It all began one summer evening at an addict’s rehabilitation center in Harlem with a Black seventeen-year-old teenager responding to the attention paid to him by a young white woman during a racial strife time. The time she spent talking with him wasn’t enough as the previous damage to his young life had already been done by an absent family. He was a product of the streets, and streets are not meant to ‘raise’ children. That is when her life’s work was decided for her with him walking steadily towards her on a raucous street. He was a shadowy figure, and she was terrified with fear for him. As he approached her, his body became more visible, finally landing in her outstretched arms. He slumped into her with the needle still in his arm, his eyes filled with pain, and that is where his young life was snuffed out by a drug called heroin.
She had always known throughout her college years that she wanted to either teach or become a social worker. She chose the latter after her experience in Harlem. She started out by teaching in a small private school for emotionally disturbed children, and although this gave her something to put on her resume, she knew this would not be her life’s work as she was determined to go back to her home city to help make the difference she knew in her heart she could do. Race never mattered to her as she grew up in that multi ethnic, multi cultural environment, and she proved this by having been involved in the lives of Black, Latina/o, and Muslim young lives and families throughout her career.
Her first position in Paterson was as a permanent substitute in School #4 in a class that had forty students, thirty eight were black, one Latino, and one white kid. The two teachers before her left because of a heart attack, and the other what was labeled a nervous breakdown. It was apparent to her why listening and seeing her class, but this did not deter her, and Dr. Frank Napier, the principal of that school, told her she could handle them and left. She had no idea how she was going to do it, but two days later under the stress of bedlam in her classroom, performed an experiment that would be not only frowned upon today, but dangerous. She asked for a volunteer and of course the rowdiest student was the first to raise his hand. As they all sat in a circle, she pricked his finger and hers, telling her students that if they looked below the surface, everyone was alike, the only difference being the color of their skin. She won them over, and by doing so was able to teach them for the next four months with the class begging her in June to be their teacher the following year. She couldn’t as she was asked to go to School #13, and that she did. It was a school that changed her life in many ways. While there, she became involved in many community activities. One was the Paterson Village Initiative, a collaboration of many community system agencies including the police, probation, juvenile parole, the school system, community service providers, and a doctor from St. Joseph’s Hospital. They went to all the housing projects in the city to help ameliorate family issues, find missing adolescents, and provide dinners for adolescents and their families. The police outfitted her with one of their vests, and up she went into the projects, not thinking twice about it. She volunteered wherever she thought the need was greatest, always fighting for the good of the kids and their families. She fought in the courts, came to know the judges and they, her, and came to respect her views including the late Judge Stephen Womack who went on record once by saying that “when Mrs. Ross gave him a report about a juvenile coming before him, it said more than any of those coming from probation, or juvenile parole”. Those systems fought her as she advocated for teens from all ethnic backgrounds.
She was asked to be the facilitator of a summer leadership program for teenagers at the YMCA, and did so for nine summers with each becoming better as the program grew from five teens upon her arrival to twenty by the summer she stopped. During the first summer she met a then sixteen year old teen who would become her Godchild as the years went on. He became a part of their family often stopping in for talk and dinner. He grew up across the street from School #6. She and her family became an integral part of his life and theirs was enriched by his presence. He graduated high school, then college, and finally, they were at his law school graduation. He’s married now with two young children. His name is Davon Roberts, and they live in Connecticut. She and her husband talk with him often, and are fed a regular supply of pictures.
She was approached by the Challenge Program to facilitate non treatment groups in an adult substance abuse treatment agency. She took the job hesitantly because it was not her area of strength working with adults, but that position changed her views, strengthened her talents, and led her to having life long relationships with a few of her clients. While at Challenge, she met an older adolescent female and they embraced each other in a mother daughter relationship. Sadness overcame her when that same young Latina woman held in her last breath till she arrived at the hospital, and her adolescent died in her arms from an overdose of heroin. It was reminiscent of her first days in Harlem, and nearly killed her spirit, and she took a month off to recover some of herself.
She was approached by the then director of the Paterson Housing Authority, Felix Raymond, to start a new department within their system, as Job Developer. She was never a bureaucrat, and had no desire to be one, but took the position anyway. She stayed with them for two years, leaving with one hundred seventy five clients without any secretarial assistance. It was quite an experience for her as she had offices in both the AHP and CCP housing projects. Some thought she was risking her life while doing it, but she felt differently, and was treated with the utmost respect because she respected her clients in a way that they were not treated before, especially not by the white bureaucrats within the Housing Authority.
While at the PHA, she decided that she wanted to administer her own program. She took two months off to write, and with a team from Trenton, a policy and procedures manual was written while she looked for the ‘perfect’ place to administer her own program. She picked staff carefully as she wanted those who looked at clients the way she did, with empathy giving encouragement and hope for a brighter future, and were culturally sensitive to the needs of families. Her program she called, The House of Hope as she was, and is, a strong believer in that word. With her husband by her side, and an investment of their retirement money, the program was opened for adults, and when that was strong enough, an adolescent component was added on. Because she saw the Paterson school system as a failure to most, two years later, they opened their own not for profit organization, The Foundation of Hope, and there they opened an alternative school, and students who dropped out of the local high schools heard about this program, and came. Some walked across town to get to the program which was then housed in space on the second floor of the AHP housing project. One participant was a Blood gang member, several from the AHP, several other dropouts. It was lovingly administered in a family environment, the students were advocated upon in family court if necessary, and she gave everything she had, and then some to all who came through their doors seeking help, guidance, and love.
During this time, she was invited by the Family Court to sit on the first Adolescent Drug Court in the county, and she did this for many years. By then she had worked very hard to garner the reputation of being the only advocate in the county for adolescents, and sometimes asked to advocate in the Adult Criminal Courts too. She loved her work, was very good at what she did, and received the love from her clients for her advocacy, and they went on to do good things with their lives. To this day, she is friends with those very people who came to them down trodden, but left with heads held high. Their programs lasted seven years because one night as she and her husband were rushing out to attend a community meeting, she did not see the plastic bag on the second step and fell head first down a flight of steel steps. The next thing she knew was that she was hearing a man’s words from a distance saying, “Your wife and mother is very lucky not to be paralyzed from her neck down”. She slowly came to, opening her eyes to see her pale husband and daughter with very worried looks on their faces. She was released the next day, held for observation. She was in a physically downward spiral, but did not know this till she tried standing up the next day when she couldn’t walk, and was carried to the waiting wheelchair. She barely got home, and only with the help of her family, and there she lay for the next two weeks. Her husband told her news she was not prepared to hear; he had no choice but to close her beloved agency as the doctor told him her recovery would not be days, or weeks, or months, but rather at least a year. She was sent to a psychiatrist to assist with her PTSD issue, but she ‘treated’ her as a colleague, not a patient, and she told the doctor that was not what she needed. The psychiatrist referred her to a talented neuropsychologist in Lawrenceville. Dr. Dan, as she called him, treated her PTSD for a long time and when well enough, asked her to co-facilitate group sessions for others with this condition. PTSD never entirely goes away. As it turned out, she doctored for two and a half years, and has residual life long effects, from head to toe.
Against doctor’s orders, at the end of two years, she could not tolerate being useless anymore, and knew she must get back to work somewhere in order to save her sanity. Thus, she started making phone calls and was met by closed doors as people and agencies forget quickly. She was then two, almost three years older, some of her former colleagues and friends in other agencies left, or retired. She was miserable, still emotionally and physically wobbly, and very unhappy feeling useless. Finally, she called her former employer of the Challenge Program asking him if he had an adolescent component by then, and he told her he didn’t but was willing to talk about it. They agreed to meet over coffee. After having accomplished what she had over years of hard work on others behalf, she knew exactly what she wanted. She and Ray Dorritty (now deceased) met. He was kind when she told him her tale of woe. She then proceeded to lay out a plan for him explaining what she had accomplished since being employed by his organization years before. He appreciated her work ethic, had heard about her work through the local addiction and social work network, and told her so. They agreed she would work at Challenge opening the adolescent component with her doing all the court related advocacy cases, would develop the program, hire staff, carry a very small caseload, and would begin with three days weekly. He even agreed to what she requested salary wise. She was thrilled and began to feel needed again upon leaving him knowing that the following Monday, she would begin a new chapter in her recovering life.
She accomplished all that was expected of her, and more, and stayed with Challenge for over seven years! She probably would still be there had the director not run it into the ground financially. She loved her work, met hundreds of teenagers, families, became a regular in the courts where she was accepted as a voice for those who had none. She fought hard for teens who had been adjudicated to remain in the community, not being sent to jails. Unfortunately, there was only one in the community program, and if a participant was sent there by a judge and violated the program, an automatic cell was waiting for him, or her. She fought this continuously, gaining the reputation of a very strong advocate.
She had worked through the years with Black and Latino/a youth and their families, thousands of them. While at the Challenge Program, a new ethnic teenager was referred to he by his mother who was a client of Ray. This teenager was a seventeen year old Muslim, and so began another chapter for her advocating and counseling Muslim teens and their families. She read and studied their customs to the point where she felt comfortable enough to interact, even learning a few Arabic words that were enough to prove familiarity.
When the Challenge Program closed its doors that last day, she was the one who did it, grossly dismayed and sad for herself, clients, colleagues, and a city that lost a great program for adolescents and adults because of the greed and ineptness of its now deceased director. Once again, she was in the position of not knowing what she would do for the rest of her life. It did not come to her until one Sunday morning while reading an article in a local newspaper. It was about a New Jersey born teenager who was jailed in a country she knew little about, Egypt. The information caught her attention because of her lifelong advocacy work, but that was domestic, not international. Never one to walk away from a challenge, she called the journalist who had written the article to find out more. However, that woman would tell her little about the case, instead wanting information about her telling her that she would give it to the international lawyer who was handling the case, and if he were interested in her, he would contact her directly.
Thus began a new and almost final chapter in her very long career. The lawyer did call her, and for eight months almost around the clock, she tried her hardest to set free an Atlantic City born teenager. His alleged crime was being an American. She risked her life for him learning there were spies right here in New Jersey who could kill her if given the opportunity. She did this arduous work for a teenager and his family she did not know, but did it anyway as that is who she was, and is. After eight long months, success came. She had him set free! She wrote articles about him in “Youth Today”, and The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange”. Her reputation grew as an international human rights advocate and then as an asylum coordinator. She took on foreign governments and won cases for strangers. She placed young men in foreign countries as asylees. She met strangers online who were interested in her work. Some helped her in circuitous ways, others looked on. Foreigners found her through social media begging for her help. She told them not to beg. Instead, she intervened on their behalf. She helped free Americans held in foreign jails including a woman from Lancaster, Pa. She made friends on social media with strangers who came to respect her work through their private grapevine. She is now writing a book about her life’s work.
I know this woman intimately as ‘she’ is me.
Jackie S. Ross