I'LL RISE

Frances Catlett- 101 years old

Pioneering social worker and Painter and Poet

At 101 Frances Catlett is in a bowling league. She plays Scrabble and does crossword

 puzzles. Her 100th birthday was celebrated with a retrospective of her work at San Francisco’s African American Art & Culture Complex. Attending the University of 

Chicago and being a young woman in jazz age Illinois inspired her to become a 

renaissance woman. “Negritude is beautiful!” she quotes a popular slogan of the era. 

Her college roommate was famed dancer Katherine Dunham. She crossed paths with luminaries of the black community such as W.E.B. Dubois, writer Richard Wright, 

and her future sister-in-law famed sculptor Elizabeth Catlett. Widowed with 2 young 

sons she moved to northern CA to study and became the first African-American to 

earn a Master’s from Mills College.  She earned her Masters in Social Work and 

became the first African-American social worker to be hired by the San Francisco 

Public Welfare Department. Painting “fell into my lap” she says. She has sold over 

60 works of art and been widely exhibited. A published poet as well Ms. Catlett 

says she has never accepted that she could not do whatever she wanted to do.


(More about Frances Catlett in the book AGING ARTFULLY and the accompanying film Still Kicking
                          Ruby Muhammad Pittman - 113 years old                                          
Mother of the Nation of Islam

Ruby Muhammad Pittman grew up in Americus, Ga., an orphan with no ties to any family. Her mother passed away when she was young; she didn’t know her father until she was a mother herself. When she joined The Muslim community in 1946 they became the family she never had. She had spent her childhood working the fields and never went to school, but the Nation of Islam encouraged her to pursue her education and at the age of 50 she began attending classes at night. She wrote poems and even published a book of poetry that sold more than 200 copies.

Minister Louis Farrakhan named her the Mother of the Nation of Islam in 1986. Islam it not a religion for her but a way of life. “It is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. It taught me that you can be anything you want to be and do anything you want to do. I grew up not knowing any member of my family, now here I am, the Mother of the Nation of Islam.”  Ruby is very proud to be a mother and grandmother and even has 2 great-great-great granddaughters. She now lives in California with her daughter and grandchildren: “The family I created.” She still exercises every day and takes care of herself. At 109 she said she planned “to be the oldest black women walking the planet without a wheelchair!”

Ovida Williams - 101

Entrepreneur and

Matron of the Pearly Gate Court #98 of the Heroines of Jericho

Ovida Williams' father worked the railroad as a Pullman Porter. She says that’s how he got educated. Her mother owned her own florist shop in the Fifth Ward, the African-American section of Houston, Texas. Her parents made sure she graduated from high school and college.  Mrs. Williams divorced her first husband and raised her son alone working as a laboratory assistant at a hospital. A well-dressedprofessional young woman she recalls trying to buy a dress at a department store. Blacks were not allowed to use the dressing rooms so the saleslady held the dress up to Ovida “being careful not to let it touch my skin”, she remembers. She had to buy the dress without knowing whether it fit or not and was informed that she would not be able to bring it back once she had tried it on.

After she retired Mrs. Williams opened “the best hamburger stand around” in her front yard. 

Eugene Florence - 105 

Baptist Preacher

106 year-old Eugene Florence, a Baptist preacher who has outlived five wives, was a young sharecropper who dreamed of becoming a minister. He could not attend the same classes as the white students but attended night classes in a basement in the then-Negro extension program. While the program for whites took less than 2 years limited classes were offered for black students. After eight years of study he received a diploma in theology while white students were awarded a Masters of Divinity.  Mr. Florence went on to preach for most of his life. In 2004, 12 years after he retired, the Southwestern Baptist Seminary offered him the Masters Degree he had earned in 1951.  He tearfully graduated in cap and gown with the class of 2004.

Elijah “Lucky” Miller, 103 

Bat Boy for  Homestead Grays

Named Elijah Daniel Miller after his father but says the best hitter in Negro Baseball League, Josh Gibson, told him he brought him luck when Elijah lugged his bats. As a teenager he set up baseball games for all the kids in town. Black and whites didn’t usually play together he says, “but one day a couple of white boys asked if they could play with us.” Lucky made sure everyone got to the games by driving them in “Betsy” his model T. Lucky put together his own team, the Homestead Red Legs, and worked from the midnight to 8 a.m. shift so he could play evenings and weekends. “I think you’d rather play ball than eat!” his wife Mary Jane told him.

He gave up playing in his 30’s when a line drive hit him in the face “and just about killed me!” but he went to every game he could. When he met the Grays main bat boy he volunteered to work with him and got to sit on the bench with Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and some of the greatest players in the history of the game.

He is 103 and still attends games when he can. “And” he says, “I’m still a pretty good rememberer!”

Otis "Dad" Clark - 106 yrs old

Traveling Evangelist

Otis Clark was born in 1903 in the Native American Territory that 4 years later became Oklahoma. He grew up in Greenwood near Tulsa with his mother, grandmother and a grandfather who was part Indian.  Tulsa was a wealthy city, an oil city, and Greenwood’s black community prospered. They had a busy main street with a theater and a candy shop. When a black man was wrongly accused of sexually harassing a white woman the locals, many of whom were black WWI veterans, came out to protect him. The resulting 1921 Tulsa Race Riot was arguably the worse race riot in our country’s history. The African-American community was burned to the ground. Otis lost his home, family and friends. “I never saw my stepfather again. They even killed our bulldog Bob,” Otis remembers.

 Otis fled Oklahoma with just the clothes on his back, hopped a train and rode it all the way to California. In Los Angeles he befriended Steppin Fetchit, the first black actor to become a millionaire, met Clark Gable, Charley Chaplin and worked as a butler for Joan Crawford. While selling liquor – “corn whiskey” that he learned to make as a youngster in Oklahoma - during the Prohibition Era he was thrown in jail where the Salvation Army converted him to Christianity.

 

Today Otis is the world’s oldest traveling evangelist. He took his first mission trip to Africa at the age of 103 and the second at 104. Until recently "Dad Clark" still hadall of his teeth except for one, which he says was pulled out by a dentist that didn’t know what he was doing!