The mother sat on the superintendent's front steps.
She waited for Steven Watkins to get home.
She was patient and she was determined.
A new elementary was opening and she wanted her children to attend Clare McPhee, a laboratory school near the Capitol.
Back in 1964, most black children in Lincoln went to Elliott, but Bernice Bowling had already pulled her daughter from the school after discovering the teacher didn’t seem to know who Alice Ray Bowling was or how she was faring in class.
This new school looked promising.
“If that’s where the opportunities were, that’s where I wanted them,†she said Wednesday morning. “Because I loved my kids and I wanted them to have the best.â€
People are also reading…
The divorced mother of five spoke to Dr. Watkins. She spoke to the school board.
The Bowling kids enrolled at McPhee.
More black families followed.
“It was mom who led the pack,†said Sue Bowling Hill. “And she just kept going.â€
She got to know her children’s teachers and principals and coaches.
She fought to remove racist children’s books from classrooms, joining other determined women like Leola Bullock, Lela Shanks and her friend Joann Maxey -- tossing copies of “Little Black Sambo†to the floor.
The 85-year-old still remembers the face of an African-American boy in class as the story was read aloud, looking like he wanted to disappear.
“It made you angry,†she said. “Because the teachers were not sensitive to it.â€
She’d arrived in Lincoln from the segregated South in 1958 with her first husband and their children.
A few years later, the couple divorced and Bernice moved to a house on Y Street, later joined by her mother and brother.
She didn’t drive. She worked two jobs. She was at Christ Temple Mission Church anytime the doors were open, a deaconess who babysat for young mothers, ministered to prisoners, knitted lap robes for the infirm, quietly gave and gave and gave.
“God keeps me going,†Bernice told the newspaper in 1994. “He’s my all in all.â€
She’d married again on Feb. 25, 1967. His name was Obasi Onuoha. An honorable and charming man who loved the Lord.
He called her honey.
She called him honey right back.
The woman from Texas and the man from Nigeria would have three children together, a family with eight children that grew and grew during their 50-year marriage.
When Obasi died last year, his stretched to list them all -- 19 grandchildren and spouses, 10 greats. It included their adopted families, too: The Browns and the Davises, the Haynes and the Joneses, the Lawrences and the Mardenboroughs, the Maxeys and the Kirklands.
“They just took me in as one of their children,†Dolores Kirkland said Wednesday.
The Lincoln Public Schools counselor had arrived in Lincoln from New York for graduate school in 1975 and met Bernice and Osabi at church.
“Even with a houseful of people, there was always room for somebody else,†she said. “They loved us like we’re part of the family, and it just continues.â€
Every Tuesday, Bernice hosted a dinner -- spaghetti and chili, meals that would stretch. She invited her kids and grandkids, church family and girlfriends, packed them all into the modest ranch on Woods Boulevard.
When her oldest grandson was a Husker, football players filled the folding chairs.
“They all called her grandma then and still do today,†Jon Bowling said. “One thing I learned from her is that in our culture, family extends out into the community.â€
There were two boys and six girls in the Bowling-Onuoha family, and lots of boyfriends.
“My parents said, ‘We don’t care who you are dating, as long as they are of good character,’†Bowling Hill said. “We’ve always had all colors in our family.â€
Those colors show in the family photos on the mantle.
Bernice and Obasi helped integrate a white neighborhood in south Lincoln -- despite a petition drive to keep them out. “She paved the way for people of color in Lincoln and beyond,â€Â said granddaughter Michelle Wirth.Â
Being one of the few black faces in school? “It gave us the opportunity to teach other people we all bleed red,†Bowling Hill said.
She never wanted her kids to settle, Bernice says.
“I told them, ‘There’s no such thing as you can’t do it.â€
She led by example.
When she applied for a job at Lincoln General and they offered her a housekeeping position, she fixed them with a stare. Pardon me, that’s not what I’m applying for.
When she went to the Kresge’s store downtown and passed the written test and a white woman -- who hadn’t -- got the job, she returned to ask why.
In 1964, she sat on the porch of a school superintendent’s house -- night after night until she caught him at home.
And her grandchildren know the stories.
“The lessons she taught my mother and her siblings live on in her grandchildren and great-grandchildren,†Wirth said. “We do not accept the status quo. We continue to advocate for our children, our communities and for a better society as a whole.â€