Woman's struggles, accomplishments contribute to history
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BY ERIN ANDERSEN / Lincoln Journal Star
No thanks, was Lela Knox Shanks’ first reaction when invited to be part of Stories of Home. “I just felt I really would be a token, and I didn’t want to do it,” explains Lela. But then, as she always does, Lela consulted her four children.
It was daughter Shela Richards’ words — “a lecture really,” says Lela — that struck a chord: “Momma, you haven’t accomplished anything if you don’t participate.”
These words to a woman who once was relegated to the back of the bus, forbidden to sit at the drugstore fountain and prohibited from going to the carnival because she was “colored.”
These words to a woman who fought for civil rights, was arrested, jailed and threatened with death.
These words to a woman who for 14 years cared for her husband at home as Alzheimer’s disease destroyed his memories, his mind, his voice and ultimately his life.
These words to a woman whose activism, writing and speeches on civil rights, peace, racism and Alzheimer’s have earned her national respect.
But, Lela says, Shela was right. If she didn’t share her story — her family’s story — all she has worked for, all she has accomplished would be lost. Forgotten. Never recorded so others could learn from the past and use it to move forward.
“I saw this as an opportunity to say something that I don’t think as a country we are yet facing up to — I don’t think that as a whole we have ever faced up to how racism and sexism were written into the Constitution,” she says.
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Lela grew up near Oklahoma City as the third of three children.
“Everything was segregated,” she says. “As a kid you never really understood that.”
She remembers the history teacher lecturing on America “the land of democracy, freedom and liberty for all.”
“I always said to myself, what is he talking about? (But) I never asked,” she says. “I tried to follow the status quo of what was said to be right and what was said to be wrong.”
She met Hughes at college in St. Louis. They married Thanksgiving Day, 1947.
Lela dreamt of being the first black reporter at the Daily Oklahoman. Hughes wanted to practice law. She wrote her mother of their plans.
Her mother wrote back special delivery: “Lela, there is nothing here for you, go some place else and start anew.”
It was shocking but it was very clear, Lela recalls. Racism, segregation and prejudice left them with limited opportunities.
They stayed in St. Louis. But Hughes’ search for better jobs always met the same response from employers: “We don’t give employment applications to Negroes.”
They moved to Denver, where Hughes worked for the Social Security administration. They stayed 10 years, until Hughes’ boss told him he would never receive a promotion.
“Because you would have to knock on white women’s doors, and when they see you they will scream and call the police and there will be a big incident.”
“My husband came home and said we’re leaving Denver,” Lela recalls.
They moved to an integrated neighborhood in Kansas City. Segregation forced their children to attend a black-only school, where there were 45 students to one teacher. The new white school had a ratio of 20 students to one teacher, Lela says.
She heard her mother’s words: “If you are not going to be for you, who is going to be for you?”
The Shankses pulled their children out of school. Lela taught them, as well as six other black children, in her home.
The Shankses picketed the school board and the federal government demanding desegregation as decreed by Brown vs. the Board of Education. The couple were arrested. Their home phone was tapped. They received death threats.
“So many things happened to us I can hardly believe they happened myself,” she says.
Today, segregation is gone, as are the “colored” and “whites only” signs.
But racism is very much alive and well, says Lela.
“It’s very much a part of the American way of life. That kind of attitude is what drives our foreign policy — that we are better than everyone else. That superiority that started with the Constitution still prevails today,” she says.
These days her focus is on the war in Iraq. She speaks for peace.
She speaks about black history. She speaks about rights for all humans.
The demarcations between race, ethnicity, gender and lifestyle are all ridiculous, she says.
“We are just people!”
She keeps tablets throughout her home jotting down thoughts, notes and arguments to things she hears, sees and reads. She writes hundreds of letters — doing it not for herself but for the human race.
And she also travels the country talking about Alzheimer’s disease and her book “Your Name is Hughes Hannibal Shanks” — written for her husband, who was diagnosed with the disease in 1984.
Keeping her vow to Hughes that she would care for him at home until his dying day, she wrote early in the morning and late at night.
Eventually, she conceded she needed more time and enrolled Hughes in the Alzheimer’s daycare program at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital.
A sharp sob escapes as Lela recalls the first time she took him to daycare.
“He looked at me and said, ‘I wouldn’t do this to you.’”
She draws in a deep breath. “I said to him, ‘Honey, this is the best thing for you and for me. I want to be able to take care for you throughout your illness if I can, and I know I can’t unless I have help.’”
It was not easy.
“I had to be strong. Nobody works round the clock for 24 hours without relief,” she says.
Through it all Lela and her family never lost sight of Hughes’ humanity. They learned to enjoy what remained of the man they loved. They learned how to appreciate, live and let go.
Hughes died at home, in Lela’s arms, on April 10, 1998.
“It was all a very rewarding experience,” she says. “I wouldn’t have chosen it, but I guess I needed it.”
“Now that I am older I can see the value in adversity,” she says. “Because it can just make you stronger and stronger and tougher and tougher on the inside.”
Reach Erin Andersen at 473-7217 or eandersen@journalstar.com.
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