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SPELMA N THE VOICE OF BLACK WOMANHOOD SPOTLIGHT Vol.3lNo.5 Atlanta, Georgia January 1978 Mrs. Isabelle Stewart A Catalyst Involved With Spelman by Roxie F. Hughes In between carting off her sons to cub scout meetings and piano lessons, and attending various board meetings, Ms. Isabelle Stewart is working on a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and is always trying to find solutions to problems in education. She has a long standing reputation of active in volvement in various organizations, especially those related to education. Case in point: Just before she and her family left Philadelphia for Atlanta last year, she vowed never again to “make the mis take” of getting too involved in her children’s new school in Atlanta. It seems that Mrs. Stewart was very involved in her children’s school in Philadelphia, working volun tarily on cpmmittees. But once reaching Atlanta, she could not ignore the pen dulum which she said is “sw inging to parental in volvement” and is now an ac tive board member of Trinity School, her children’s new school, located in northwest Atlanta. Even now Mrs. Stewart is moving toward greater in volvement in education as Spelman’s First Lady. Ever since she and her family arrived at the Spelman com munity a year and a half ago, she has been learning the role of the college president’s wife. “And I have been figuring out what my interpretation was going to be,” she said. “Traditionally, the wife of a college president doesn’t work, but Dr. Manley’s wife set the tone that is compatible with Spelman’s image,” she said, “Spelman women are expected to be achievers and to have a career.” Finding this way of thinking to be compatible with hers she said, “This means I don’t have to reconstruct anything.” Moving toward her own career goals, Mrs. Stewart is earning a doctoral degree in educational reading and for a period, was commuting from Atlanta to the University of Pennsylvania. She said that she is now able to handle the work “at this end”. She is currently in the process of deciding a thesis topic, because her interests have shifted since living in a college community, she said “I came to Atlanta expecting to do a thesis about illiterate adults and children learning to read together,” she said. “But I Continued on page 6 Mrs. Isabelle Stewart Singer Extraordinaire: Ms, Robin BrOWTl If you want to know Where I’m going Where I’m going, soon If anybody asks you Where I’m going Where I’m going, soon Tell them for me that I’m going up yonder . . . by Robyn D. Mahone It could have begun for Ms. Robift Brown when she was three years old. Her mother used to take her to a toy store where there was a little toy piano. She wouldn’t go to any of the other toys in the store. She’d head straight for that toy piano. “My mother stopped taking me there because she didn’t want me to tear\it up,” Ms. Brown said, grinning. When Mrs. Brown was five her uncle bought the little piano for her. She’d sit in her little comer and play to her heart’s content. At age seven she had a real piano. She began taking lessons when she was in the first grade. She had always played the piano at school functions, but one day, in junior high school, she was asked to sing a solo. “I’ve always sung in church. I did my first real solo when I was about five years old. That’s been my only love, I’ve always loved music,” Ms. Brown said. Ms. Brown, a Spelman College junior and music ma jor from Vienna, Georgia, is a very busy young woman. She smiled infectiously, revealing rows of white teeth, as she talked about the five church choirs she plays for and directs. One of them is the Martin Luther King Voices of Freedom. “Alveda King Beal called me at home during the Christmas holidays a year ago and asked me to get a choir together. I said that I’d see what I could do.” She had about a week to get it all together before the performance. “I called people. I pulled people off the streets and said, ‘you’re going to sing in my choir’,” she said laugh ing and making a pulling motion to show how she’d con vinced people to join her. Ms. Brown said that a lot of her notoriety began, here at Spelman, after a friend, Rodney Cash, heard her singing in the Howard Harreld lounge on the Spelman cam pus in 1975. One Sunday, when she was in church Cash asked her to sing, impromptu. The people must have liked what they heard because afterwards she began to receive a lot of re quests to sing at various churches from persons who came up to her after the service. The first church she began playing for was Jackson Memorial. “A friend asked me to ‘help’ with the choir.” Ms. Brown said that when she got there she was greeted with, “Oh, you’re the new musician!” “By March I had four choirs. In October I started playing at Ben Hill United Methodist,” she said, “at the request of Reverend Cornelius Henderson.” One day when Ms. Brown was sitting among the congregation at a particular church, “I said to myself, this is the one time I could sit down, relax, and enjoy the program. The choir walked up to the mike, then, someone an- by Robyn Mahone Every year many books are stolen from Quarles Library in Giles Hall on the Spelman College campus. Every year there are complaints catapulted by students and faculty because requested books that should be contained in any library are not there. The most recent complaint to be launched by students concerns what they feel are too few books by and about African-American women in nounced that the musician had taken ill, ‘but I see Ms. Robin Brown, I’ll ask her to come on up and play’.” Ms. Brown said that she’d heard the choir sing once, four or five months ago. As she walked towards the front of the church, she thought, “What Continued on page 7 the Margaret Nabrit Curry Collection'which is the special womens collection in Quarles library. Three students did a research project for a class with the objective of pointing out to the class, school and community “the number of books in the women’s collec tion at Spelman College by and about black wpmen or women of color,” as stated in their 80 page renort Continued on page 3 Students Charge: Too Few Books On Black Women