The personal story of the first African American woman to be elected President of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, Chicago, Illinois. Woman of Steele A Personal and Political Journal By Bobbie L. Steele AuthorHouse Copyright © 2011 Bobbie L. Steele All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4389-5332-8 Chapter One Rural Beginnings I had humble beginnings growing up on a farm in the Mississippi Delta. I found my niche later in city life through serving my community. I managed to penetrate the well-established Chicago political system to become the longest-serving, elected African American woman in the history of Cook County government. Cook County is the second largest county in the United States. My journey on this path led me to become the first woman in 2006 to be elected president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, a body which served 5.3 million people and managed a $3.2 billion budget. As I look back over my life and think about growing up on a farm in the Mississippi Delta, learning to chop and pick cotton at an early age and starting school in a one room church school, where grades one through eight were all taught together by the same teacher, I am grateful that I was encouraged to dream big while working in the cotton field. I am grateful that I had parents who believed in me and taught me to be prepared with a good education at an early age. My mother always said to me: "When preparation meets opportunity you must be ready to seize the opportunity." I'm grateful that I was taught to work for what I wanted and not to expect accomplishments to come easily. Life on the farm was rigorous. It set me on a course in search of liberation as early as age ten. I never liked chopping or picking cotton. The steaming hot sun that beat down on my head despite the hand-me-down straw hat that I wore, gave me severe headaches during cotton chopping season. Then there were the calluses, corns, and blisters that covered my hands as a result of the firm grip I kept on the handle of my hoe during the planting season, not to mention the long and tedious work hours I endured. It didn't get any better when cotton picking season arrived. Our family picked cotton from sunup until sundown, twelve to fourteen hours a day, often without breakfast or lunch. Supper was the only meal we actually sat down to eat during chopping and harvest seasons. It didn't take long for me to decide that this was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Despite working so hard on the farm, we were a pretty happy family. Daddy, mom, my four siblings and I always had tasks to perform around the house. We were each assigned chores in the garden or wherever daddy found something for us to do. Abraham Lincoln Rodges believed in work. Hard work was all he had ever known. In addition to working in the cotton field, we raised most of our own food: sweet potatoes, white potatoes, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, greens, peanuts, and other vegetables. We also raised cows, chickens, and hogs. There was never a lack of work to do. It kept us pretty busy. My mother was a strong believer in education. She never missed an opportunity to read and, in fact, made sure that she found time to do so. Although books and other printed materials were scarce, mother read to us regularly. She ordered books and they arrived via U.S. mail. Mom read everything she could get her hands on, from romance novels to Ebony and Life Magazines. She cherished her books and magazines and I still have some of these magazines from the early 1950s and '60s. Make no mistake, mother was as hard a worker as any on the farm and could chop and pick more cotton than the average field hand; she always set a goal of picking three hundred pounds of cotton a day during harvest time but at night she would somehow find time to read by the light of our kerosene lamp because we had no electricity. She had a burning desire to learn and she passed that on to her children. Although mom was only in seventh grade when she married my dad, she continued her education through home studies, evening classes, and summer school. She attended school most of her adult life and proudly graduated from Mississippi Valley State College many years later along with my youngest brother, James. He was twenty-three and mother was forty-four when they each received their college degrees in Elementary Education in 1959. Chapter Two Mother Was My Role Model In 1950, we left the farm and moved to the small town of Cleveland, Mississippi. I was twelve years old and ecstatic to leave the farm. I thought we had made it to the Promised Land! There were no more before or after-school farm chores. There were still plenty of other chores, however. My mother was a multi-tasker long before the term was coined. I have never figured out how she could accomplish so many things at the same time. She could work crossword puzzles and hold a conversation without losing her train of thought. Wh