1. No Safe Place
In 1960, a Black woman having a baby with a white man was more than controversial; it was dangerous. Their union was illegal in most states. Families risked isolation, violence, and legal consequences simply for loving across racial lines. That’s why one interracial couple made the difficult decision to give up their child, a choice shaped not by a lack of love, but by a world that refused to make room for it. They never imagined the role that she would later play in protecting civil rights and fighting racial discrimination across the country.
Her name was Anita Earls. After she was put up for adoption, little Anita was sent to different group homes and eventually ended up at the Children’s Home Society in Seattle. The building was large and institutional, its windows overlooking an outdoor play area where children waited for families that might never come.
The experience made her worry, at a very young age, that she wasn’t good enough. “The woman who carried me and gave birth to me didn’t want me,” she said. That thought lingered, settling into her identity before she was old enough to question it. Her caretakers believed that a mixed-race baby could only be placed with an interracial family. That left the orphanage with few options, as the percentage of interracial married couples was in the low single digits.
A loving couple finally adopted her before her second birthday. They had met in Missouri, a Black man and a white woman who couldn’t legally get married. “It was incredibly brave of the two of them to fall in love,” Earls said. Their relationship was an act of quiet defiance against a system built to keep them apart. “My father risked his safety to be with my mom,” she said.
Her adoptive mother was Hazel Brooks, a white woman who grew up outside of Springfield, Kentucky. She was affectionately known as “Reb.” The nickname was a reflection of her strong will, independence, and refusal to conform to expectations.
“She was a rebel from an early age,” Earls said, “and she was stubborn.” Reb wanted to be a nurse and worked for seven years, through World War II, to save enough money for nursing school. It was a persistence shaped by limited opportunities and quiet determination.
Her first marriage ended after the couple couldn’t have children. Reb was working at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis when she met a handsome orderly named Garnett Brooks.
Brooks had grown up on a farm in a small Missouri town, where his parents sometimes spoke in an old slave dialect, and he wanted to get out. There was no four-year college in Missouri that would admit a Black man, so he attended a two-year school and returned to work on a farm.
“My dad told me stories about the level of disrespect that he experienced as a young man working on this farm,” Earls recalled. “And ultimately, he decided that he was never going to be able to make anything of himself on the farm.” So, Brooks packed up and moved to St. Louis, the gateway to the West.
The move opened doors that had once seemed unreachable. In the city, Brooks was something of a Renaissance man. He worked as both a boxer and a semi-professional bowler. He drove a taxi for a while, a job that left him with stories about driving Black artists like Louis Armstrong around St. Louis.
When Brooks was denied the opportunity to obtain a barber’s license, he hired an attorney. They negotiated a settlement that allowed him to take the barber license exam, but he had to do it sitting in his car, outside.
Brooks had been married before, but it never seemed to work out. “He was an incredibly handsome, generous, loving, and truly brilliant man,” Earls said. “I don’t know why he couldn’t find the right woman. None of them was able to create the family he wanted.”
Then Brooks fell in love with a spunky nurse named Reb. They couldn’t get married in Missouri, so Brooks found a job as a urological technician at a hospital in Seattle.
Brooks had dreamed of becoming a doctor, but he didn’t have any advanced degrees. Instead, he learned on the job and got his certification to become a technician, a role that has long since come to require a college degree. He built his career through determination, rather than formal education. Brooks even went on to train medical students at the University of Washington. “My father worked really hard throughout his career to be treated fairly and recognized for his accomplishments,” Earls reflected. “It was just an incredible career path that would not be possible today.”
He persevered in the face of discrimination on the job and struggled to get paid as much as his white coworkers. Earls recalled one of the few times she saw her dad cry. His bosses had asked him to take down a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. that he had placed on the bulletin board after King was assassinated.
Earls revered her father for his “incredible humility and courage, a determination that he would never let hate overcome him.” Through it all, Brooks kept a positive attitude and found a way to provide for his family. “He faced all these setbacks and challenges and never let himself get bitter,” she said.
The family struggled to pay bills and often lived paycheck to paycheck. “My mom had to make tough choices,” Earls said. “One month, she couldn’t pay the electricity bill, and the next month, it was the phone bill.”
Both of her parents had grown up during the Great Depression. “They came from families that farmed the land, and they knew what it was like to go without a meal,” she said. Earls saw her parents’ courage and self-determination in the face of adversity. The family ate a lot of rice and beans, but the kids were never hungry.
Her parents adopted a baby, her little brother Aaron, when she was still a toddler. “We were as close as any siblings can be,” she said. Because their mom worked night shifts and slept in the afternoon, the kids spent a lot of time outside on their bikes. The neighborhood became their playground.
As the older sibling, Anita would entertain Aaron. “I would ride him around on my back, and then when it was my turn to ride, being bigger, I could sit on him and make it impossible for him to move,” she recalled. From a young age, she felt a responsibility to take care of her little brother.
Earls and her little brother with Santa Claus.
Aaron was a fun-loving kid. “He was a sweet, outgoing, rambunctious child who wanted to make the world laugh with him,” Earls said. “But white people who did not take the time to know him saw him as a troublemaking, threatening Black boy.” The contrast between who he was and how he was perceived became an early and painful lesson in bias. She described her brother facing more discrimination because he had darker skin than his adoptive sister.
Anita tried to protect her little brother from the harsh realities of the world. Even as a child, she sensed dangers she could not fully name. She had a recurring nightmare about their school burning down and trying to get Aaron out.
When he was a toddler, Aaron fell into the lake where the family vacationed in the summer. The kids couldn’t swim. “He went under the dock and came up on the other side,” Earls recalled. She reached in with her tiny arms and pulled her brother to safety. The moment passed quickly, but its weight lingered, how close she had come to losing him. When their parents asked, the kids downplayed the danger.
The family spent time together on the weekends. Brooks loved to watch boxing on TV. “I couldn’t sit next to him when he did, because he would throw punches in the air,” Earls said.
On Sundays, the family attended a Lutheran church. “They chose that denomination partly because the church would marry them,” Earls said. But the church drew the line at letting her father become a deacon.
When she went with her mother to the jewelry counter at a department store, the woman behind the counter turned around and refused to serve them. “Well, my mom wasn’t going to tolerate anybody mistreating us,” she said. Reb called the lady out and demanded to see a bracelet.
When Anita was around seven, the family moved to a mostly white neighborhood. “Every time we left our front door, whether we were going to the store, going to church, or wherever, people stared at us,” she said. “It was scary, as a young girl.”
There were people who didn’t want them in their neighborhood. Earls remembers riding her bike down the street with her brother when a neighbor turned her garden hose on them. “It made no sense,” she said. “But it certainly made us feel unwelcome.”
On another occasion, Aaron was playing at a white friend’s house. When the child’s father came home, he kicked Aaron out and slammed a fence gate against his back.
Aaron came home with a bloody scratch. “I remember my fear, because my father wasn’t going to let that happen… So he went to the house down the street and pounded on the front door,” she said. The children were terrified that something might happen to their father. “And when he came home safe, I was so relieved.”
Earls described a sense of physical fear in the late 1960s, as riots exploded in cities around the country. As a young girl, she had nightmares about her family getting caught up in the unrest. She feared that if they were in a white neighborhood, people could target her father. “And if we were in a Black community, my mom may not be welcome,” she said. “It just felt like there was no safe place for my family.”
Even as a young child, Anita faced the racism that pervaded American society. She recalled hearing derogatory words to describe mixed-race children, “like we were the worst of the worst… It was illegal for the races to mix, and we were the bad thing that society didn’t want to happen.”
She saw echoes of that racism in her brother’s report cards. Earls said the negative comments were “partly about the fact that he appeared to be behaving the way a young Black male behaves: wearing a big Afro, full of tough talk and bravado.” The way Aaron expressed himself was interpreted through a lens of bias.
Aaron was frustrated by his academic struggles, and he became “the misidentified source of my mom’s constant disappointment,” according to Earls. Their mom, who had been physically abused as a child, couldn’t help but yell at the kids. “She didn’t know any other way to mother,” Earls said. “Everything we did earned us a barrage of biting criticism.”
She recalled her brother withering under the verbal assaults. The more he struggled in school, the worse their mother treated him. “He loved Mom so much, and she could only see his faults and shortcomings,” Earls said.
Aaron wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia until he was 17, and he didn’t graduate high school. Instead, he joined the military at a young age.
Unlike some of Aaron’s teachers, Earls knew that her brother’s struggles had nothing to do with the color of his skin. She had read an academic article in the Harvard Education Review that argued Black people were inferior and less intelligent. But young Anita knew that was wrong. “My father’s family were people of great dignity and big hearts,” she said.
Although Reb’s family had cut off contact, Earls was embraced by her adoptive father’s Black family. “That side of the family was the only family that I knew,” she said. “That was my culture.” Her paternal grandmother, who trusted little Anita to run errands, loved and embraced her.
Encountering those bigoted ideas led Anita to work hard in school. She was determined to prove the racists wrong. “I had to get straight A’s, because I had to prove that I was just as good as every white student in my school,” she said. “And I did. I just internalized all that and vowed to do my best to make things better for my family, for my community.”
The straight-A student began thinking about college and eventually, a career as a lawyer. Anita joined the high school debate team to improve her speaking skills. She worked at a law firm in the summers. “I had opportunities that my father didn’t have,” she said. “And if I became a lawyer, I could try to help people who were facing discrimination on the job, as he did.”
Every day, when Anita walked to high school, she passed the Children’s Home Society. She saw the kids who didn’t have a family to take care of them and the challenges they faced. “That always stuck with me,” Earls said decades later. “Even though I faced some disadvantages, I was extremely lucky.” And she was determined to make the most of that luck.
Earls at Williams College in 1980.
