It was the 1950s. They were black.

She didn’t understand the stories she was hearing about what white people were doing to black people. She didn’t understand why her grandmother was so upset and scared when a 7-year-old Barbara sprinted into a bathroom designated for white people.

She didn’t understand why there would be a bathroom designated for white people.

“I remember one time when we were in Montgomery, I went downtown to look in the stores with my cousins. There was a water fountain, but it was a white water fountain. I was thirsty — it was a hot day. And I wanted to get a drink and they said, ‘No, no. Don’t drink out of that fountain.’ I said, ‘Well, what’s the matter?’ I didn’t understand. So they took me in the store and they brought me a pop. I thought, well, that was a better treat to get some pop,” she said, chuckling. “It was a while before I really realized what was happening, but I could never understand why it was happening.”

Today, Morris runs a tour company focusing on black history. She organizes days-long coach trips across the nation, some following the Underground Railroad to Canada, others taking people through the monuments and museums of D.C., others to Detroit’s Motown Records, along the Buffalo Soldiers’ path in Oklahoma or to the Maryland slave port where the man who inspired Kunta Kinte was sold.

And, of course, the former school speech therapist has a bus tour through Chicago.

“I feel like I’m still teaching,” she said. “I love the fact I am enlightening people about my heritage.”

Her house in Auburn Gresham is lined with photographs of family history and black history, shots of uncles and cousins framed next to images of Barack Obama and Shirley Chisholm. She gleams with pride at her family tree photo collage running from pictures of her grandkids to info on her great great great great great grandparents.

Her grandfather came up to Chicago during the Great Migration, a turpentine tapper down in Mississippi who came up to find work.

“The steel mill was the saving grace for my family,” she said, listing off the family members, including her father and all her uncles, who would find work there. “Even some of the grandchildren worked in the steel mill for a minute.”

Her father was a colonel in the National Guard, a WWII and Korean War veteran recalled to Fort Sheridan as a survival assistance officer during Vietnam.

“My dad held high standards for all of us. There was no such thing as red on your course book,” she said, referring to the color that indicated a failing grade.

One of her grandfathers bought property. Her father rose in the National Guard and became a bus driver in civilian life. Her uncle was a Tuskeegee Airman who became a police officer, the latter a job that still runs in the family.

Barbara became a speech therapist, a story we heard a bit about last week.

Barbara decided that — and we’re in the 1970s by now — as long as the her students had to practice speech, they might as well practice speeches by Frederick Douglass. As long as she had them reading poems, they might as well be from Harlem Renaissance writers.

“I got known as the dingbat teacher that did not know it was not Black History Month,” she said, launching into a loving impression of her former students. “‘Oh man, why we gotta do all this black history? It ain’t Black History Month. What’s up with this?’”

Heavily involved in Brownies and her grandson’s Cub Scouts troop, she eventually was asked to put together routes focusing on black history for the groups’ yearly trips.

“Every chance I got to work with children — especially African-American young children — I utilized that to try to enlighten them about the tremendous heritage that we have,” she said.

She later started pitching her trips, one of which followed the Underground Railroad up to Canada, to adults. Chicago tours started on a fluke while pitching to a local black business group in the early 1980s.

“One person at the meeting said, ‘Do you have a black history tour of the city of Chicago?’ I thought ‘Oh God, I can’t be trying to sell people on going to Canada and I don’t have anything on Chicago.’ So I said, ‘Of course!’” she recalled, laughing.

He wanted to book the Chicago tour — the one that didn’t exist yet — for his upcoming family reunion.

“Back I go to the library,” Morris said. “I found so much information. I think to do everything that I originally thought I wanted to do, it would have taken seven hours.”

She got it down to two hours, but as the years ticked by and she found out more about the city, it inched back up to three hours. A monument to the army’s first all-black unit here, a soul food restaurant where civil rights leaders strategized there.

In a city whose heritage includes Ida B. Wells, Chess Records, Oprah, Obama, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, Blues, Gospel and open heart surgeon Daniel Hale Williams, Morris is never at a loss for material.

“Some people say, ‘Girl, I’ve been in this city all my life and I had no idea,’” she said.

She’s currently considering splitting the tour into two — one for the downtown and West Side, the other for the downtown and South Side.

In the decades since, she’s had groups from as far as Japan, France and Timbuktu. She has booked corporate trips, family reunions, school groups, church groups, senior centers and black trade and business associations.

“And then the children! Sometimes I can’t even get off the coach. ‘Miss Morris! Miss Morris! Wait a minute, so so so and we passed this place and what did they do then?’” she said, laughing.

Miss Morris will be 70 next year. She shuffles a bit as she walks, a leftover from a childhood accident that put metal pins in her leg well into adulthood. She has had triple bypass surgery.

But she’s that little girl again — the one laughing and joking and sprinting into the wrong bathroom before her grandma could stop her — the moment she starts talking about the centuries of history that sustain her.

Book a Black CouTours black history tour

Read about a different family the steel mills helped grow

And a different one

…

We’re sipping sugared green tea in a kitchen in a house filled with photos of family.

Barbara had shown me the photos, shown me her uncle’s pictures from the Tuskeegee Airmen, shots of her parents handsome and smiling at military galas, showed me a collage she was working on from her grandkids all the way back to her great great great great great (five greats) grandparents, who they think were slaves-turned-sharecroppers in South Carolina.

In a future story for this site, I’ll tell about why I was there. Since the 1980s, Barbara has run a black history tour company. It’s amazing. But that will be later.

Right now, I’m transcribing the unedited and verbatim story Barbara told me over tea, memories and gospel music in a kitchen in Auburn Gresham.

Do not read it. Instead, listen along here.

It starts with the oil crisis of 1973.

…

When they had a gas freeze, I never knew if I was going to have enough gas to get to work or enough gas to get back home. And I spent most of my day in lines to get gas. And sometimes you was getting in line and by the time you get there, they were out of gas, you know? So then I came into the city.

At that time, I needed to get a master’s to continue to be a speech therapist. And so I decided to go into the army so I could get educational benefits. Because, you know, my dad and all of his brothers had gone in and everything.

But when I went in for my physical, the doctor told me, “Not only can you not get into the army, but you better run — not walk — somewhere and get your legs fixed.”

When I was born, I had slipped epiphysis of the femur bone, which means that the ball part of the joint did not form and then it didn’t fit into the socket. And I had a fall. And I had to have four pins put in each hip.

So everybody thought I was going to be a cripple. My grandfather was looking at wheelchairs, he was going to buy me an electric wheelchair, and people on my block said, “Well you can come out and play with us. You can watch us play hopscotch.”

But my grandmother?

Well, I had two praying grandmothers. Everybody in my family prayed, but my grandmothers — you didn’t want them to be praying on you for nothing.

If they were telling you, getting on you about something, you just went ahead and did it because they were going to be kneeling and the next thing you knew, you know?

But my paternal grandmother told me, “Baby, I’m not going to be able to get out to the hospital to see you, but I will send my prayers.”

And so I went through with flying colors, but I could not have a pair of skates. I could not have a bike. I could ride my sister’s bike, but they wouldn’t get me a bike.

One day my cousin that lived around the corner from us got a new bike. And so I went over there to get a ride because I didn’t want my parents to see me riding a bike. And he was scared.

They were playing hopscotch and red light and they were jumping double dutch and he said, “Aw naw, if you fall, I’ll get in trouble.”

I said, “I can ride a bike.” And I got on the bike. I remember the wind blowing through my hair and I was just like, oh I was like on Route 66.

But when I got back to the front of the house, I slid on some gravel and I actually remember being up in the air looking down on the ground where I was going to fall.

When I fell, everything stopped — the double dutch, the red light. And I turned over and looked dead in my grandmother’s mouth.

I said, “Oh, I’m going to get a whipping for riding that bike.”

I jumped up, I went home, I took a bath, I rubbed on the Ben-Gay and alcohol.

The next Sunday was Easter Sunday. I cornered my grandmother in the room, I said, “Whycome you never called my daddy and tell him I was riding that bike?”

“Oh baby, when I saw you fall like you fell and get up and run like you ran, I knew my prayers had been answered.”

She said, “Your legs. Will be. All right.”

OK, fast-forward 10 years later, trying to get into the army? I found out that one of the pins was slipping and picking away at the joint. So back I went to Illinois Research, the famous Dr. Fox, who eventually became the surgeon for the Chicago Bears.

They had taken all these X-rays and had me doing all these exercises. And then he was in the process of training other doctors. So they were all in this room, a bunch of people all in white, and they had all these X-rays and stuff like that. While he was explaining to them, he was also explaining to me.

And then he said, “And what we’re going to do is we’re going to do this and such and then you’ve got to do thus and so and then we’re going to do the other leg.”

I kind of fogged out. It’s almost like things kind of went dim, you know?

And I heard my grandmother say “Your legs. Will be. All right.”

And when I came back to myself, I just said, “You know, that’s OK. That’s OK. I don’t want you to do all of that. Just take the pins out.”

“Well, I’ve had much success with this. Are you afraid? We will be following you-”

I said, “My grandmother prayed for my legs. I’ll leave here with what I got.” And he looked at me and he said, “All right.”

I’ll be 70 years old next year and I’m still walking on my grandmother’s prayers.

Take Barbara’s black history tour

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