Oral History/Interview
Claire Patrese Sams Milligan
Session #2 Mar 15, 2023 (Unedited)

Video

Hartford:

Let's start with — You had said, you know, wanted to talk about lessons, lessons you've learned, and —

Milligan:

Yeah, but remember? Remember, I sent you an e-mail, and I said, "Since we're doing it on the 15th, we'll talk about my grandmother today, and lessons, for next time?"

Hartford:

Sure. You want to start with that?

Milligan:

Yeah.

Hartford:

But there's something you want to do. All right, go ahead.

Milligan:

March 15th is the birthday of my paternal grandmother, and she's a significant part of my life. Goes back to the fact that I did not know my father, never have met him. My mother was the belle of the ball in 1950, '49 and '50. She was president of her sorority at Alabama State University.

She has two friends who are still alive, and they recount what a belle of the ball my mother was. She was the only one among them who drove. My uncle let her drive his car. He had an old T Model Ford. So my mother was the leader of the group of them.

They had a habit of going out to Maxwell Air Force Base, to the NCO Club, and partying. That's where she met my father, who was an airman, a con artist. One of my aunts told me that her only sexual encounter was with him, her first encounter was with him, and I'm the result of it.

So for all of my life, my mother never talked about him. When I would bring him up, she would change the subject. She was very pained by her relationship with him.

I pieced together stories, based on finding, I used to ramble all over the house and find stuff. I found letters from my father, to my mother and to my grandmother.

Milligan: Turns out he was a Casanova, and she fell hard. She was a young, naive child, person, and she fell hard for him. My grandmother, my maternal grandmother, Juanita McCall is, even though she died in February of '99, is still a strong, active spirit in my life.

This part of what I would talk about is not just the paternal grandmother, but the matriarchy that's behind me. I'm a product of very strong Black women. My mother's mother, I called her Big Mama, I'm sure, forced my mother to marry, to get married, so that I could have —

Hartford:

Because of the pregnancy?

Milligan:

Airmen's benefits. Huh?

Hartford:

Because she was pregnant, or because —

Milligan:

Because she was pregnant, and she was pregnant by an airman. So I would, theoretically, get military benefits. So they married, I've just recently found a letter from him, in December of '51. I was born in February of '52.

They never lived together. They went to Chicago, and one of my grandmother's sisters lived in Chicago, and they stayed with her, and got married. They never lived together, though, as husband and wife.

I found a letter that he wrote my mother, in 1956, I was born in '52, asking Eva, "I'm writing to find out the status of our relationship. Did you divorce me, or did you get the marriage annulled?"

Which means that he had absolutely no contact with her. And that was very painful for my mother. She never could talk to me about him.

Hartford:

And she never got military pensions or benefits or anything?

Milligan:

Nope, nope.

Hartford:

Could you tilt your screen a little, so — There, because you're being chopped off.

Milligan:

Okay, okay. So I grew up with, in the home of my maternal grandparents, though, my mother and I lived with her parents. So I was not without a father figure.

Milligan: My grandfather, my Big Daddy that I rode in the bus boycott, when he drove his car, during the boycott, that was my Big Daddy, that I rode with. So I had a male presence, but I'm convinced that there's something about a little girl and her father that's almost mystical.

I didn't grow up consciously missing him. There were times when I was embarrassed that I didn't have a father to come to school on Father's Day, stuff like that. But in terms of pining for him, I didn't do that.

But when I was 27 years old, he called me, two or three times in my life. I told you about the thing when he gave me my name, Claire Patrice, and what my name means. And in one of those conversations, he mentioned that he had married again, and had two sons from his present marriage.

I had two brothers, Eric and Oliver III. His name was Oliver Columbus Sams Jr. Very august name, for a man of whatever kind of morals. So I knew that I had those brothers.

Over the years, when I went to college, I was very angry with my father. I went into this angry mode. Who was this man calling me, coming in my life at this late point? So I ostracized myself from him.

Over the years, realized that I wanted to have a relationship with him. So I started back writing him, and he never responded, to anything that I wrote. In 1980-something, one of my two brothers called me, out of the blue, I was living in Houston at that point, and said, in the process of talking, revealed that I had, we had a living grandmother, who is my grandma still, the one that's birthday is March 15th.

So I contacted her. I was 27 years old, and I flew to Akron, Ohio to meet her. Back then, there was not the restrictions for access at flight gates, so she was waiting there when I got off the plane. When I got off, she just grabbed me, and hugged me, and would look at my face and then pull me away, and look at me, and put me away.

She just kept saying, "Blessed Jesus, you are my child." Because I looked like my father, I looked like my mother, too. They looked like, they would look like sisters and brothers. So her statement, her affirmation was suggested to me, "Yeah, well, maybe this one really is his."

I'm sure it wasn't unusual for her to have calls from women saying that had his children, had had his child. Because he was just a philanthropist, not philanthropist, he was a philander.

Hartford:

A slight difference there.

Milligan:

Just a bit different.

Hartford:

Although there are philanthropists who are philanderers.

Milligan:

Philandering philanthropists, yes. Yes, yes.

Hartford:

And in this era of Me Too, they'd better watch out.

Milligan:

Yes. So meeting her was a joy. It wasn't as though I was conscious of missing anything, but she pulled pieces of me together. I saw me in her. I have a lot of surrogate children all over the world, that I adopt kids, and make them my child.

My grandmother was like that. Children, people, adults all over Akron considered her their mama. She was a touchy feely kind of person. "Come let Grandma love you." She always had to touch and feel, which was totally different from what I was used to growing up. I think I mentioned to you the whole concept of post-traumatic slave syndrome before, right.

Hartford:

Right.

Milligan:

She was a good example of the opposite of that. She grew up in, was born in a little town, 66, South Carolina. Her mother, my great-grandma Ola, was part Native American. I don't know which group of native peoples, but was part Native American, and was a woman of the earth. She was tied to the earth, an earthy woman.

So that helped me in my adult years, when I had to deal with issues of intimacy. And it was a real good training ground for me, in raising my son Evan, because I didn't grow up with the touchy kind of feely thing.

My grandmother's perspective was she was going to do everything she could to provide for Claire, for Eva, my mother, and for Claire, so that we didn't have the hard life, that she had as a child of former enslaved, a descendant of formerly enslaved people in Wellsboro, Alabama.

So my grandmother's emphasis was on provision of material things, and showing concern that way. She taught me, when I was in junior high school, every first of the month, I would see, she would give me the checkbook, and I would have to write out the bills. She made me know how to pay a utility, but how to pay the bills, and stuff.

I balanced her checkbook as a 13-, 14-year-old, she brought me up that way. Very, very practical. Wanted me to know things, not to be.

Hartford:

That's good —

Milligan:

Naive.

Hartford:

That's good, too.

Milligan:

Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.

Hartford:

So many children grow up, what's the phrase, unumerancy, or ill-numered? In other words, they don't know how to do numbers and checkbooks and banks.

Milligan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hartford:

They get ripped off in later life.

Milligan:

When I was 13, I had to do that every weekend. She got paid on the 1st. She was a school teacher that got paid on the 1st. Every 1st of the month, I had to write the bills out. She was just intent on my knowing practical things. But in terms of intimacy and emotional stuff, she was shut down.

And it wasn't until I was an adult, that I knew the need to actually hear and verbalize, "I love you." So that became an intention of mine to say that to them. And they were never able to voluntarily say it at first.

I would always get the, "I love you, too," but never did they say it first. That's something, in terms of life lessons, that that's can go to that.

There's something, to me, that's important about hearing it, and having that affirmation, and having that spoken over children, that I think is very important. That in our fast-paced technological world, we breeze by the human touch part of life, to our detriment, I think.

So my grandmother and mother weren't able to do that, but I got that from my father's mother. I learned that from her, and incorporated that in my relationships with my mother, and maternal grandparents.

But it was a challenging time, because I went through the classical stuff that psychiatrists talk about, about girls missing their fathers and looking for fathers, and all their relationships and stuff. So I went through relationships like that.

I was never the one to be hurt, though. I was the one that always broke it off, because it would become real clear to me that this ain't going nowhere. I was not sexually active.

I had a whole lot of boyfriends, wasn't sexually active, because when they didn't do something that I thought I deserved, to hold a door, or whatever. Well, you ain't my boyfriend no more. So my whole sense of relationships with men was skewed.

That factored over into my first marriage. I married a man who was abusive to me before I married him, but I thought that his extreme abuse and his jealousy was love. I said, "That there has to be, can't nobody love me enough this much, to want to beat a man who looks at me." But that's the way this man was.

We were driving, and I'm in the passenger seat, and we stopped at a light. There's a car next to me. I look over, if it happens to be a male driver, instantly, "Oh, that's your boyfriend," and a slap, or whatever.

Milligan: And I thought that that extreme jealousy was love, because I had never seen real love between, with a couple. Because I thought his abuse was love, I married that man, but with a vow to myself, that if he hit me again, I would kill him.

One night in January of '75, he did, and I decided I was going to kill him. He used to complain that I didn't cook. I don't really like to cook. So I cooked a beautiful meal, and then, I looked under the cabinet for rat poison. I was going to poison him.

I was an atheist. That's when I was in Black Workers Congress with Jim Foreman. That's why I was an atheist. Me and Marx and Lenin, and dialectical materialism, and stuff.

But I looked up at the sky. When I reached down to get the rat poison, I heard something say, "Don't do it, it's not worth it. Leave." I didn't know where it was coming from, but I said, "Okay, I'm going to do that."

So I rushed at midnight, and packed my car. I mentioned before, I think that my husband was, we had identified him as an advanced worker, and we worked in the same factory.

And he was so jealous, he beat his supervisor one night, and lost his job, because he thought that I was going with the supervisor. So this is how crazy this man was. About one o'clock that night, that morning of January 20- something in '75, when I heard something say, "It's not worth it, leave."

I had a little Volkswagen, I threw some things in the car, looked up at the sky, and I said, "If you are there, get me away from this man," because there was no doubt in my mind he would kill me. "If you're there. Get me away from him."

I was living in Atlanta, left Atlanta that morning, went to my sister's, wrote her a check for, I had no money, because we were Communists, and we didn't like money. So I had no money.

I wrote my sister a check for $5, so that I would have some cash. I had an Exxon credit card that I still have to this day, my first credit card, and I still have it since 1974, and drove from Atlanta to Montgomery, got to Montgomery.

Didn't tell my folks where I was going, but they knew that we had had bad times, and that I was leaving him. I didn't tell them where, because I knew he was going to come looking for me, and I didn't want them in an awkward position, of having to say they didn't know where I was. So I didn't tell them where I was going.

I headed to Houston. I was going to go to LA, and stay with a college friend from Fisk, but the cards weren't meant for me, apparently to get to LA. I stopped in Houston. My plan was to pay off my car note, but I never left Houston. And went through a challenging time in Houston, of depression and fear, that he was going to find me and kill me.

So went through all that, and fast forward, went through, from the atheism to, I started studying Hinduism, and all kind of Eastern religions, because I didn't want anything to do with Christianity, and an organized church. I went back to being an agnostic of sorts.

I got a job at the University of Houston, and met a woman who became a very dear friend. And she gave me a book by a Theosophist, Alice Bailey. The title of the book is From Intellectual Intuition. And something in that book, I saw the alphabet's, G-O-D, and it reminded me that maybe there is God.

So I started studying a little bit of Bailey's stuff, but I went to a metaphysical bookstore, and I was reading Buddhism and Hinduism, and I came across The Sermon on the Mount According to Vedanta. All of my life story, I can hinge it around books and music.

At that particular point in 1976, The Sermon on the Mount According to Vedanta was a critical book in my life. And as I read it, when I saw how similar the teaching, the truths in Vedanta are, as they compare to what Jesus taught in the sermon, then I said, "Okay," because I'd been praying for a guru to mentor me with the Hatha and and Raja yoga. And I never got a guru.

So I said, "Okay, well, if the Sermon on the Mount is close, then I'll just study the Sermon on the Mount." But I didn't want to read the Bible. I thought Paul was a misogynist, and I didn't think all the killing and murdering and stuff in the Old Testament was relevant.

I just literally read, not just the Gospels, the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus's discourse, and had what could be called a born again experience, but it wasn't a typical one. But anyway, let's say that that is what happened. So my spiritual journey went from, where I was as a child, in the Southern Baptist Church, to agnostic at Fisk, to atheist, to Hinduism and Buddhism, and Vedanta, to the Gospels.

That was a very meaningful time in my life. I believe, for certain that grandmother, my father's mother, that I've mentioned, she was a powerful woman, and a praying woman. I found in June of '21, I was preparing my house for my ex-husband, my son's father, to move in with me. We were very good friends, and he was ill, and at the end of his life.

So he wanted to move back in with me, I thought, so that he could die here. He died two days before he was supposed to move in. But in the process of getting my house ready, I'm doing a massive decluttering, and I found some of those letters that I had found from my father when I was a child.

Among the letters that I found was also a letter that my abusive husband wrote to my mother and grandparents. I left him in January of '75. I found a letter, postmarked April of '75, in which he described his visit to them here in Montgomery, and assured them that he hadn't any, didn't have any plans to harm me.

He said, and he was writing, and I don't know if it was in all kind of persons first, third, 95th, all kind of tenses. But he recalled that my grandmother, my mother's mother, asked him for his mother's contact information, address and phone number. And so he wrote, so he said, "and I gave it to her, and I guess she wants it so that if something happens to Claire, they'll know how to find me."

But my grandmother kept, I have the letter that he wrote them, and also, his writing, where he wrote his mother's contact information in Macon, Georgia. I found that.

Milligan: I found a letter that my father wrote my mother, asking her in '56, had she divorced him. I found a letter that he wrote my grandmother, asking her for $3,600, so that he could pay some of his bills, and have some money to give Eva and the baby, that's me, the baby. He was not a good soul.

He had some lessons, some unlearned lessons, that he left her with. He was an alcoholic. And, as the universe would have it, one of my mother's closest friends lives in Milwaukee, which is where he lived, and knew him, up there in Milwaukee. So she told me that he died in a car accident.

So my whole journey is anchored, in part, around that whole question of my relationship to my father, and my non-relationship to him. I used to call him a sperm donor, and say that that was all the only role that he played in my life. The universe told me that he was actually more than that, because he was an intelligent man. He just used his intelligence differently, so I got some of my intelligence from him.

I come from intelligent stock, anyway, but there's a brand of it that I think might be uniquely his, that he did not use in a good way. And I hope to be using it, mine, in a good way.

Milligan: So I inherited that. I have, from that home, not knowing him, though, and that little girl's search for a father, and going through an abusive relationship, one of the lessons, and I'll tie this into a lesson thing for me, deals with women who are in abusive relationships. And my counsel to them is leave.

If he hits you one time, leave. He's going to be all apologetic, and swear he'll never do it again. And he might be sincere when he says that, but the fact is, if he did it once, leave. And it's up to him to do whatever kind of therapy, and whatever kind of changes and stuff he needs to make.

But don't be fooled by the plaintiff cries of, "I'm sorry, I'm not going to do it again." So I'm very much a proponent for ending violence against women. I'm really impressed by the UN's stance on that, the international day against ending, eliminating violence against women and girls. Phenomenal stuff, the UN does.

And the data about incidences of women being abused worldwide is phenomenal. I mean, we're treated like shit. And that's a passion of mine.

Hartford:

If I'm right, if I'm remembering correctly, that's one of the many United Nations human rights treaties that our government has refused to ratify.

Milligan:

Exactly. We've only signed three, I've got the numbers. If it's 30 of those resolutions, and treaties and stuff, united States only signed eight of them. Unbelievable.

Hartford:

Very small.

Milligan:

Yeah, unbelievable.

Hartford:

Unbelievably small number, yeah.

Milligan:

Yeah. I asked a friend, now I'm going to ask you. What is wrong with white people? We voted against the recent vote in December, against abolishing capital, the death penalty.

The United States was one of 30 countries. 120-something countries voted for abolishing of death penalty. The United States was born of 30, that included Iran, that voted against that. Why? What is it about white men that makes you want to kill?

Hartford:

Well, my take on that isn't so much, that US refusal to sign a large number of human rights treaties isn't so much simply white men, but —

Milligan:

I'm being facetious.

Hartford:

There's a political and economic hierarchy in this country that they want to preserve, and that, in order to preserve it, they don't want to be challenged on human rights. I mean, you could go all the way back to W.E.B. Du Bois, the second time he was with the NAA, he drafted for the UN, immediately after the Second World War, a statement on human rights and racism, which the US blocked.

About four or five or six years later, the Civil Rights Congress had something about, We Charge Genocide, I think, was what it was called, which was about lynching in America. And the US just, it blocked it even being discussed.

But you could go through there, some of those treaties that the only ones who refused to ratify it was us, North Korea and Iran. I mean, there's one, I have it all written down, but my short term memory is so bad, I can't memorize it from heart.

People don't know. But let me go back to something else that stuck in my head from what you were saying, and it's a non-sequitur.

Milligan:

Okay.

Hartford:

But you ran off your religions, Southern Baptist, going all the way, Hindu, and so forth. But it seems to me, in my view, you might have skipped over one, which is Marxism-Leninism.

Because in my experience of being in what I call a Marxist-Leninist cult for two years, it didn't have the label of religion, but it had the feel of religion, of true blue religion. So I'm curious if you see it that way or not.

Milligan:

It's definitely a part of my journey. I call that, I just say atheist, when I used to be an atheist, and that's what I'm talking about it.

I didn't have the same cultish fervor, religiosity, behind it. Oh, I wasn't an evangelical Communist. I didn't push the line like that. It was a deduction for me.

Except when I got to the point of, okay, you say with historical materialism, there's a class basis to everything. So this originated from that, and that from that, and that, where did the original stuff come from? And I never got an answer, to that because that would have taken us to spirit, right?

Where'd that original stuff that started this cascading of historcracy? So I just kept that thought of, "Where did it originally all start from?", to myself.

But it was almost, Marxism, and a class analysis, was the logical way to understand why these people are so mean. Why is all this bad stuff happening to poor and underrepresented people? And it's got to be a question of class.

Hartford:

Well, that's interesting that your experience in the Black Workers Congress sounds like it had quite a different quality than mine did in, what did we call ourselves?

Milligan:

SDS?

Hartford:

No, no, no. This was later. I don't know. Proletarian Workers Party? I'm spacing on the name, but —

Milligan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hartford:

Anyway, the other thing that you sparked, in my mind, in what you were saying, was this whole network of extended family that you were referring to. I was wondering, it seems to me that the role of family and extended family in the freedom movement was quite large, and quite significant.

I was wondering how you saw, I mean, as a six- or seven-year-old riding with your grandfather, Big Daddy during the bus boycott, and all of the family connections working around through the South, underground tree roots connecting with each other? I mean, I'm curious if you have thoughts on that.

Milligan:

Yeah, I think that. Have you seen the movie, Will Smith did it, Six Degrees of Separation?

Hartford:

No, I've heard the phrase, but I never saw the movie.

Milligan:

Yeah, it's a one, just dumb down. Don't do nothing, watch it. He pretends to be a wealthy Northeastern collegiate, who imposes on a wealthy white family, and pretends that he knows their children and stuff.

Anyway, the idea is that he does this saying that he knows somebody that their children knew. So the idea, that I say, if in that community, there's six degrees of separation in the black community, there's one and a half degree.

I can get to anybody Black in the world through another person double quick, we're connected. That connectivity, yes, was there, even in the movement. We'd have meetings in different cities. There's always somebody in the city, that I knew somebody there, that I could call and crash on their sofa.

We're having a meeting in Buffalo, or wherever we were going to be, in our meetings and stuff. So there's a connectedness in the Black community, that I definitely experienced in the movement. And not just the Black community, because among us all, like kindred spirits, that we were connected. The connections are amazing.

Hartford:

I think also, maybe, that particularly the family connections provided a kind of resiliency and defense against white retaliation and counterattacks. Again, in other words, people knew, "All right, if I get fired for registering, trying to register to vote, I have family who can help me." And I think that was, that's probably an important aspect of almost every successful social movement.

So one of the things I wanted to ask you last week was International Women's Day, March 8th. Talk about how you viewed the role of women in the movement, in the freedom movement.

Milligan:

Okay. You know Mao's thing, about women hold up half the sky? That was one of our mantras, and it's still one of mine. And as I age, I'm becoming, I'm more a woman, I don't know what the word is.

Am I a womanist? Am I a feminist? I found the word today, eco-womanist. So I think that's what I am today, because [inaudible 00:33:42].

Hartford:

What is an eco-womanist is different from another kind of

Milligan:

Okay, the eco-womanist is aware of the, and those kids' buzzwords, the intersectionality, dah, dah, dah, of race, social justice, and in this particular case, food justice. I'm reading and really inspired by a group of Black women vegans, who are justice advocates, who look at not just, do no harm to animals, and only eat plant-based food, but how does access to food relate to justice? And even to the point of considering, in some areas, we have food apartheid.

So taking diet, out of just the construct of what we eat, to maintain our physical sustenance, but in a broader perspective, of how does what we eat fit into what's happening in the world ecologically, how much carbon it takes for a cow to do a pound of meat, and stuff. So, looking at diet and food, from a broader perspective, the eco-womanist looks that way.

Hartford:

What does food apartheid mean? I'm not sure.

Milligan:

That people are denied access to healthy food, can't get food.

Hartford:

Oh, I see, okay.

Milligan:

And it's not accidental, it's systemic. The lack of access to healthy food is a systemic problem.

Hartford:

Systemic beyond, simply the cost?

Milligan:

That there's, the whole design of our communities with the, and I'm just saying this off the top of my head, so I'm thinking out loud. But if you look at the way interstates went through the black communities, and divided up the communities, and then, look at the holes that's left in the black community. There's food deserts.

With that decimation of the communities by the interstates going through, and literally bulldozing houses and neighborhoods, when those roads went through, fresh food access was not built into the recovering communities. So you have systemic. There's a plan not to have fresh food in X, Y, Z neighborhood.

It's not an accident that there are no grocery stores, that you have liquor stores, and fast food restaurants, but don't have access to fresh fruits and vegetables in neighborhoods. So the food deserts are an example of that. Systemic, is what I'm calling apartheid.

Hartford:

Open deserts, too.

Milligan:

Exactly, exactly.

Hartford:

Yeah.

Milligan:

But on the question of women?

Hartford:

Yes.

Milligan:

The older I get, the more — I turned 71 on the 27th of this month, a couple of weeks ago. And when I turned 70, something happened to my sense of myself. I've always been outspoken. I've always been a champion for human rights.

My son asked me, "Mom," he called my mother, Granny, "did Granny raise you, and say to you, you can do anything you want to do?" I don't remember her sitting me down amd saying that. But I was brought up that way.

I was brought up with the sense that there is, if you put your mind on something, there is nothing that you cannot do. "You can do whatever you want to do, Claire. There's nothing that you cannot do. The sky is the limit." So I was fortunate.

Hartford:

All right, would that be — 

Milligan:

Huh?

Hartford:

— There's a difference between permissiveness, "You can do whatever you want to do," and achievementness, "That you can achieve anything you want to do."

So your mother didn't say, "You can go do whatever you want to do," in the sense of just running wild. She said you could achieve, right? I mean, is that — Or am I misunderstanding it?

Milligan:

Yeah, yes. At some point, she was permissive, but yeah, yeah, the achieving is the more, is what the emphasis should be on. Although sometimes, she just let me do what I was going to do.

She would laugh ,and say — There's something I did. Okay, here's an example, going to mind, of what she would let me do. For a week, back when I was eight or nine years, I didn't want to take a bath. I refused to bathe.

I would put water in the tub, take my shoes, and run it around the rim of the tub to make it look like dirt, mud was in there, put soap on the towels, splash water on the floor, everything. But I would not get in the bathtub for about a week.

And I didn't know that she knew. When Evan was born, and he was sudden, and she would laugh and say, "He's just paying you back for what you did to me." "What you talking about?" So she said, somehow, it came up that she knew that I wasn't bathing.

I said, "Ma, if you knew that, why did, how come didn't say nothing to me?" She said, "Girl, I couldn't stop you on everything you did. Some of that stuff you did, I just ignored it." So some of it, some of me, yeah, she just did permit.

But the idea, though, was, I was just brought up with the notion. She used to say, "He puts his drawers on the same way I do, one leg at a time."

My mother said that to me. She was never had any deference to men, or people in authority. She wasn't disrespectful, but everybody, we were equal. And that's the way she brought me up.

So I never approached anything, thinking that something was insurmountable. If it was something that I wanted to do, I figured out how I could do it.

That ranged from, when I was in Washington, and had the option of choosing where I wanted to intern, I said, "Ted Kennedy," because it was no thought in my mind of who he is, and this important man, and stuff. I wanted to be at the top. So I picked Kennedy, and that's where I went.

So I thank my mother and my grandmothers for giving me a sense of, I won't say invincibility, but I'll use that word. I'm learning, as I age, how to temper that.

There's a Scripture, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." And I literally believe I can do it. If something has to be done, I can do it. And if I can't do it, it wasn't meant to be done. That's how I look at life.

So if I have a goal of whatever, if it doesn't work, I don't trip out, because some didn't work, I believe in synchronicity, I believe in divine order, I believe that things work the way they're supposed to work.

When they don't work the way I thought, then I just take a deep breath and say, "Okay, well let's see how this is going unfold, universe," you know?

Hartford:

You were raised with self-confidence.

Milligan:

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Hartford:

So many children are not.

Milligan:

Exactly, and it's important, and I think about that. And I try to, not try, I'm intentional in how I model that with my grandchildren, because kids come here, they have it when they come, and we take it from them, the babies and stuff, they know stuff.

Ruby, I have a portrait of my maternal, my paternal grandmother and me. There's a portrait of us hanging behind my bed, and we spent a lot of time in my bedroom. So the kids and I talk to my grandmother, and she knows, and Ruby knows that Grandma still is with us. She knows that she can do it, that she's got her angels out there for her, and that she can do whatever she sets her mind to do, If it's a good thing.

I'm not giving license to hurting people. I don't license unkindness. In that whole construct of self-confidence, as important as that, is a passion for me not to hurt anybody,

Hartford:

Which is a little different than invincibility, that —

Milligan:

Yes.

Hartford:

In some ways, verges over into privilege and arrogance, for some people. Not you, though.

Milligan:

Exactly, exactly, exactly. Because I'm absolutely concerned about not hurting.

I looked up the Hippocratic Oath one night, because the only part I could remember of it was, "Do no harm." And that's the way I would like to live. I don't want to hurt people, because I've been hurt.

Hartford:

That's very much in the ethos of the freedom movement.

Milligan:

Yes, yes. Yeah.

Hartford:

In some ways, I think it's associated with the freedom movement's embrace of, at least, the large parts of nonviolence. That's a whole different discussion. But before we-

Milligan:

Oh, now, I'm thinking bout nonviolence. Diane Nash was in Birmingham a couple of years ago, and she said that what we call nonviolence is really agapic energy.

Hartford:

— A what?

Milligan:

Agapic.

Hartford:

A-G-A-T-H-I-C?

Milligan:

No, A-G-A-P-I-C. Agape, the Greek word for love?

Hartford:

Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes.

Milligan:

Agapic energy.

Hartford:

And that was really good.

Dr. King said something like that, too.

Milligan:

Really? Okay.

Hartford:

Yeah.

Milligan:

Okay, okay.

Hartford:

Yeah. I always thought it was pronounced ""ah-gape" (rather than "aga-pay") because I only read it.

Milligan:

Yeah, yeah. Agape is the word.

Hartford:

Yeah.

Milligan:

Yeah. There's something profoundly powerful in it. Powerful, yeah.

Hartford:

Going back, though, to gender questions for a moment. You've mentioned, a couple of times, issues of gender issues that came up within the freedom movement.

Could you talk more about that, about how you experienced it, how you saw it, what you think about it?

Milligan:

Yeah, there was definitely the — I remember the Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver stuff. I was never like that, about standing by my man. But the man that I was with, Rick Reed, was Jim's lieutenant, and —

Hartford:

Jim Foreman?

Milligan:

In BWC. I was 19 years old, and they were 19 and 20 years old. These were thirtysomething-year-old men and stuff. But they respected me, my mind.

Worth long and I, Worth tickles me, because he talks about my mind, and remembers stuff, that I said and did and told them, the men in the group, that I don't even remember saying, but apparently I've been speaking my mouth the whole time, which —

Hartford:

And he's just eyeing retiring now. That's surprising.

Milligan:

But there was a thing in the Black Workers Congress, I'll talk about that part of the movement. Women were herald, and then kind of silenced. It's hard to describe. There were women who were in polyamorous relationships. Is that a word? Is that the word? Okay.

So there were open relationships like that, one woman, and two brilliant woman. But she felt that she had a right to be in love with the men that she was in love with, who happened to have a wife. But they maintained their separate, they maintained a household together, brilliant woman. And she was on the executive council of the organization, so what she had to say was respected. It was really weird.

The man that I was with was a philanderer, so that had its whole life, but we were respected, in the main, even though there were the quirks, like that relationship, that polyamorous relationship. We were respected. Wasn't the extreme of the stuff that say, like Karenga did, and all that kind of stuff? The beatings and stuff like that. I didn't, we didn't go through any of that stuff.

But on this thing about me, and being a woman, let me think through that. I'm at a point, at 71, where I'm really proud to be a woman. Let me see how to phrase this. I'm aware of the unique place that women have in the universe. We can do stuff better and different than y'all can.

And I'm not bashing men. It's just, I'm growing to appreciate the energy that women bring to situations, how we analyze. We look at life differently than y'all do. And there's something unique about that difference, I think. Okay, I'm having trouble doing it to words.

Hartford:

Sounds to me like you're echoing Sojourner Truth.

Milligan:

Absolutely. That's my girl.

Hartford:

"Ain't I a woman," yeah?

Milligan:

"Ain't I a woman?" Yup. You sitting over there, Fred? You're sitting, you're listening? Yeah.

I found it, it fell off my wall. But one of my paintings in my office is a portrait of Sojourner, when she is selling this portion of herself, and it is her pennies. Have you seen it? I'll send you a link to it.

It's a portrait, where she says, she's selling her likeness for the cause. Phenomenal, phenomenal portrait. But yeah, yeah, so, anyway.

Hartford:

A woodcut?

Milligan:

Huh?

Hartford:

A woodcut, or a photo?

Milligan:

A photo, a photo. I'll send it to you. It's just an amazing time, as a woman. My husband, my son's father, who was my, at the point that he died, we had been divorced, but we were very good friends. We were, I think, soulmates. We went through a whole lot of hell.

But towards the end of his life, I think he wanted to move back with me, to make up for how he had treated me. And my whole concern was just to make him happy, because I knew he was dying, so I wanted him comfortable in his last days.

But there's something, in terms of life's lessons, the whole man lesson that I had to go through with not having a father, and how that transformed, morphed at different stages in my journey. Towards the end, at the end of his life, we had become very, very supernaturally close spiritually.

Now that he's gone, not in the earth, my whole sense of myself as a human being, who is female, is evolving. When he died, it's been over since June of '21, 2021. I wanted companionship. But now, I talk to him now, and so he's my companion. He ain't even in the flesh, but I find solace in talking to him.

When he first died, I wanted to have a human being companion. But now, that's really not important to me, because my whole sense of what companionship and friendship is, probably is skewed.

And ain't no man in the world going to want to just sit and listen to me read and write, which is really all I want to do, listen to music, and read and write. I'm not concerned about romance anymore.

Hartford:

Well, as a writer, I don't find that at all unusual.

Milligan:

Oh, well, good. Good, thank you. Was one of my friends —

Hartford:

I'd sit in here, stare and write all day. Oh that, you know?

Milligan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hartford:

Let me ask you a different follow-up question. When we look back at the Freedom Movement, and the civil rights movement, people say, "Well, it did this, it did that. It failed in this, it failed in that."

Do you feel that the Freedom Movement had any effect on issues of gender, sexism, misogyny, female empowerment, anything like that? What relationship would you say, if any, did the freedom movement have?

Milligan:

I think, I would not use it in terms of past tense, and say that it did. I think it's a process. I think the whole question of women and our roles in the movement is continuing to evolve, just as our whole life's experiences with freedom, or processing, so that the sexism around the time when Shirley Chisholm ran for President, and that woman ran for Vice President, when we couldn't make a statement about there being no, she was the first Black woman to run for President? Those kinds of firsts are important, and also are not important, I think.

The fact that Ketanji is the first Black female Supreme Court Justice, all those firsts that we're having, are important historically. But they also, on the grand scheme of things, don't really mean that much.

Hartford:

Well, I agree that the "first this," the "first of that," those are milestones, but it's the journey that's important.

Milligan:

Absolutely.

Hartford:

Past a milestone. But you mark your progress by the milestones.

Milligan:

Yes.

Hartford:

But I think what I'm trying to tease out, is that I would take the thesis that the Civil Rights movement, and broadly defined, say '50s and '60s, in some ways, changed a lot more in American society or the world global society, than simply issues of segregation and voting rights. And that a sense of the importance and the validity, and the value and the essentiality of human rights, had to include gender rights, women's rights.

I mean, as a historian, looking at the legal and cultural rights of women in the 1950s, compared to the 1970s, it looks to me like there's some big changes. I feel that the freedom movement had something to do with that, I'm wondering that —

Milligan:

I agree with you.

Hartford:

That's what I'm posing to you.

Milligan:

Yeah, I agree with you. And I think that, at least for me, it's gone even beyond human rights, to living rights, life. So that I'm a human being, worried about other beings that are all part of the creation.

The movement is evolving even to that place for me now, so that it's not just about myself as a human, but myself as I relate to all of creation. So that not only do I want to not kill a cow, not eat beef, but I'm concerned about the farm workers who work on those ranches. Are they being paid an equitable salary, also? So that my —

Hartford:

The answer to that is "no," but go ahead.

Milligan:

Yes, yes. Exactly, exactly.

Hartford:

Here in California, you can follow that.

Milligan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that the whole journey, the R-I-G-H-T-S journey, from civil to human to life, to me now, it's not even just human life, but all of life.

One example of that, I'm fascinated by the James Webb Telescope and those photos that came back in June, remember? That our whole sense of the universe, and being able to see light that's all those hundreds of millions of years old, that's phenomenal to me.

Hartford:

Yeah.

Milligan:

And that relates. I have pictures of five of those photographs on my kitchen wall for my grandchildren, so they can grow up and know that there's really, there's a whole lot to this world and what you see. Seeing, on the one hand, the largeness of the world, on the other hand, how very small incidences and activities are, that happened in that real big world, it's all fascinating.

There was a time, right from when my husband died, and I returned to a point of studying quantum physics. Because I wanted to get a handle on, where is he now? What is this side? What are these universes? What's in time and space? And I've stopped studying that, because I don't really want to know it intellectually.

I just have a sense that there's more to life, than what we experience daily, what we're conscious of. And it's allowing for the possibility of that other, capital O other, is fascinating to me. I have fun with it, fun with it.

Hartford:

I've gone through periods of studying astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and for very similar reasons, with similar outcome, that at a certain point, as you get deeper into quantum and astrophysics, it begins to converge with theology, and the presence.

Anyway, let's not — Get you back to the freedom movement, [inaudible 01:00:22], but it's a fascinating thing. I got half a dozen popularizations of that, of which I can understand maybe a tenth of what they're writing.

Milligan:

Exactly, exactly, exactly. I was watching some YouTubes about it, and rewinding and rewinding, and going back and looking, reading the transcript and stuff. And it really ain't about that right now for me, so we'll just let this go.

Hartford:

It's interesting intellectually, yeah.

Milligan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hartford:

So anyway, one of the things you had said you wanted to talk about was lessons, and that would be a very interesting thing to have on the interview.

Milligan:

Yes.

Hartford:

Lessons you learned from political activism.

Milligan:

Not just that, from life in general. I think that-

Hartford:

But life in general.

Milligan:

— That, okay, this is my world according to Claire. I think that we come here, we manifest in this earth realm from somewhere, don't know where.

That's when I was studying the quantum stuff, and left it alone. Don't know where we came from, know we came from somewhere. And I think we come here with lessons that we have to learn.

The lessons are, or our way of contributing to humankind, to the goodness in humankind. That's why we're here, I think. So we have these lessons, and if we don't learn our lessons, we repeat them. The thing about repeating lessons is, each repeat gets successively harder.

So for me, say the life lesson about relationships with men. I messed up when I was a child, with the boyfriends and all this stuff, all these relationships, all this sexuality and stuff, all the way, up to marrying an abusive man that I was going to kill, or being at the point of murder, is about the extreme in a lesson that I want to get to.

I have told the universe, "I've learned that man lesson now, so ain't killing nobody." Wipe that off my list of things to learn, how to have been in a healthy relationship with a man. So each unlearned repeat gets harder, and it behooves us, it behooves Claire, to admit, what is the lesson, so I can learn it and get on.

The thing is that I've had to say to myself is, I know what the lessons are, and they really aren't that I'm not going through anything, my challenges are not because I don't know better. They're usually because I've chosen to keep doing the wrong thing that is not to my advantage. For whatever reason, I'm still persisting in that behavior that does not help me.

So, to play a game, and ask the universe, "Oh, what am I supposed to be learning in this? I don't have to do that. I just had to admit that I know what the lesson is." I know that I have my mother, who was an extremely brittle diabetic, and so I have had, since at least 1965, when she became diabetic, I have known that sugar is bad.

Raw sugar cane is bad. We human beings should not consume it. It'll kill you. I've known that since 19 — But have I stopped eating sugar? No.

So I'm trying to stop now. I'm on this plan now, where I'm eliminating some stuff, and sugar is one of them. But when I get sick from eating that milkshake, then I don't have a righteous, "Oh, well, why did this happen?" Because I ate the milkshake. I know I didn't need the sugar.

Learning from the lessons is important. So what are my lessons? One, I think it's very important to be thankful. And how does thankfulness relate to a life lesson, for me, in the movement?

We did some stupid stuff, some dangerous stuff, up against the police, in demonstrations in downtown Atlanta, and walking up to the policemen, screaming in their faces. Or one day, my husband told us on the telephone, he was coming to kill everybody.

So he drives up to where we were meeting, with his rifle, and there's the FBI outside, with their rifles posed at us just, and thank God I've just been protected from being in crazy situations. And I'm thankful for that.

My grandmother's mothers and my mother were praying people, except my mother, I never saw her pray. Never. Which is an interesting point. Never saw my mother pray. I know she was a spiritual woman. But in terms of the actual, physical process of on knees, hands, heads, bowed, palms together, my mother never prayed like that.

Hartford:

Did she go to church regularly?

Milligan:

Funny thing. We lived around the corner from the church. My mother did not like the pastor, so she didn't like how he would talk about people, and do all this ad-libbing, talking and stuff, before the sermon. So she would not go to church until, she timed it, her arrival, in the choir stand to the song before the sermon. She literally would not leave home.

She would get to church in time to sing the song before the sermon, because she didn't want to hear his stuff. So yeah, she went to church, but she wasn't into ritual. My other grandmothers, though, were the old-fashioned praying women.

I happen to be like that, too. I like to pray, but my mother never saw her do any of the formal stuff. Amazing. And it used to embarrass me when she would come to church late, but she would not get out.

She would not leave the house, until 10 minutes to 12:00, so she could get there, and sing in the choir before he preached.

Hartford:

What church was that?

Milligan:

Hall Street Baptist Church.

Hartford:

Oh, Holt Street, yes.

Milligan:

Hall, H-A-L-L.

Hartford:

Oh, oh, okay. Okay. I was confusing it with the —

Milligan:

Holt.

Hartford:

Holt Street was where Dr. King gave one of his famous, this speech, the Montgomery bus boycott.

Milligan:

Where the first meeting was that night.

Hartford:

Yeah.

Milligan:

And they voted, when they decided to boycott.

Hartford:

Right, exactly.

Milligan:

So what was your question on?

Hartford:

Just your general thoughts on, I mean, anything you want to conclude with, or —

Milligan:

On lessons. One lesson is about being thankful, because as I've aged, I know the role that my grandmothers and other praying women have played in my life.

I'm thankful for them, for their presence in my life. So being thankful is a big part of how I think we succeed, how we navigate this whole experience of life on this planet, in the 21st century.

Another lesson for me is that about the importance of having fun. I think that we're supposed to have fun. And so I like laughing, I like having fun.

I'm not a narcissist. I don't believe in having fun at anybody's expense. I don't gossip. I don't talk about people, or joke about people, but I think that we're supposed to have fun. For me, the way I have it, usually is from helping other people, and my relationships to other people.

The whole question of being a cheerful giver, the Bible talks about that. I like to give, I want to be rich, not so that I can have stuff, but so that I can be able to give money, without balancing my checkbook. That's what being rich means to me. And because I like to give, and meet people's unmet needs, then I need to be rich to do that.

I learned a Jewish friend of mine in 1975, when I was working at University of Houston, introduced me to an author, David, when the concept of tzedakah —

Hartford:

Yes.

Milligan:

Became real to me. I love, in tzedakah, there's the levels of giving, where you give, although the last, the highest level, is anonymously, so that the recipient doesn't know. And you don't know who you gave to, and the recipient doesn't know where it came from.

I like anonymous giving. I like that there's a Jewish concept of giving, chai, the —

Hartford:

Life.

Milligan:

Letter in the word life, add up to the number 18, so Jewish people give 18. That's what I give to y'all, to the vets, $18 a month.

Hartford:

Are you the one? There are two or three people who month who automatically monthly donate to the archive, and two or three, a number of people do that. Two or three have $18.

Milligan:

I'm one of the 18.

Hartford:

You're one? I wondered who, if that was one, you.

Milligan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm one of the 18, and I want to be rich enough to give multiple chai. So, like 10, and hundreds of chais. I just like to give.

It's amazing to be able to, I feel good, I feel happy, when I can surprise somebody with somebody that needs something. So giving is important. Laughter and fun are important. Thanksgiving and being thankful is important.

Rest and sleep, life lesson? Important, important, important. The body is so miraculously made, so that I'm learning about the gut and the lymphatic system, and all that.

But all these systems in our bodies, well, the brain has its own lymphatic system, its own, I forgot what it's called, but the brain detoxifies itself in sleep there, there's a word for it. And having been so active —

Hartford:

It files, it indexes.

Milligan:

Huh?

Hartford:

The brain files and indexes information during sleep.

Milligan:

Yeah, yeah. Some of it, though, it just wipes out. It files in there, but it literally wipes out stuff. It's just amazing to me. There's been about a year that I've been conscious of the whole thing about sleeping.

It amazes me when I wake up in the morning, and my brain is fresh, and what I can accomplish, unbelievable what a clear brain will do. So I'm learning to listen to my body, and listen to my brain, when I need to just stop and rest, or when I need to sleep, versus when I need to nap, all of those.

Rest is important, sleep is important, napping is important. It's just amazing how, at least, and from my experience, that's one of my life lessons, that you really do need to rest, Claire.

Because all that stuff that you were planning to do, it is going to work out anyway. And if it doesn't, it wasn't supposed to, but it's so important, to sleep, and to rest. Unbelievable, unbelievable. Yeah.

Hartford:

See, if only we knew these philosophical things when we were younger, and could have used them more.

Milligan:

Yup. Well, what we can do, at least for me now, my intent on using is with my grandchildren. I tell my son, I say it to my son too, but he's got problems, challenges with testosterone. You know how y'all selectively listen, and don't listen.

I wish that he would listen, but my grandchildren are on point. I mean, they grab it. It's like, "gogo" is the Zulu word for grandmother, so I'm Gogo, and we'll get in a zone, where they will say stuff, and do stuff, that just completes my sentence.

My granddaughter's five, and she announced one day, that she was going to have three husbands. One, let's say his name was Clarence, is smart. One makes her have fun, and one is kind. Now, in my five-year-old, or she's going to need three husbands to get all that in one man.

Since when she said it, we were on the bed lounging around, and I jumped up, and I was about to, "And which one has the money, baby?" But I didn't say that to her, she likes the kind, the friend that's kind, is the one that she likes the most.

She told me that they broke up. They decided they weren't going to be boyfriend and girlfriend right now. They were going to break up, and then they would get married, and then they would go on a date.

So she's got her priorities in line, but I want my children to know it, because the stuff that I say to them is instinctive. She's real high strung, and so she has a tendency to scream, when something doesn't go right.

I've been telling her about not screaming, that you should breathe baby, before, because all this stuff, have you noticed, when you get upset about things, in a few minutes, they always wind up working out. So why are you sitting in your body through all these changes, screaming and all this?

Producing all these hormones is going to make you sick, when you get all that go-go. Don't that to your body now. Just stop and breathe, Ruby. So when you get upset, instead of still screaming, what do I want you to do? "You want me to breathe, Gogo?"

One day, a couple of days had transpired between my saying that to her, and then she was screaming about something. So I said, "Ruby, what are you supposed to do?"

She said, "I'm supposed to ask for help. I know, before you ask for help, you're supposed to breathe." Watching her response to breathing deeply is amazing, because she gets it. It's just a question of reminding her of stuff, that there's an alternative to being upset, and watch how you handle your body, and take care of your body, and let's breathe deeply.

So I see it. Being a grandparent is a joy, because I get to pass what I hope are my painful lessons to them. But the thing is, they're going to have to go through their own stuff, anyway.

Hartford:

Yeah.

Milligan:

So I can only say it.

Hartford:

And then, [inaudible 01:16:10].

Milligan:

And be here for them, when they get hurt.

Hartford:

Yeah.

Milligan:

Because they will. And not say, "I told you," so —

Hartford:

That's like sugar, you know? You can say, "I didn't do it." And you can say, "I ain't going to tell you, I told you so," but that's a hard one to resist.

So listen, look here. Is there any concluding thoughts that we haven't covered?

Milligan:

I'm sure there are. We'll think about it.

Hartford:

All right.

 

Copyright © Claire Milligan. 2023


Copyright ©
Copyright to this web page, as a web page, belongs to this web site. Copyright to the information and stories above belong to the authors or speakers. Webspinner: webmaster@crmvet.org
(Labor donated)