MORGANTOWN — She didn’t really say much after the city council meeting broke that night.
In the time it took to walk to her car, however, Charlene Marshall had gotten herself good and annoyed.
How do ya like that? Wouldn’t even talk to me.
By then, she was in politics, without even realizing it.
She had come up as a shop steward at the old Sterling Faucet plant in Sabraton.
The go-to when you thought you were being wronged on the line, or there was something on your paycheck statement that didn’t quite look right, or you had that supervisor, who, well, wasn’t being fair.
Marshall was the voice of the rank-and-file, a position made all the more notable, as she was the first Black woman to be hired at the facility. First, ever.
Don’t think she didn’t notice that. But when she settled into the job, and when she became that shop-floor voice, then it wasn’t so much about pigment as it was people.
Doing what you were elected to do, as it were.
Which is why she was brought up short at that council meeting that night.
By then, she was getting into local issues.
She had concerns about her neighborhood, her kids. She and her husband, Rogers, were both working, with three young ones under the roof.
By then, she was getting to know who was on council.
Marshall started going to meetings, and at the end of this particular one, she went up to the person representing her district to talk about some things that weren’t on the agenda when – she was dismissed.
The councilor, she said, wouldn’t even stop to talk – Well, that’s rude – and this was important.
It was important to her, and her family, and her corner of the block.
It was important to her neighbors. Hey, she said. We’re all working. We’re all paying taxes.
“That’s when I decided maybe I should run,” she said.
Maybe it’s a matter of West Virginia being northernmost South.
After all, Marshall did have to turn her tassel at the segregated Monongalia High, before attending Bluefield State College, which was then all-Black.
Maybe it was a simple matter of demographics, with the Mountain State having more white faces than not, just because.
Either way, Marshall would go on to be elected to Morgantown City Council.
And when she was named mayor, well, as it turned out, she was the first Black woman to ever hold that post in a Mountain State municipality.
First ever. Again.
“At the time, I didn’t even realize that,” said Marshall, who was city mayor from 1991 to 1998.
“People started pointing that out to me,” the now 87-year-old said, “and I thought, ‘Well, you’d think there would have been others before me.’ ”
That’s how it goes in the coal camp
Growing up in Osage, the coal camp near Morgantown that housed all those people from all those different states and all those different countries – everybody came here to work in the mines – Marshall was raised in a house where her parents put their kids first, and helped watch out for everyone else besides.
That’s just how it was in Osage. Everybody was equal in Osage.
And everyone’s dad looked the same, covered in coal dust, when he came out of the maw of the mine at the end of his shift.
Except that one day, her dad, Charlie Jennings, didn’t get to walk out of the mine.
Marshall was 5 when he was killed in the accident, but she can still conjure dream-like images of the man she trailed after like a puppy.
“I wouldn’t leave him alone,” she said.
“When he was home, anywhere he went was where I went. And I’d be talking the whole time.”
She didn’t get that from her mom, Christina, whom everyone knew as “Missie.”
The matriarch doled out words and praise sparingly, but Marshall and her siblings knew how she felt about them. A mom’s unconditional love.
She didn’t say it. She showed it.
You work hard for your kids, because your kids are everything.
Especially after the accident.
A few years later, Missie would remarry, only to endure the same coal-camp tragedy, when Ollie Cranford was killed in a cave-in.
“Both my father and stepfather,” Marshall said, “lost to the mines.”
When Charlie died, widow’s benefits were only $30 a month and $5 a month for each child in the household.
Those benefits went up after the United Mine Workers of America started raising holy hell.
“That’s when I started paying attention to unions,” the once-and-future shop steward said.
Legislating with love
Marshall went on to serve several years in the House of Delegates, taking her concern of families, and family life, to the state level.
In her second term, she launched legislation to help aid families dealing with a wrenching, painful circumstance trying to care for a loved one suffering from Alzheimer’s, which robs people of their memories, then their very lives.
The idea was to provide financial aid and other respites. She wasn’t just talking about it.
She had lived it.
Years before, she had helped care for her father-in-law in his final stages of the disease.
It was stressful.
It was tireless.
It was thankless.
“I quit work and my husband, Rogers, and I cared for him until we just couldn’t do it any longer,” she told The Dominion Post then.
And it was also the same as that council meeting, she said.
That is, if her household was going through it, of course, others were too. And there were always others worse off, who might not have the resources to do what Charlene and Rogers were able to do.
That’s why you run for office, she said. Or, that’s why you should run for office.
What’s past is prologue?
April 4, 1968, was a Thursday.
In the Marshall household, Thursdays were even busier. That’s when Charlene Marshall went straight from work to an evening class at WVU on labor relations.
That’s where she found out Dr. King was dead in Memphis.
Yeah, Bloody ’68, she said.
The Lorraine Motel, the Ambassador Hotel, Chicago and Tet.
Young men – Black and white – dying with an awful, assembly-line regularity in Vietnam.
Flip that to George Floyd. Black Lives Matter. Rioters in the U.S. Capitol Building.
But then, flip that to Kamala Harris and Amanda Gorman, who both never fail to make her smile, she said.
These days, Marshall worries after her three grown children, two of whom live in Ohio and California, and can’t come home to visit because of the pandemic.
There are the grandchildren she’ll fuss over at a distance.
She lost Rogers a few years ago, but he’s still a presence in her house and heart.
“We worked together,” she said, “on everything, especially when I started campaigning.”
Bowling with Henrietta
In many ways, Marshall will say, politics is like bowling – and she’s not trying to joke, as she was accomplished at both.
She once rolled a 252 and competed in a championship in North Dakota, of all places.
Bismarck.
Probably another first ever, she said.
But bowling-as-politics: Both are a matter of setting them up, and knocking them down, be they pins or the correction of social problems.
“You have to work together,” she said.
“Honestly, there’s nothing you can’t achieve when you work together.”
These days, she’s working to get to people to take the vaccine for the coronavirus.
Marshall just received her second dose, and she wants others to roll up their sleeves.
“A lot of people in my community are still apprehensive,” she said. “I make phone calls every day. I tell them, ‘You’ve gotta get that vaccine.’”
Empathy is the most effective vaccine against intolerance of any kind, she said.
That’s why her go-to book these days is “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” She re-reads it every couple of years or so.
The 2010 book recounts the life of the Black woman and mother of five who died from cervical cancer in 1951, when cancer treatments and cellular research were still in the doorway of medical breakthroughs.
Lacks’ cells were harvested by doctors at Johns Hopkins, without her knowledge or permission while she was still alive and undergoing treatments.
Her family didn’t know either, and the book delves into how racism can shade medical research, which isn’t lost on Marshall.
But those wondrous cells got the last word, Marshall said.
Those wondrous cells opened doors to the polio vaccine, in vitro fertilization and other medical advances aiding in quality of life and the prolonging of life, even.
Cells, in effect, that have even touched the lives of those who are cruelest, vilest and simply the most intolerant, Marshall said.
“Why would you want to be so harsh and hateful, when you don’t know what was done for you?”
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