Martin Luther King Day & My Family

This past April my father Howard Jeter passed away. This is the first year without him, and I’ve been thinking about his accomplishments a lot particularly with the MLK Day holiday.

My Personal Heritage

I am, like Derek Jeter, of mixed heritage. My dad was mainly African-American and Anglo with a considerable amount of Native American. We are direct descendants of Pocahontas and the Mataponai tribe in Virginia. The first Jeter in our family came over from England in the 1600s as an indentured servant. We’ve been around here for nearly 400 years. My mom is German-American on both sides and blonde. Her side of the family came over around the same time.

Family reunions are amazing. You can see virtually every color of the rainbow of people within them. The resemblance between distant family members was uncanny. You would see certain facial features even though you were separated by thousands of miles and in our case, multiple different ethnic backgrounds. One of my cousins married an Irishman, but her daughter looks a lot like my daughter born four years later.

I was approached at the 2000 family reunion held in DC by a man who told me, “…you look like my son.” I, being in the family spirit, replied that I’d been hearing that a lot that night. I pointed out two other cousins who I resembled.

We introduced ourselves, found we had the same name, and had a great conversation. Later one my cousins came up to me and asked me if I knew that man was Derek Jeter’s dad. 

But it didn’t matter. Dr. Charles Jeter had told me earlier when I asked why his son wasn’t there that he had to work and just couldn’t make it. I think he knew then that I had absolutely no idea who he was. Of course I was from the West Coast and baseball really doesn’t drive the hero worship that it does back east.

Now I’ve heard recently that Derek Jeter lives in Vista, north of San Diego. If true we should get together and play some XBox when he’s not gallivanting around with the Hollywood crowd.

The Jeter Family in Civil Rights

Our contributions to civil rights are surprising and I didn’t find out about most of my dad’s accomplishments until after he passed away. He was the first black substitute teacher in several Bay Area districts, like El Cerrito. He was also the first African-American permanent teacher hired into the San Francisco school district and taught at Balboa High School during the 1960s and 1970s.

There’s more about my dad Howard Jeter in his memorial blog if you’re interested, I’m just hitting the highlights here.

I remember reading several civil rights books and being able to meet Dick Gregory, the author of one, during a speech he was giving in the 1980s at UC Berkeley. He greeted my dad like an old friend, and this was something that I had noticed around Berkeley. People knew my father everywhere he went, but at the age of twelve I didn’t know that it was on a national level.

My dad ran against Ron Dellums in an early Democratic primary that Ron won in the late 1960s (or Wikipedia says 1970). Ron Dellums went on to serve over thirty years in office and now has a federal building named after him in Oakland. I met him in the 1980s, and he also greeted my dad by name.

Another member of our family, Mildred Jeter, was part of the groundbreaking civil rights decision that overruled the Virginia ban on interracial marriage in Loving v. State of Virginia. This occurred 40 years ago to the day that my father passed away.

My political stance is neutral. Having not experienced the same level of discrimination as my father I’m fortunate for the work that they laid for me yet I also retain a certain amount of belief that the pendulum can swing too far in areas like quotas and preferential treatment.

MLK Day 2008: Going Forward From Here

Prejudice of one kind or another continues in the heart of man. This isn’t something limited to regions, or political parties, or class structure. It’s just how we’re wired. We’re tribal by nature and tend to group into clans. My mom experienced the same sort of prejudice against her when she taught on the Navajo reservation.

Prejudice of any kind is overcome by long term exposure to a different culture and the earning of respect by professionalism in work and loyalty in personal friendships. It’s overcome by involving oneself in the community they live in.

As my aunt once said, we’ve been vocal for generations and one more struggle is a walk in the park. She’s had numerous lifetime achievements for over fifty years of community service given to her where she lives in New Jersey.

I am satisfied however that right now my children will grow up with the knowledge that our very legitimacy is due to the struggles of the 20th century. Our family was not a bystander in this struggle, rather we were directly involved.

That’s my family’s legacy. I’m proud to have known their personal involvement and been able to chronicle some of it. In honor of my dad and of Martin Luther King, I’m posting it today.