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Family a source of strength, pride

By John C. Ensslin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 16, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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On the night that Jackie St. Joan brought her boyfriend to meet her parents at their Virginia home in 1967, she chose not to tell them one thing about him.

Peter Bryson, the guy she had been dating since they met on an anti-Vietnam war picket line, was black. Or rather, he was the son of a white mother and a black man. St. Joan and her parents were white.

"Pete is very light-skinned," St. Joan said. "When I first met him, I wasn't sure. I thought maybe they wouldn't notice."

They did.

"We had a very tense meatloaf dinner," she said recently. "My mother was very upset. She was worried that the neighbors had seen us."

"They're good people," St. Joan said, as she reflected more than 50 years later on a rift that took another 15 years to heal. "I didn't communicate it very well."

Six months after that dinner, she and Bryson got married. They did so shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court declared Virginia's laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional.

Bryson recalled how on the marriage form, he filled out B for Black and St. Joan wrote H for human.

For Bryson, who grew up in an integrated, diverse Bronx neighborhood in New York City, coming from a biracial family was no big deal.

"Growing up, I never felt like I had to take sides," he said.

The couple moved to Colorado after Bryson completed medical school. They moved to Denver's Park Hill, a neighborhood with a history of integration.

They split up five years later, but remained friends and shared custody of their two children Chris and Dana, who are now 39 and 36, respectively. They still celebrate the holidays as a family.

Bryson became an emergency room doctor and toxicologist and served as an associate director of the Rocky Mountain Poison Center. He currently teaches video editing at Red Rocks Community College.

St. Joan went on to become a lawyer, municipal judge and law professor. She is a Barack Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

In all the time they have spent raising their biracial family in Denver, Bryson and St. Joan said they never experienced any significant prejudice or bigotry.

She recalled there was one incident when a classmate at Colorado Academy called her son by a racial slur on a school bus. But school officials responded when she asked them to deal with it.

Dana Bryson remembered she "looked different" at a time when teenagers worked so hard at not being different. But she realized how tolerant Denver was after going to college in Virginia.

Growing up biracial in Denver taught her interpersonal skills that she continues to use in her career as a city administrator in Oakland, Denver and Washington, D.C.

"We're just a beautiful, unique family, which has been a source of strength and pride for me," she said.

Comments

  • August 16, 2008

    10:40 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    blacksho89 writes:

    "...he was the son of a white mother and a black man."

    Is the News implying that the only duty a man has is to provide sperm and get out of the way? Isn't that the major problem in family today?

  • August 19, 2008

    9:49 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    peteSmith writes:

    Jackie St. Joan is part of Colorado's divorce industry ( http://www.knowyourcourts.com/divorce... ) I don't have enough information (anecdotal or otherwise) about her to know whether she's one of the crooked ones or, rather, one of the few ethical ones.