My Mom Marilynn Leonard and Iowa Civil Rights Pioneer Edna Griffin
One more story of our rich and diverse history Republican leaders will want suppressed...
Credit: University of Iowa.
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When I was little in the 50’s and 60’s, mom would drive me and my two younger sisters to Grandma Ferne Fenner’s house on most Saturday mornings. Mom, Grandma, and the other women on that side of the family would get together for coffee, conversation, and gossip while we cousins played together. I remember lots of laughter.
I don’t remember where my uncles were, but dad was working. Dad was a carpenter who worked most Saturday mornings. I suspect my uncles were working too. That’s what they did.
Grandma Fenner lived by herself in Highland Park, in Des Moines.
On our way to visit Grandma, we would often drive by the Katz Drug Store in Highland Park and mom would tell us the story of Iowa civil rights icon Edna Griffin who was denied service at the downtown Katz Drug Store because she was Black. The story can be read in the link above, and in the graphics above and below.
Credit: DSM Magazine.
Mom told us Edna’s story, nearly every time we drove by, for as far back as I can remember, and I learned to tell it. Mom thought it important and so I did too.
I learned that story so well I even told it in the New York Times in a column I wrote about then-Iowa gubernatorial candidate Deidre DeJear in September of 2018:
On July 7, 1948, a 39-year-old African-American woman named Edna Griffin entered Katz Drug Store in downtown Des Moines with her infant daughter and two friends. Griffin and her friend John Bibbs sat down at the lunch counter but were denied service by the waitress on an order of ice cream sundaes.
Protests and a boycott of the store by both black and white citizens ensued, and a lawsuit was filed. In December 1949, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that Katz Drug Store had discriminated against Griffin and Bibbs. This boycott occurred seven years before the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., led by Rosa Parks.
Griffin is often called the Rosa Parks of Iowa. Another way of looking at it is that Parks should be called the Edna Griffin of Alabama.
My friend Abena Sankofa Imhotep tells me that the original Katz Drugstore lunch counter is on display at the African American Museum of Iowa in Cedar Rapids.
On Saturday, March 22, at the Des Moines Book Festival, several members of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative gathered for a panel discussion. Above is my friend Steve Semken, publisher at Ice Cube Press, who is also a member of the Collaborative. He wasn’t in the panel discussion—he was too busy selling books. Steve has done more for Iowa authors than any other press. Please check out his catalog and buy some books! Read and buy books locally. Steve is our friend. Jeff Bezos isn’t.
The Des Moines Book Festival was sponsored by Beaverdale Books, one of my favorite bookstores, and the Beaverdale Neighborhood Association. As I wandered down the hallways of the Franklin Event Center looking for the room our discussion would be held in, I spotted my friend Dartanyan Brown and the Des Moines-based artist Paula Egan. Dartanyan is an Iowa musician, journalist, and educator with a 40-year career in the arts. He’s an inductee into the Iowa Blues, Rock ‘n Roll, and the Iowa Jazz Hall of Fames.
Dartanyan introduced me to a man standing next to him, who just happened to be Stanley Griffin, the son of Edna Griffin!
Stanley was in Des Moines for the 45th Annual Midyear Conference of the National Bar Association. His mom Edna was receiving recognition as one of the Heman Marion Sweatt Award recipients and Stanley wanted to be there.
I couldn’t believe my luck at meeting Stanley and I started telling him about my mom and his mom, but it was time for Dartanyan and me to get in our seats for our presentations.
Left to Right. Stanley Griffin, Julie Gammack, Founder of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, and Dartanyan Brown. Photo by Paula Egan.
Julie led the discussion where members of the Collaborative talked about their columns. I went Substack live, and you can view the entire discussion here.
When it came my turn to talk about my column, instead I said something like, “I don’t want to talk about my column, I want to talk about my mom,” and I talked about my mom and her teaching me and my sisters about Edna’s encounter at the Katz Drug Store and how Iowans fought to make it illegal to discriminate based on race. You can go to Dartanyan’s Substack to watch the video here (please consider subscribing to the work of an Iowa legend), and below is Dartanyan’s take on the moment when I spoke:
Thanks for capturing this Dartanyan.
I’m not sure where mom's drive to fight injustice by repeatedly sharing Edna Griffin’s story came from, but I have some ideas. My mom’s dad—my Grandpa Dale Fenner—was abusive and he and my Grandma Ferne divorced, and for years apparently had an on-and-off relationship. Some of my mom’s earliest memories were from when she was four or five years old, and she remembered her and her sister and brother being passed along repeatedly to whatever family would take them, kin or not, and not ever having a regular home with Grandma for years. Doing genealogical work years ago my wife Annie found that Grandma was a bigamist, being married to Dale and another man at the same time.
When Annie told my mom this story maybe 20 years ago before she passed, she was visibly relieved, because mom finally knew that she and her siblings weren’t passed around because Grandma Ferne didn’t love them, but because of difficult circumstances they were under.
We suspect that Dale left her or vice versa, and that she did what had to do to survive as a single mother of three who had to support her children alone in the 1930s and 40’s. Grandma always worked, yet we suspect that she did what she had to do and found a man to help her and her children survive, even if it involved being married to two men at the same time, with one of them being absent.
Grandpa Dale had been born in Wyoming, and in the late 1930s Dale, Ferne, my mom, and her brothers and sister moved to Wyoming for a brief time before returning to Iowa. Mom’s little brother Johnny, only a few years younger than her, died there as an infant, and all mom remembered about him was putting pennies on his eyes before they buried him, alone, in the desert, outside of Newcastle, Wyoming.
We went to visit Johnny’s grave once, when I was ten. If I remember correctly, he had a small headstone, and my mom and dad, sisters and I stood at his lonely grave for maybe a half hour, the wind kicking up sand around us in the austere beauty of eastern Wyoming. I felt a deep sadness, which is all I can say, draped over us like a heavy blanket.
My dad also fought against injustice. Dad never told me this story—my uncles did. One time when dad and mom were in High School he went to pick up mom for a date. As he walked up to Grandma’s house, he heard flesh being pounded. He opened the door, walked in, and found my Grandpa Dale had returned and was beating either Grandma Ferne or my mom, I don’t remember. Dad was tough as leather and a good athlete and beat my Grandpa Dale down.
Dad told Grandpa Dale that if he ever hit one of the “girls” again, he would kill him. Grandpa Dale never hit them again.
There are a few good things I could say about Grandpa Dale, who we saw a few times while growing up, but I don’t have room here. I know he had lots of regrets. Actually, I don’t think he ever had a chance. Annie found records that he was sentenced to prison at Fort Madison when he was 17, for larceny.
One of dad’s younger sisters had an abusive husband and a bunch of kids. One Sunday morning the phone rang and mom picked it up. It was a call from one of the kids that their dad was beating up their mom, dad’s sister, and my mom piled me and my sisters, all of us in elementary school, into the car and dad drove like crazy to the farmhouse where his sister’s family lived.
Dad pulled up to the fence outside the house, and I rolled my window down and watched. My uncle stood on the porch of the house by the front door with a shotgun in his hands. While we kids sat in the backseat of the car, dad got out and calmly walked toward my uncle at a steady pace, while mom ran across the yard to the side door to help her sister-in-law and the kids.
I remember as clear as day, in maybe in 1960 or so, my uncle, tanned dark from the sun, strong and thin with ropey arms with veins sticking out, pointing the shotgun at dad, saying, “Come one step closer and I’m going to kill you, and then I am going to kill Marilynn, and then I’m going to kill the kids.”
Dad didn’t break stride and went up the steps of the porch and grabbed the barrel of shotgun from my uncle’s hands and proceeded to beat him about the head and shoulders with the stock.
Dad left my uncle lying beaten, bruised, and bloody on the porch, and we went in to check on my Aunt and the kids. My aunt was badly bruised, the kids were crying, and mom tended to my aunt while my sisters and I comforted our young cousins. I remember saying some funny things trying to make them laugh, and eventually they did. I don’t remember what happened after that.
Every Wednesday while my sisters and I were in school, mom would drive to what is now called the Woodward Resource Center in Woodward and volunteer at what was then the Woodward State Hospital. It was founded as the Woodward State Hospital for Epileptics and School for the Feeble Minded in 1917.
Mom’s special charge was for a girl with encephalitis who she loved very much. Her photograph was on our refrigerator for many years. Mom also loved helping blind kids ride bikes.
Those were often terrible times for so many people who were ostracised by society, and to a lesser extent, still are. The Americans with Disabilities Act, led by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin and passed into law in 1990, has become the foundation of the disability rights movement.
To state the obvious, mom was a fan.
Mom volunteered at Woodward for 50 years, and sometime in the 1970’s was named one of Governor Robert Ray’s volunteers of the year.
Mom wasn’t a civil rights pioneer like Edna Griffin. Not even close. Yet, she recognized injustice wherever she saw it, and did her best to fight it, by teaching her children to fight racism, and as a hands-on advocate for those with disabilities.
Let’s be like Edna Griffin. Let’s be like my mom.
Let’s fight injustice where ever we see it and as it is being imposed on us by Republicans in statehouses across the land and from the Trump administration as they try to rewrite history and cruelly victimize minorities, immigrants and the marginalized as they try to build authoritarian rule and a white “Christian” nationalist ethnostate.
After our session at the Des Moines Book Festival, Stanley, Dartanyan, Paula, Laura Belin and I were talking in the hallway as attendees swarmed around us, and Stanley said something like, “It’s going to take all of us together—Black, white, everyone—to fight back.”
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Spencer Dirks and I will be holding an Iowa Revolution/Deep Midwest Substack live conversation tomorrow, Wednesday, April 2, at noon CT.
Given who you seem to be Bob, I’m not surprised by your mother’s courage and her fight for justice. Sometimes when I look around and can’t believe the place we are in, in our state and country, I remember stories like your mother’s, Edna Griffin, John Lewis, and others, and know that people have always had to fight for justice and for what is right. May we draw strength from these stories. We aren’t alone. It is our turn.
A great story.. I recently noted that today's protestors can learn from the civil rights movement which thrived on strategic persistence despite setbacks. MLK united diverse coalitions through a shared moral vision, training activists in nonviolence. It applied targeted pressure—boycotts, protests, and alternative institutions—while documenting abuses to shape public opinion. Most importantly, it sustained hope and determination, recognizing that real change demands ongoing, strategic struggle.
Instead of a single MLK or Mrs. Edna Griffin, right now we are relying upon multiple leaders, like Sen. Booker today on the Senate Floor, or AOC and Sen. Sanders. But we can still push current leaders to speak out louder. Today's leaders with the biggest megaphones, including current politicians and aspirants, can do more.
PS. Bob, I was director of the Civil Rights Commission under Vilsack and Culver. Around the 40th anniversary of the federal Civil Rights laws, we renamed our first floor offices in Grimes Office Building, as the Edna Griffin Offices. We also made sure other leaders were recognized by the Gov. and other offices were named in honor of leaders in the women's, Latino, Asia and disability communities.
I think Reynolds has erased those names.
PS what a mom.