Mama Alma, now I know why you didn’t call me back when I reached out to you recently. I was worried. Now that I’ve talked to your daughter, Muriel, I’m devastated.
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Alma Speed Fox passed away this week at the age of 98. I met her about 25 years ago, though I don’t remember exactly where. It was for something concerning civil rights. Of course it was.
Someone sitting next to me said that the petite, fiery lady at the lectern was a legend — a fearless woman who got things done in the city and was among those responsible for a 1968 demonstration against Sears and Roebuck, demanding Blacks get jobs and credit. I was instantly smitten by this Ohio transplant speaking truth to power.
It didn’t take long for me to start calling her Mama Alma. I lost my mother when I was 10 years old. Mama Alma filled that unfillable void.
She was so much to so many people, so of course I couldn’t keep her to myself. I smile when people refer to her as Pittsburgh’s “mother of the civil rights movement.” A couple of years ago, when I told her that people called her that, she joked that she didn’t have as much movement as she used to.
But even if her “creaking old bones,” as she called them, couldn’t keep up, her heart, her spirit and her words still powered a movement beyond bones and muscles, a movement of love and justice that’s more powerful, and lasts longer, than any body.
She always wanted to look as strong in body, though, as she was in soul. She didn’t want to use a walker in public, so she had been staying at home a lot. Oh, what a wonderful, independent woman she was.
When I talked to someone in New York about her death, he asked me to describe what she looked like. When I said that she wasn’t much over 5 feet tall, I realized that I never thought of her as short. Instead, to me, she was a great African queen towering above all injustices. She was, as the trite but true saying goes, larger than life.
She called me in 2018 and said she wanted me to be somewhere with her and not to say no. I told her that I couldn’t say no to her. Then Alma explained that she was inviting me to join her at a ceremony where Mayor Bill Peduto would present her with the key to the city, the first woman so honored.
There’s a picture of her between two mayors, one at the time and one to come. She’s holding onto them, one hand on Ed Gainey’s arm, the other in Bill Peduto’s hand. But I knew, and we all know, that they were really holding onto her.
I can never forget a phone conversation we had in 2021, right after the Jan. 6 insurrection. I was anxious to get her reaction. She was fiery to the end, Mama Alma.
“We have been telling white folks about those white folks all of our lives. Now they know it,” she said. She knew. She always knew.
Kamala Harris is a great first Black woman vice president, she told me. “She is intelligent, has a sense of humor and knows how to be tough.” It takes one to know one, so they say.
She also had some funny things to say about former President Barack Obama. “First he was the skinny boy with the big ears. Now he’s got more gray hair than I have.” She was one of the few people who could call the president a “skinny boy,” and it felt just right. She’d earned that right.
And when talking about God, she asked, “Don’t you wish God would tell you what He wants you to understand?”
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Yes, Mama Alma, I do. But He did give me you, and that went a long way.
I’m going to miss you, Mama Alma. I have so many memories of us, and they will never be taken away — just like your legacy can never be erased.
Hey, Mama Alma, I have an idea. I’m going to drive over to your building, the Alma Speed Fox Building, beside the Pittsburgh Branch NAACP office. At least I’ll see your name, even if I can’t see you.
But don’t worry, I won’t sit and stare for too long. I know there’s work to be done.
Tene Croom is a veteran journalist from Downtown. She is co-chair of the Black Press Task Force of the National Association of Black Journalists.
First Published: January 30, 2022, 5:00 a.m.
