Walking & Talking w/ Becky Livas

As told by Ms. Livas, in her senior year of high school, a “nice little colored girl” announced to her mother that she didn’t want to go to college but wanted to pursue a singing and acting career in New York. From the time she was born in Philadelphia, her mother’s hometown, she had been groomed to attend her parents’ alma mater St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, N. C; but by senior year, she was being considered by a couple of small predominately white colleges in Allentown, PA.

She attended Cedar Crest College in Allentown with about five hundred other girls, four of whom were “colored,” although the one from British Guyana wanted nothing to do with the other Black students. The experience was enlightening, and after two years, this good little colored girl returned south to a new “home by the sea,” Hampton Institute, where she found the nurturing she needed to succeed. Graduating with high honors, Becky was active in AKA, Alpha Kappa Mu Honor Society, chairman of Homecoming Dance.

In the years to follow, she started a family and was active in many civic pursuits. By 1969, Becky became the first president of the civic league; her involvement in the Iota Omega chapter of AKA and as a Civil rights activist led Vivian Mason to coax her to join a group of ladies to pursue civic interests: the Women for Political Action. Soon after joining the American Association of University Women, a cinematographer covering a Drug Seminar Becky produced suggested to Becky that she would make a great candidate for a news reporter.

In 1966, Becky Livas had attempted to be hired by radio stations—too black for “white” stations and too white for black stations. In 1972 when she noticed the breaks coming in national networks with women and people of color, notably Michell Clark on CBS, she decided to attempt again to get into broadcasting.  

In the Autumn of 1971, she applied at WTAR Radio-TV News and did an audition tape. In April of 1972, she called the station when a neighborhood child drowned to suggest they do a feature on swimming pool safety for private owners, and reporter Tom Roland answered with, “We were just talking about you … we want you to go to a unique program at Columbia University (which would become named after Michell Clark) this summer for black journalists.”

Becky arrived for the interview in a proper homemade dress but failed to make the program because they wanted angry people who believed there was police brutality in their cities, among other issues that pervaded the North. We had racism, but blacks and whites were still working it out in “genteel” ways. WTAR News Director Jim Mays declared that Columbia was exhorting advocacy journalism.

So, Jim Mays hired Becky and created a personalized 13-week training program.  Livas became a consumer medical reporter, producer, and after two and a half years host of a half-hour “magazine” show. Two and half years later, Livas became producer and co-host of an hour-long show called 3 in the Morning, co-hosted by Andy Roberts.

After eight years in broadcasting, Livas was embraced by a second marriage to a musician and moved to Las Vegas. In Five years, she would return home and become an overnight Jazz radio host, the singer she had always wanted to be! After 15 years of teaching 8th graders geography, history, and literature Becky Livas continues her civic affairs, love for singing, and cultural awareness!

Becky Livas ASALH Interview Questions

1.     Tell us about Becky Livas.

a.     Born in Philadelphia, my parents were John Richard Logan Perry and Ellen Allen Perry. They met at St. Augustine’s college in Raleigh, N.C.  John from Thomasville, GA. I’m an only child with many cousins whom I adore.

b.     Singing captivated me at age 3; my first performance on TV at age 7; too shy to sing publicly till my late forties after other careers.

c.     Journalism desired a career after a 7th-grade tour of the Virginian Pilot Newspaper. First searches for jobs … to “white” for the black radio stations and too black for white media.

2.     What motivates you to work?

a.     The need to feel useful, have a purpose, and the thought of whom I represent personally and ethnically. Money for performing surely helps.

3.     What are your greatest strengths?

a.     Tenacity when doing a project, especially if it’s public. However, my most significant distraction is a tendency to get lost in something I really like doing.

4.     How do you stay organized?

a.     I make my calendar on my computer to print portions out, hang other calendars on my bathroom door, and place giant post-its on my colossal bathroom mirror.

5.    Imagine the world in three years. What do you see?

a.     I’m living one day at a time right now. But I do “prep” for upcoming events.

b.     Public behavior has become so bad, that I’m praying that I will be alive in three years to be with my grandchildren and continue singing and whatever else I can do. 

6.    Tell me about significant challenges or conflicts surrounding your personhood as a descendant of enslaved Black people in the United States.

a.     I have issues that are more connected with being mixed race. There were many free Philadelphians in my background, even when slavery existed. They were not so much mixed race as the southern ancestors who were not living on a plantation but in Yak (Danville), VA, where mulatto women mixed with whites. Read more in Having Our Say by Sadie and Bessie Delany for insight. We share that Logan lineage. Their mother and my paternal great-great-grandmother were  Logans.

b.     The slaves I do know about were of Madagascan and (I don’t know what other) African heritage. My great-grandfather’s great-grandmother and her brother were kidnapped from a ship on their way to Europe to be educated. She was brought to Virginia, sold into slavery, and was a wedding present to a lady in N.C. She must have insisted on reminding them that she had been royalty in Madagascar because she was called Princess. She had about five children … (I’d have to go through pages to find more details). One of her daughters was able to marry a freedman after the younger siblings were sold for the money. That lady, Patsy (I think) Freeman, married a carpenter/wheelwright named Andrew Jackson, and their son (my paternal grandmother’s father) went to Oberlin and later became the first black Episcopal Minister in Kentucky.  When Alex Haley was about to write QUEENIE, he wrote to my father and is brother to see if there was any connection between his Queenie and our Princess.

7.     Who do you admire and why among the people you’ve worked with?

a.     Having taught eighth grade for 15 years, I can tell you that I’ve seen a few miracles. From time to time, I hear from parents and former students thanking me for being “mean but fair.” That’s how the kids described me. I kept in contact with their families and didn’t let them play the victim role, which many like to play … tried to make them take responsibility for their actions.

b.     I admire teachers! I admire good musicians who actually know how to read music and practice and rehearse.

8.    When did you begin singing? What part do you sing?

a.     I Started singing in elementary school as a soprano. 

b.     I guess now if I were an opera singer, I would be a contralto.

Follow–up from meeting:

9.     Would you share the story about the student who changed his tune in school after hearing your father’s story?

a.     The child was acting out to impress other students. I suggested he could not speak to me the way he was speaking. He told me he could talk to me the way he wanted because he had made a girl pregnant. I asked him to step outside the classroom with me and proceeded to share how my father handled young men like him in the 1950s, and how many of them cried openly when he died saying that the method worked to save them from failure … that they would not be where they were in manhood had he not challenged them. And the athletic coaches did the same back then.  (Come to think of it, those guys had a “village” in school among the faculty at Booker T. Washington).

b.     I looked the young man straight in his eye and told him if I were my father and it were the fifties, I’d pull him by the collar and say “Nigga, if you don’t get your shit together, you’ll amount to nothing.”

My student cried and told me he didn’t really want to be like his brother who was in jail and that he was scared. We returned to class and proceeded to continue learning Geography. He managed to stay in school and not meet the fate he feared.