rescue and everything. My wife told me
to go downstairs but I didn't want to be
a gawker. Then later, my brother-in-law
came to tell me it was my mother. I am
the last one left in the family. All my
brothers and sisters are gone.
I started on North Providence Town
Council in 1973, after we moved there.
Former Mayor Sal Mancini asked me to
run. After refusing a number of times, I
decided to run expecting to lose so I could
be done with it. Well, I won. I served on
the Town Council for ten years, zoning
board for four years, school committee for
three years as chairman, mayor for three
years, thirteen years as chairman of the
Democratic party and chief of staff for
thirteen years. This position is a threemonth
favor I did thirteen years ago.
The Way Things Used to Be:
Mildred Nichols
| | CONTINUED FROM PAGE 75
the time. His papers are on display at the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of African
American History and Culture.
My grandmother Clark was one of the
first women in Loudoun County to register
to vote. She registered on October 4,
1920. For the ninety-fifth celebration of
women’s right to vote, I wore the roll [the
list of people who had registered to vote]
that had her name on it to the League of
Women Voters celebration in Newport.
Her name is Eppie Clark and you can see
a “C” for “colored” after her name. I
pinned this list onto the front of my white
outfit so everyone could see it.
My late husband, Charles Nichols, was
born in Brooklyn, New York. We met at
Hampton Institute, which is now Hampton
University in Virginia. Two months
after I graduated, we got married. I was
twenty-one. We have three sons, David,
Keith and Brian. In 1954–55, my husband
was a Fulbright professor at Aarhus University
in Aarhus, Denmark. We had
sailed for Europe with an almost three
year old and a five-month-old infant.
After that adventure-filled year, we were
back at Hampton. Four years later, my
husband accepted an offer to become a
tenured professor of North American
language and literature and director of
the department of literature at the John
F. Kennedy Institute for American Studies
at the Free University. We flew to a divided
Berlin, Germany, in 1959 with our two
RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l MAY/JUNE 2020 133