5d - newz group · 2020. 4. 12. · to learn and grow — gener-ations beyond his dreams.” in...
TRANSCRIPT
news-journal.com Longview News-Journal, Sunday, April 12, 2020 5D
USA page about the people who make life better
US is a weekly roundup of outstanding volunteer and philanthropic activities in East Texas. To submit or suggest volunteers or donors
for recognition in US, write to Features, c/o Longview News-Journal, P.O. Box 1792, Longview, TX 75606; email [email protected]; fax to (903) 757-3742 or bring it to our offices, 320 E. Methvin St.
THE WISH LIST Your chance to help
VOLUNTEERS WANTED People and organizations need your assistance
COMMUNITY FUNDRAISERS Your chance to give
■ Furr Ever Pets Rescue April Foolishness: now through April 30, Furr Ever Pets Rescue is a nonprofit group of volunteers that provides veterinary and foster care for home-less dogs until they are adopted. Furr Ever Pets is seeking sponsors to help pay for vetting costs. Donations of any amount will benefit this res-
cue. For donation/information, visit furreverpetsrescue.org, facebook.com/furreverpetsrescue or email [email protected] .
— To have information considered for publication in this section, send it by 5 p.m. Wednesday to [email protected] or mail to P.O. Box 1792, Longview, TX 75606.
■ House of Hope, 3011 W. Mar-shall Ave., Longview, needs canned foods: sweet peas, black eyed peas, cream of mushroom and cream of chicken soups, evaporated milk; packaged foods: yellow cornmeal, cake mixes, frosting, vanilla extract, nutmeg and shredded sharp cheese. For a complete list of needed items, call (903) 295-0904.
■ All Good Dogs Coalition needs baby crib-sized mattresses, any sized sheets, blankets and towels. For information, email [email protected] or call/text (903) 235-0383.
■ Longview pet rescue orga-nizations have a crucial need for dog and cat food. Corporate and individual donations are currently reduced because of the COVID-19 pandemic. For information, email [email protected] or visit LongviewPetsRescue.org .
■ Family Promise, 700 N. Edith St., Longview, needs toilet-ries, OdoBan and high-efficiency powdered laundry detergent. For information, call (903) 234-8343.
■ House of Disciples, 210 S. Green St., needs bunk beds, men’s clothing, disposable razors, soap, body wash, shampoo and shaving cream. Donations can be dropped off at House of Disciples or Gifts of Grace Resale Store, 2519 Judson Road. For information, call (903) 553-0952.
■ D.O.R.S. Youth Transition Center, 1125 Judson Road, Suite 153, Longview, needs disinfecting wipes and paper towels. For infor-mation, call (903) 803-0100.
— To have information considered for publication, send it by 5 p.m. Wednesday to [email protected] or mail to P.O. Box 1792, Longview, TX 75606.
■ The Longview Regional Medical Center Volunteer Aux-iliary is a nonprofit organization that assists patients, visitors and staff throughout the hospital. Volunteers serve at information desks and in various depart-ments. For information, email [email protected] or call (903) 553-7406.
■ Longview pet rescue or-ganizations have an immediate need for volunteers to foster dogs and cats due to an increase in strays and pet surrenders. Volunteers are trained and most expenses are covered. Fostering can last from a few weeks to a few months. For information, email info@LongviewPetsRescue.
org or visit Longview PetsRescue.org .
■ Martin House Children’s Advocacy Center is a nonprofit organization that provides a collaborative, multidisciplinary response to the investigation, prosecution and treatment of child abuse. Volunteers help re-store hope to children who have been abused. For information, email [email protected] or call (903) 807-0189.
■ Newgate Mission, 207 S. Mobberly Ave., Longview, needs volunteers for sack lunch prepa-ration from 9 to 10 a.m. Mondays. For information, call Brenda, (903) 757-6146.
■ Texas Home Health
Hospice, 2904 N. Fourth St., Longview, needs volunteers to of-fer patient companionship, family support and office assistance. For information, email [email protected] or call (903) 234-0943.
■ East Texas CASA is looking for volunteers to help children as they enter the foster care system. CASA volunteers are screened and trained, then appointed by judges to represent and advocate for the child in the child protection system. For information, email [email protected] or call (903) 753-8093.
■ Christus Good Shepherd Medical Center Longview
Auxiliary is a nonprofit volunteer organization providing services and support to the medical center and the community. For volunteer opportunities, email [email protected] or call (903) 315-2199.
■ Longview Citizens on Patrol seeks volunteers to increase cooperation between residents and the Longview Police Department. For informa-tion and volunteer opportunities, email [email protected] or call (903) 570-1480.
— To have information considered for publication, send it by 5 p.m. Wednesday to [email protected] or mail to P.O. Box 1792, Longview, TX 75606.
My name is: Eva SepulvadoI volunteer at: Partnership for Pets of East TexasI have volunteered since: 2007My duties include: Fostering and transporting.The people who benefit from this are: Anyone
who adopts a pet.I volunteer because: I was raised on a farm and
have always loved animals. In 2004, I took a job as an animal control officer for the city of Marshall and realized my passion to care for and protect animals. While the animal control officer duties were varied and challenging, I immediately noticed the lack of options for the city’s small shelter to move healthy and adoptable dogs. Most were simply being eutha-nized, not because of behavior or illness but for lack of space. It was an eye opener and the catalyst to my “rescue career.” I have been rescuing, assessing and re-homing pets ever since. I strive every day to pro-vide a quality life for my fosters and work hard to en-sure they are placed in kind, loving homes. There are still more adoptable pets with no loving homes out there. Not all can be saved but I do what I can.
My hometown is: MarshallI live in: MarshallI have lived there since: 1993I work at/My profession is: Towne South Animal
Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, and I’m a veteri-nary assistant.
My hobbies include: Bowling, playing pool and attending concerts.
My family members are: Daughters Michelle, Kristin and Jessica.
I would encourage people to volunteer be-cause: It will satisfy your soul.
Upcoming activities at this organization: Our adoption events were canceled due to the pandemic. However, we still need foster volunteers. Follow us online at pfpEastTexas.org and Facebook.com/pf-pEastTexas .
Animal control officer discovers her true passion in volunteering
Special to the News-Journal.
Eva Sepulvado, who lives in Marshall, encourages other to get the volunteer spirit because it will satisfy the soul.
BY MICHAEL BARNESAssociated Press
AUSTIN — Mixing in the grand open spaces of the University of Texas Law School last year, the descen-dants of Oral Rochester “O.R.” Lott Sr. and Viola Madison Lott greeted one another with exceptional warmth.
The distant memories of those ancestors, born of for-mer slaves in the 1890s and builders of a thriving lum-ber and housing business in East Austin, lingered among the oldest guests.
Yet the assembled proge-ny were actually present to salute that historical cou-ple’s son, the late Virgil C. Lott Sr., the Austin Ameri-can-Statesman reported.
In 1953, Virgil became the first African American to graduate from the Univer-sity of Texas Law School. As part of a distinguished career of public service, he was also the first African American to sit on the bench of a court in Austin.
Since 2011, the UT law school has given out the Vir-gil C. Lott Medal to honorees who “made significant con-tributions to the legal profes-sion and to the improvement of understanding among all peoples.”
Some of the recipients have been former Chief Jus-tice of the Texas Supreme Court Wallace B. Jefferson, former Texas State Sen. Rod-ney Ellis, former U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Myra McDaniel, the first Af-rican American secretary of state of Texas.
Freshly lionized this eve-ning was Gary Bledsoe, pres-ident of the Texas NAACP and former acting dean of Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law.
The Lott family were par-ticularly delighted by a new plaque that reminded guests of Virgil’s accomplishments, and they gathered in small and large groups around the memorial for photographs.
Beginning in 2011 with a story on the sprawling Limón/Estrada dynasty, which counts thousands of Central Texas members, Michael Barnes has written about the ancestral fami-lies who have shaped our region over the course of generations. They have in-cluded the Koock-Kuyken-dall-Faulk clan, most asso-ciated with Green Pastures, the Callahans of general store and rodeo fame, the restaurant-running Lungs, Bertha Sadler Means’ ex-tended relations and the Saldañas of South Austin. They are among the histor-ical articles collected in his three volumes of “Indelible Austin” books.
“My father pioneered a piece of the black progres-sive movement during some very dark times,” says Vir-gil’s daughter, Joycelyn Lott Toliver. “His immediate plan was to simply graduate from law school, but the big pay-off was bigger than Daddy. While pushing through the racism and undergoing the worst of circumstances, he created a safe space at the UT Law School for blacks to learn and grow — gener-ations beyond his dreams.”
In Austin’s ancestral fam-ilies, a key figure or figures often tend to stand out as early community leaders. Those leaders’ descendants reap the benefits, which can spur their own accomplish-ments on an even larger public stage.
Early in the 20th century, Oral and Viola Lott played that crucial family role for the Lott family.
Oral owned the Lott Lum-ber Co. as one of the biggest black-owned lumberyards in Texas. Oral was very much involved in onsite home-building, not just in Austin, but in Bastrop and William-son counties.
Viola ruled over an ex-tended brood with a firm hand.
“When she said be there,” Toliver remembers, “you were there.”
Viola was the daughter of a prominent Methodist minister in Austin. Oral and Viola married on New Year’s Eve 1913 in Austin and they lived for several years in Co-logne, but Viola was misera-ble and wanted to move back to Austin, the late Ira Lott told their grandchild, ac-cording to family members.
Toliver also has helped put together genealogical records of Viola’s family, the Madisons, which includes black and white members. She also organized reunions.
One member of this fa-milial branch, Henry Green Madison (1843-1912), was a farmer and policeman who homesteaded a cabin in East Austin with his wife, Louise Madison. It dates to 1864 at the latest.
The cabin was discov-ered within the walls of a wooden frame house during demolition. As the Ameri-can-Statesman reported as part of its Austin Untold Sto-ries series in 2015, the prop-erty’s owner during the late 1960s, Mrs. Greenwood Woo-ten, donated the cabin to the city. She cooperated with the Rosewood Recreation As-sociation and the Delta Sig-
ma Theta service sorority to take the cabin apart and put it back together in 1973 in Rosewood Park, where it can be seen today, a concrete monument to the larger Lott family history.
“I love the roots of our family,” Toliver says. “When you are gone, you are gone, and nobody else knows this family history.”
Born in 1893, Oral brought some of his country ways — picked up during his youth in a freedom colony of former slaves and their descendants at Cologne, not far from Victoria — into the city.
“He loved his horse,” Toli-ver says of the man she re-members as “Big Daddy.” “And in the lumberyard, where everybody worked, the wood smelled so good. We played around the back side.”
In 1921, Oral invented a collapsible ironing board; his application for a patent was reported in the Victo-ria Daily Advocate. He is re-ferred to as “O.R.” in news-paper advertisements for the ironing boards.
Family members remem-bered how Oral had met
Booker T. Washington in Austin on one of his tours throughout the southern states promoting industri-al and agricultural educa-tion and that that was what prompted him to later attend Tuskegee Institute, major-ing in construction.
Lott met J.E. Mosby in 1914 at which time he formed a business relationship and a partnership known as Mos-by and Lott. Some of their initial endeavors involved salvaging building materials from buildings and homes in the geographic areas around the Capitol building and UT, according to family members. They operated in downtown Austin.
After the 1928 urban plan created a separate Negro District in East Austin, the Mosby and Lott company was forced to move.
Oral built houses, some of them for his six children, all located not far from the oth-ers.
“Everybody had a house,” Toliver says, “but they had to pay for it.”
The Lotts were among the primary builders of McKin-ley Heights, an upscale postwar African American
neighborhood in the Rose-wood area, where many of the pioneers of the modern civil rights movement lived in proximity, there and in the Grant Park subdivision not far away.
“Big Daddy’s company built a whole subdivision,” Toliver says. “Everybody lived on the east side until they got the money to leave.”
In 1930, Oral was elect-ed as the first president of the Negro Citizens Council, which for decades was an es-sential power broker in the city. The main goal early on was to win basic services for East Austin.
In 1936, Oral bought out Mosby and the business became Lott Lumber Co., which continued to thrive until Oral’s death in 1952.
A doer, Oral was, ac-cording to family lore, “the man with a plan.” He even planned his legacy.
“He asked my father to take care of the family be-fore he died at Holy Cross Hospital,” Toliver says. “He trusted him.”
That son, Virgil, like the rest of the family, worked in the lumberyard.
Born in Austin in 1924, Virgil graduated from the old segregated L.C. Ander-son High School before serv-ing with valor in the Army during World War II in the U.K., France and Belgium. In 1949, he earned a degree in business administration from Samuel Huston Col-lege, now Huston-Tillotson University.
In Austin, Virgil followed in the footsteps of Heman Marion Sweatt, who opened up the UT Law School — and all graduate and pro-fessional programs in the South — to integration via the groundbreaking 1950 U.S. Supreme Court decision Sweatt v. Painter.
Yet the stress and trauma of the years-long case af-fected Sweatt’s physical and mental health. He missed classes and failed others. In 1952, he withdrew from law school.
Meet the Lotts, a legendary Texas family
Nick Wagner/AP Photo
Ward Farnsworth, dean of University of Texas School of Law, toasts in honor of Virgil Lott on Feb. 7, 2019, at the school in Austin.