Emmett W. Bassett descends from William H. Bassett of Henry County, Virginia as follows:
William H. Bassett (b. 1846) and wife Lucy Jane Staples
John Henry Bassett (b. 1876) and wife Mary T.
Emmett W. Bassett (b. 1912)
Lydia Bassett Tyner, daughter of Emmett W. Bassett, came across my Bassett newsletter from November of 2013 and decided to share the following for publication.
Emmett W. Bassett (Picture provided by daughter Lydia Tyner)
The following is a speech given by Lydia Bassett Tyner about her father who was being honored for his work on the Human Rights Commission in Sullivan County, New York on May 19, 2013 just a few months before he passed away.
Good morning. I am Emmett Bassett’s daughter Lydia. I’m thrilled to be here today to honor my father’s work in human rights.
Dad, you were appointed to the Manhattan Human Rights Commission in the 1980s. After you moved here with Mom in the 90’s, you were a founding organizer of the Human Rights Commission of Sullivan County. I asked you recently why human rights have been a constant commitment for you. Your answer was very direct. You said, poor people and working people don’t have a chance without organizing to protect their rights. You want to try to give people a fighting chance. I think you spent your life doing that. — For yourself, for your family and for all the families of this world. Even with Barack Obama as our president, we have to keep the pressure on for peace and justice. As Frederick Douglass said, power concedes nothing without demand.
Growing up in New York City in the 1960’s with you and Mom, my brother and sister and I had the most wonderful childhoods. We had parents who were a loving team and you were the father children dream of. You played with us, you told us stories, you showed us how the world worked and there was nothing — except maybe Mommy– that you treasured more than us. In fact, it was very hard for us to get our heads around the idea of racial inferiority because you were the smartest, strongest, most confident and handsome man we knew of! You could explain any phenomenon, fix whatever broke, and you understood each of us so well.
You were born in 1921 in Martinsville, Virginia. You went to a one-room segregated school house where sometimes there was no teacher for months at a time and school closed down for weeks in the fall for harvest. As a small child, you impressed everyone with your abilities as a gardener. You observed everything your mother and father did. You woke up at the break of dawn to milk the cows and you and your younger brother had to protect yourselves from the older boys in school who did not like it that you were smarter at your studies. Today, you probably would have been called “gifted” in mathematics. Then, early on, the teacher gave you advanced math books and told you to go ahead because you had reached a level that the teacher did not understand. Your childhood was filled with hard work on a farm in the beautiful foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Your childhood was filled with a love of learning, ten brothers and sisters and an extended family that included three races and the complex legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Once a neighbor watched you weed the vegetable garden in record time. He told you that in slavery days you would have been worth $1,000. He meant that as a compliment. You told him that nobody would sell you for $1,000 because they would have to kill you first. Your older brother survived polio and you remember meeting him at the train station when he returned from a doctor’s visit in Roanoke. You hoped that he would be well again, but you saw he still limped. You were so disappointed, but your father said, “We got our boy back.”
Tragically, you lost your father to a stroke when you were just 14. That must have seemed like the end of your childhood. You took on the responsibility of running the farm with your mother. I wish that hadn’t happened to you. We know how much it has meant to us to have you in our adult lives. You went to college at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama when you were just 15 years old and you were selected to work with the great George Washington Carver, noted botanist and inventor.
After being drafted and serving as a sergeant in Germany in WW2, you attended graduate school at the University of Massachusetts where you met our mother, Priscilla, at a protest outside a roadhouse that refused to serve blacks. Mom was a junior at Smith College. Love at first sight. You married two years later in 1952. I’m sure people said it wouldn’t last. I guess you both outlasted all that. You knew what was right and you had confidence in your love for each other.
We can imagine you both as newlyweds, excited about your new lives together just having moved all your belongings into your first apartment. You leave out for a while and upon returning find yourselves locked out. The landlord had met only Mom and when he saw you moving in together, he changed the locks as soon as he could. You battled that landlord for two years to retrieve your things, but only got back a few blankets. You were able to settle in at your next apartment near the Bowery, NYC’s Skid Row in lower Manhattan where people were less particular about interracial neighbors.
Your next stop was Columbus, Ohio where you were working on your doctorate at Ohio State. Mary and Jonathan were born. Mom worked at General Motors on the factory line and was the UAW shop steward. You became the first African American in the country to earn a doctorate in Dairy Technology.
You and Mom were both active in the Progressive Party. At a NAACP meeting you started a fund drive for the mother of Emmett Till. Till was the 14 year old, African American boy who was beaten to death for whistling at a white woman in 1955. His mother bravely allowed an open casket at his funeral because she wanted the world to see what they had done to her boy. Your son was just a baby then. If a young boy like Emmett Till could be murdered with impunity, it could happen to your own son. You knew you had to do something. Your fundraising efforts were successful and there is a picture of you in your early 30’s featured in W.E.B. Dubois’ Crisis Magazine.
How brave you and my mother were. During this time, union leaders were charged with being secret communists. You went to the Columbus court house where union leaders were on trial. A group of professors’ wives asked you why you were there. “”To make sure they are getting a fair trial!”” you replied. The atmosphere was tense in Columbus, Ohio in the early 50’s. At night you and Mom would sometimes receive frightening calls to, “Come to the morgue to identify the body.” The city was segregated. You couldn’t even take Mary and Jonathan to the town pool. But you and mom discovered a beautiful state park, Lake Hope, sixty miles away. That was better than a concrete swimming pool.
After getting your doctorate at Ohio State, you sent your resume and transcripts to three businesses in Chicago. The response was enthusiastic. In days, you had three plane tickets and reservations at the best hotels. I can imagine you, tall and accomplished in your dress clothes, traveling to Chicago. But they didn’t expect to meet a black man and the reception was very different when they met you. One man who was supposed to interview you at the Beatrice Foods Company told you there wasn’t a single black person in all of their huge operation and that if he hired you, which he wanted to do, that he would be fired.
Eventually, you got a job as an assistant professor in Microbiology at Columbia University. That’s around the time I was born. We spent one year in Sweden when you worked in the lab of Arne Tiselius, who was a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. That was a great family adventure–sailing to Norway, living in Sweden and traveling all around Europe in the Taunus bus, camping. Later you taught at the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry for 18 years.
You were one of the earliest organizers of the March on Washington in 1963 with Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph. You served on community boards working for better housing and schools in New York City for ten years. Both you and mom were founding members of the Presbyterian Hospital Community Health Council.
Every single day for three years, you picketed against the cruelty of apartheid outside the South African Consulate in New York City. For months after that you marched daily to save Sydenham hospital and preserve quality healthcare in Harlem, New York.
Around that time in the early 80’s a young man from Grahamsville needed some help moving and storing a mattress from his apartment in the city near where he attended Columbia College. You offered to let him store it at the house. Phil and his roommate couldn’t manage the bulky mattress so you, then 60, hoisted it on your back and carried it alone while Phil made sure the coast was clear and the other young man, Barry Obama, made sure no one came from behind. Yes, that was Barack Obama, our president. Of all the ways your path could have crossed with a president, it does not surprise me that it was in the act of helping another to accomplish something that seemed impossible.
The gift of your life has been in contributing to the possibility of a better world. You never gave up working hard to create the best conditions for progress. As Frederick Douglass said, you can’t have the crops without first plowing up the land. Like the farmer you were first trained to be, you cultivated a lot of fields and did all you could to give those plants a chance to grow. You never hesitated. You have always embraced work. We could not love you more. Like your mother and father, we are so proud of you. You planted some seeds, and they grew. They grew very well.