stand in the corner until they came to their senses.

The great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Right now it seems to be sharply kinking in the opposite direction. Let’s hope this changes soon and that these forces of antidemocratic extremism will soon be banished to the dungeon of obscurity. I’d like Betty to be able to rest in peace.