In Her Words: Dear Mother Whittemore, What Have ‘Ye’ To Say?

Written by Lauren Poteat

Dear Mother Whittemore, What Have ‘Ye’ To Say?

I’d like to dedicate this letter to the Whittemore House and to all of the fearless women who have come before it.

What a momentous feeling to know that every year, Women’s History Month, will be celebrated, right after Black History Month.

A member of the Greater Washington Urban League-Thursday Network and the Women’s National Democratic Club, I get chills whenever I think about how far we have come in today’s society and the responsibility that I have to continue to hold on to, uplift and then pass along that same mighty torch.

Washington, DC, is such a historic city, but when self-freed slave, abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass came to speak at the now historic Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in 1894, entitled “The Lessons of the Hour” and discussions of other “so-called” negro problems, did the now landmarked “Whittemore House” built between ‘1892–1894,’ which now serves as the official headquarters for the Women’s National Democratic Club since 1927, ever expect to see great things built in the heart of the city, or run face first and shake hands with a brown girl like me? Black hair, dark eyes and skin the pigment of a ripened cacao seed?

Within the walls of the Whittemore House, more formerly dubbed as the “Whittemore Mansion” there on the walls rest portraits of some of this country’s finest First Lady Leaders, including former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Onassis Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton, but when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., first uttered one of his most powerful speeches “I Have A Dream” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, not too far off from the White House, could the Whittemore House and its occupants have ever guessed, that one day, there would be three life size paintings of Forever First Lady Michelle Obama, hanging on their walls, at the top of their staircase?

The world has opened up, quietly, controlled and in secret, but if one looks close enough, you can see the works of Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, in the way that small Black-owned businesses within the District, continue to thrive, or in the way that Mayor Muriel Bowser, ordained the bright yellow words “Black Lives Matter,” across Freedom Plaza, or in Madame First Vice President Kamala Harris, bearing the torch of hope and progress throughout the nation’s capital and country.

Whittemore House did you know, had you any idea? From when former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, would hold regular forums, calling for personal social reform, could you ever have guessed it, that a little brown girl named Lauren from the south, who would move to Washington, DC, in search of one of those hidden pearls, would one day stand at your stairs, by my choice, as a volunteer Docent, for the Women’s National Democratic Club, in hopes of discovering and sharing these same exciting stories and visions of hope, for some other young girls too?

This Women’s History Month I celebrate myself, for believing my ancestors when they showed me that “I Could,” and for all of the many other women, brown, beige and tan girls alike, who also dared to listen and also believed that they too could.