From the time she was a child in Harlem, Paula Walker Madison has known who she is, even when other people could not figure her out or her two brothers or, especially, her mother.
“If you asked my mother, ‘What are you?’, she’d say, ‘I’m Jamaican.” And then people would look at her – that Chinese face with that accent – and it was like, ‘Where are you from?’ [She’d say], ‘I’m from Jamaica.’ [They’d say], ‘Yeah, but what are you?’ Then, depending on the era we were living in, if it was the era when we were colored, she’d say ‘colored.’ If it was the era when we were Negroes, she would say ‘Negro.’ If it was the era when we were black, my mother would say ‘black.’ My mother identified with her children. Whatever we were, in spite of how she looked, she was us.”
Madison has spent a lifetime confounding people, not just in her racial identity, but also in a career path that saw her walk away from the executive suite at NBCUniversal to help oversee her family’s investments, including a professional women’s basketball team (the Los Angeles Sparks, which they sold to Magic Johnson and his partners in January 2014) and a television network (The Africa Channel). It is racial identity, however, that rivets audiences from campuses like Morgan State University to gatherings like those of the National Association of Black Journalists and the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference or at film festivals in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and Hong Kong.
She is a black woman with a Chinese grandfather and, as a result of a journey of many thousand miles, her family now has a place in the jia pu, or legacy book, of her Chinese kin
that traces 151 generations
over 3,000 years. Madison’s
story is told in the
documentary “Finding
Samuel Lowe: From
Harlem to China,” which
follows her quest to
discover the man who left
behind his three-year-old Jamaican daughter when he returned to China in 1933. Nell Vera Lowe Williams, who
died in 2006, never again
saw her father. But since
Madison took up the project
in earnest after retiring as
executive vice president and chief diveristy officer at NBCUniversal in 2011,
she and her
brothers,
Elrick and
Howard
Williams,
have
gotten to know Samuel Lowe’s family – their family – in the wealthiest province in China, Guangdong, and in other parts of the globe.
The patriarch of her Chinese family – her mother’s half brother Lowe Chow Woo – has bestowed Chinese names upon Madison and her brothers.
Paula Williamms Madison
By E. R. Shipp
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