Rubina Ann Guscott, A Force For Justice, Equality, 102
DGH
Rubina Ann (Fields) Guscott, an influential force in Boston's black
community for years who spent a lifetime fighting for justice and
equality for all races, died Tuesday, October 1, 2002, at her
Dorchester, Massachusetts, home of natural causes. She was 102.
Widowed at 30, Mrs. Guscott single-handedly raised her six children to
have the same commitment, Kenneth I. Guscott, one of her five sons and
former president of the Boston branch of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, said yesterday.
Until her health began to fail a few weeks ago, Guscott said, his
mother was keeping abreast of the janitors' strike and, had she not
been frail, "would have been right out there on the front lines with
them."
That would not have been unusual for Rubina Guscott. She had always
been on the front lines when justice was at stake.
When she first arrived here as a domestic worker at the age of 20 from
her native Jamaica, she used to march every Saturday through Roxbury
with the Black Star Nurses division started by Marcus Garvey, a fellow
Jamaican, who organized more than 2 million blacks worldwide in the
fight for equal rights.
"My mother believed as Garvey did," Guscott said, "that we had to do
it ourselves and she followed that procedure all her life."
During the civil rights activism of the 1960s, well into her own 60s,
she went on long NAACP bus trips to Washington to walk in marches
there.
In the late 1930s, her son said, she was a charter member of the
Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts and "very active in it. She
also joined about every club group within the church and any that had
do with social issues, such as the Robert Gould Shaw House that helped
the poor and paid visits to the sick."
After her son, Charles, was killed in World War II, she became a
member of the Massachusetts Gold Star Mothers, an organization that
honors mothers who lost children in the war, at one time serving as
its president.
Much of Mrs. Guscott's work to win social, economic, and educational
equality for blacks, her son said, was done in concert with other
women who came to Boston from the West Indies and became leaders in
the black community - women such as the late Melnea Cass and Edna
Bynoe.
On learning of her death, Elma Lewis, another prominent black leader,
described her as, "a lady of great dignity, very committed to many
causes, including cultural preservation. She was a hard worker and
helped to bring all of us up to believe that no matter what you got in
life, you should live your life with dignity."
Last year, Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson cited Mrs. Guscott
for her work in Boston and Jamaica. He praised her for having the same
attitude that Marcus Garvey had in "seeing what the next day will
bring and the courage to face it."
Mrs. Guscott was born in Portland, Jamaica, and came to Boston in
1920, getting a job as a domestic in the home of a Harvard professor.
In 1921, she married Frank Henry Guscott, also from Jamaica, whom she
met here. He died, Kenneth Guscott said, when Mrs. Guscott was about
30 and she was left to raise six children on her own during the Great
Depression.
For a time, Guscott recalled, the family lived on Shawmut Avenue,
"next door to (Nation of Islam Leader Louis) Farrakhan when he was
known as Gene Walcott. His mother and my mother and a lot of West
Indian women all came here about the same time."
To support her young children, Guscott said, "she scrubbed floors and
sent us boys out to shine shoes, sell newspapers and wood that we
collected for people's stoves. She always made sure we went to school
and had clean clothes and polished shoes. When I was in high school
and wanted a $15 bike I saw at Sears, she told me if I earned half,
she would give me the other half."
His mother, he said, did not believe in credit and never got a credit
card. She only acquired a bank account when she started to collect
Social Security.
With some other women, Mrs. Guscott founded Boston Progressive Credit
whereby members used to contribute 50 cents a week to a kitty and
every month or two one of the members would get the kitty to buy
needed household items. Guscott said the concept remains today among
the Caribbean community as, "The Partnerships."
Along the line, Mrs. Guscott found time to complete her education. In
1940, she earned her high school diploma from the old Boston Central
Evening High School.
In the 1940s, Mrs. Guscott saw her sons leave for war one-by-one. "The
military was segregated in those days," Guscott said, recalling
incidents he, himself, endured. It was his mother, he said, "who gave
us the drive to pull through it."
It was also Mrs. Guscott's drive that got her sons to start the Long
Bay Management Company in Boston in 1971 to turn condemned buildings
into affordable housing for needy families. "We wanted to show what
black men could do and serve as role models for others," Guscott said.
"Mother was the company's driving force, its moral leader and its
chairman until the day she died."
In later years, Mrs. Guscott became a world traveler, her son said,
going on NAACP tours around the world.
Her recent hospitalization, he said, was only one of two in her life.
But, she wanted to come home to die. Though she lived on her own at
her insistence, her son, Cecil, lived across the street, and she had
in-home aides.
"Mother never took pills and never got sick," Guscott said." She was
hospitalized two weeks ago because she wouldn't eat and was
dehydrated. "She was a strong woman in more ways than one."
Mrs. Guscott never remarried, he said, but "dedicated her life to her
children, her community and her church."
Boston Globe