Miriam B. Frank Umbaugh:  

Life I lost my Nita this year (2016). Juanita Lusier Buggs was my aunt but we grew up like sisters. Every time she learned something about life, she shared it w/me. S I know she is in heaven and happy along with my parents and other loved ones I am divorced from my daughter's father (after 2 years) . I married Richard and he passed away after 10 wonderful years. Now I am married to Gregory (Ringo) Umbaugh. Read my story. ***One child -- TaMiria J, Fisher, age 38-- has autism and is basically non-verbal but happy and beautiful. She talks by typing out messages --has an incredible spiritual gift. She lives in a group home and is safe, active, and very happy. She has a very special spiritual gift...angels visit her in visions and reveals some things about to occur. she told me two years after my husband died that I would marry again. She revealed that he would be white. I was concerned that people would think that I didn't like back men. She assured me that God was sending this man to me. she said he was WT. For a year I looked for Wt. I started singing karaoke in 2010. The second time I sang, I did "At Last." I spotted this hippy-looking white guy with a beard and ponytail. My heart started pounding; I couldn't understand the attraction. He came up to me to compliment me on the singing. I later discovered that he was surprisingly and immediately attracted to me also. This was April 2010. I saw him occasionally at karaoke. In July, he danced with me. In late August, Tam revealed that this was WT. But his name was Gregory. He preferred to be called Ringo -- he was a preacher /biker. I asked Tam what WT meant and she said White Teacher. Ringo had taught elementary school also. He kissed me on September 9, 2010. we were married Dec. 21, 2013. There is so much more to tell. Tam talks to Ringo telepathically and in dreams. She loves him and he loves her I was very happily married to A. Richard Frank (March 31, 1997). Richard passed away on January 29,2007. Richard and I were an unusual couple to many. My marriage to Richard brought many blessings. He had to fight to get Tam into a home and he took up my battles as a black woman. (This union prepared me for my life with Ringo.) God knew what I needed on this journey even tho I didn't always understand A newspaper article was written about me and Richard; the evening news carried the story. I was black, plus-sized and he was white. We were an older couple, and we both grew up during the fierce segregation laws in the south. Most could not understand how we got together. Excerpts from the article are below. c2010 The Huntsville Times. All rights reserved. Used with permission of The Huntsville Times MARRIAGE IN BLACK & WHITE Author(s): AMY FRENCH Times Staff Writer Date: March 27, 1999 Section: Little Miriam Blalock's father knew. Children listen closely to what parents say, when the words are overheard from an adult conversation. Thomas Blalock Sr. was talking to Miriam's mother that day, discussing with her and friends in their home something he'd read about an interview with the famous, white Baptist minister, the Rev. Billy Graham. Miriam guesses she was about 10 years old. The interviewer had asked Graham if he believed people of all races are equal in the eyes of God, and Graham had said yes. So, the interviewer had pressed, would Graham approve if his daughter married a black man? Grown up now, Miriam doesn't remember Graham's answer. But she remembers that her father's eyes met hers before he spoke for himself, saying, "If you truly believe all people are equal, then it shouldn't matter." She also remembers wondering, "Why are you looking at me? I'm not going to marry a white man." This was Griffin, Ga., in the late '50s. Rosa Parks had refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery bus.... The Blalock children attended school apart from white people, drank from different water fountains and used different, grimier public toilets. The idea of sharing wedding vows, home and family with a white spouse was incomprehensible to most people, but Georgia didn't rely solely on social mores to enforce the divide. Georgia, like Alabama, legally forbade marriage between blacks and whites.... Richard grew up in Miami, one of the nation's southernmost states that will never be considered the South. Nonetheless, his childhood was thoroughly segregated. No black people in his neighborhood. No black people in his schools. Still, somewhere, at about 7 years old, he heard the word "n-----" and asked what it meant. It was a bad word, he was told. But he had little idea of the centuries of racist punch that it packed, or how determined some people were to keep his world as white as possible. "I think," he says, "that until I went into the military, I had never even talked to a black person." Richard enlisted in the Army in January 1955, and his world began to expand. Driving to his first assignment after basic training, he stopped at a diner in New York and saw a black man served alongside white people in a diner for the first time. He was 19 years old. "The waiter or waitress just came up and said, `May I help you, sir?' " Richard recalls. "It just struck me because that never happened where I grew up." Not long after that, he was in California for foreign-language training and saw for the first time a white woman and black man holding hands. "I guess my mouth dropped open, like some dumb hick," Richard says. "It wasn't a negative feeling. It was just a shock. Like, you never really know how life is going to turn out." The view from Griffin was different. It must have been like a lot of small Southern towns. Moving from commercial to residential areas, you would come to a fork in the road. To the east lived black people, to the west whites. But there, at the crossroads, sat a grocery, owned by two white men. It was the only store Miriam remembers serving people of both races without separate checkout lines or other special provisions. People seemed to get along there, she says. "It taught some things, that store - that we were all alike, except in the color." And except in private life. Miriam has several memories of honking Ku Klux Klan motorcades zooming through her neighborhood, on the black side of town, just to affirm the organization's continued strength in numbers. "I remember you could hear the horns before they even turned the corner," she says. "On one occasion, I looked into one of the cars, and I looked into the eyes of the grocery owner. I think it really affected him, because he knew me." Miriam never mentioned that man's eyes to her parents, and her family continued to shop at that grocery as if nothing had happened. But that man began to see things differently. He renounced his KKK membership and took a special interest in Miriam's life, often phoning his congratulations for her achievements, which included graduating as valedictorian and receiving the highest score at her school on the SAT college-entrance exam. Later, while attending Spelman College in Atlanta, Miriam ran into the grocery owner's son. Happy to see each other, they got to talking, and Miriam surprised herself. She went on a date with a white guy. Interracial dating was still uncommon, but Atlanta was a relatively tolerant city. When Charlayne Hunter, the first black student at the University of Georgia in Athens, began dating white fellow student Walter Stovall, they often went to Atlanta together, according to a 1963 article by The Associated Press. But when Stovall and Hunter decided to marry, they eloped out of state. Stovall's father was quoted in his reaction as saying, "This is the end of the world." Georgia officials investigated options for criminal prosecution. Prosecution remained a threat for interracial couples in 16 states until 1967. It was then that the U.S. Supreme Court decided, in the case of Loving vs. Virginia, to sap the power from state laws against interracial marriage. Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter had left Virginia to marry, but they had returned afterward, and that had made them felons. According to the ruling, Virginia argued for its numerous laws against interracial marriage to prevent "the corruption of blood," "a mongrel breed of citizens" and "the obliteration of racial pride." Those ideas from the past sting Miriam today, especially when she sees them, in black and white, in the constitution of her new home state. Article 4, Section 102 of the Alabama Constitution, ratified in 1901: "The legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a negro, or descendant of a negro." Alabama is the only state left with a constitutional provision against interracial marriage, but legislators appear poised to repeal it with an amendment proposed by Rep. Alvin Holmes. A recent Associated Press poll found that at least 82 percent of the state Senate and at least 66 percent of state House of Representatives favor the amendment. So do roughly 63 percent of Alabamians, according to a November telephone poll by the Alabama Education Association. Perhaps even more striking is that almost 2 percent of marriages in Alabama were between blacks and whites in 1997, the most recent year for which the state has statistics and the year Miriam married Richard Frank. That's almost double the percentage from five years before. "I was scared to death," she says, laughing as she recalls their first dinner together. It wasn't going to be a date date - she had been clear about that - but she did like Richard. They had met at a Rudy Mockabee show. Mockabee is a former Drifter who plays music from the 1950s, '60s and '70s at the Holiday Inn-Research Park , and Miriam had grown into a big fan since moving to Huntsville in 1972. She had accepted a job as o...Expand for more