March 11, 2004
Orchestrating how to make a difference: Russell honored for catalyst role
The mention of her name lights up the faces of those who know her. Millie Russell’s impact on people is more than her warmth, keen interest in others, generous laugh and gifted storytelling.
She is a natural teacher whose goal is to help others to success and whose deep caring for humanity is evident in her work as assistant to the vice president at the UW’s Office of Minority Affairs.
“I orchestrate how to make a difference,” said Russell, who received an award this year from the Technology Access Foundation.
The Kiongozi Award celebrates community leaders who have “dedicated their lives” to creating opportunities for young persons of color.
She initiated a program at the UW in 1987 that exposes disadvantaged middle-school students to state universities, employing college students as their after-school tutors. The goal is to build skills and confidence, to explore career choices, to provide mentors and role models and to support a desire to go to college.
The Early Scholars Outreach Program inspired a nationwide program, GEAR UP, that partners middle schools with parents, universities and community organizations to help prepare for college students who might not otherwise be inclined to seek higher education.
Russell is also a lecturer in biology, teaching immunohematology to medical residents and a series of preparatory science and college-skills classes to minority students new to campus.
She grew up poor in Depression-era Seattle in a family at the center of the city’s flourishing African-American culture. One of eight children, seven of whom survived childhood, Russell had four sisters who were musically gifted with perfect pitch. The famous contralto Marian Anderson heard the eldest daughter, Edith, play and offered scholarship help that resulted in study in Paris and at the Julliard School of Music. Pat, another sister, gave music lessons to Quincy Jones, then at Garfield High School, who was sometimes teased by the sisters when he came to practice at the house.
“Quincy, you just don’t have no rhythm,” Millie recalled them saying at the time to Jones, who would go on to win Grammys and other major awards as a music producer and impresario.
With a piano, big family, and devoted parents, the house was a lively center of activity and Russell’s mother walked the children two miles to go to the library, even though people of color were not particularly welcome there. They went to free and low-cost cultural events at the old Meany Hall, and the Orpheum and Metropolitan theaters. She remembers seeing a performance by actor and singer Paul Robeson.
The children all went to white Catholic schools and advanced education was a family expectation. So was the idea of making a difference in the world.
Around the big wooden kitchen table in the evening, family discussions ranged from news to how to handle instances of racism.
“My parents would relate current events to values and to what our ancestors would have done and then the struggle that people have had in America and particularly the people of color, African Americans,” Russell said. “And our responsibility to make a difference. It was really ground into us that we each had talent and value and we needed to be there for a purpose.”
Both of her parents were the children of freed slaves and the driving force behind the family’s philosophy of education was Russell’s mother, Edith, who was orphaned as a youngster. She and her younger brother were sent to live with relatives who did not treat them well. Through the intervention of a priest at the Catholic church they attended, both children were moved and enrolled in Catholic schools. Edith lived with an Irish family, working as a chore girl and earning 50 cents a week. She saved this money and eventually attended Fisk University, which was founded in 1866 to educate newly freed slaves. After two years, Edith’s money ran out and she had to quit college, something she never forgot.
She found a career as a chiropodist and hair stylist after training at the Madame Walker School, which allowed students to pay as they learned and worked. A pioneer in African-American business, C.J. Walker became America’s first woman entrepreneurial millionaire.
Edith determined that each of her children would have the opportunity to complete their educations, and her husband, Augustus, agreed.
His father died when Gus was in the ninth grade and he worked for many years to support his mother and sisters. He was thought to be the first black person hired by the Canadian Railroad, but lost his job over his refusal to accept an incident of racism by another employee.
Gus became a longshoreman and, after seeing the beauty of Seattle from its docks, moved his wife and children to the city in the 1920s, where Millie Russell was born in 1926.
In Seattle her father was captivated by a speech by Harry Bridges, the famous labor organizer and founder of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Gus soon became a representative of the union and a longshoreman leader.
Because her sisters were musically talented and Russell was not, her parents pointed her in the direction of science. Her parents said that the black community needed scientists.
“Science satisfied my curiosity and I could help people,” said Russell.
She earned her undergraduate degree in medical technology and a secondary science-teaching certificate at Seattle University. She worked at the King County Central Blood Bank, the largest in the country at the time, and became the director of immunohematology. The facility was a leader in tissue matching, necessary for advanced medical procedures such as organ transplants.
Russell started teaching the resident doctors who came to the center for training and became the director of technical education there. She was approached to teach some students from a Garfield High School magnet program who came to the blood bank to explore careers in the sciences, and it set Russell on her track as a teacher and mentor of young students of color.
She came to the UW during the mid-1980s to teach entering minority students interested in the sciences after the results of a two-year task force determined that these students needed specific preparation in the sciences to be successful at the University. These preparatory courses include human biology, communication, career exposure and anatomy and physiology.
After some trouble at the Office of Minority Affairs about enrollment access to the UW, Russell was asked to add to her job by becoming the assistant to the vice president of minority affairs. She continued her own education at the University, earning a master of science in health education and a doctorate in higher education, policy, governance and administration.
Lette Hadgu, director of the Seattle Early Scholars Outreach GEAR UP, has fondness and respect for Russell.
“She’s a catalyst,” Hadgu said.
The program Hadgu directs was initiated by Russell and the legacy that was passed through Millie Russell’s mother continues to new generations of minority students who see opportunity for higher education through GEAR UP and the early scholars program.
Estella Navas-Algarin, who received a 2002 UW degree in zoology with minors in art history, medical history and ethics and music, wrote Russell: “I am finally graduating. . . .Thank you for always encouraging me, especially when I needed it the most. I’ll never forget your kindness.”
Russell was a mentor to Hadgu and she credits Russell’s passion and caring for empowering others.
“Nothing is impossible for her. The way she looks at life is the possible, so there’s more happiness there,” Hadgu said.
Russell served as a regent at Seattle University for 10 years, is the secretary/treasurer of the Washington State Association of Black Professionals in Health Care, chairman of the Seattle/Mombassa Sister City Association, chair and finance officer for Blacks in Science and holds memberships and offices in many other professional and community organizations.
She was honored in 2001, on her 75th birthday, when the City of Seattle declared Dr. Millie L. Russell Day.
As Russell recently walked down the hall at the Office of Minority Affairs, several staffers leaned out their office doors with smiling greetings and a waiting student got a kind word and hand on the shoulder.
“I was raised to value purpose and to value humanitarian causes and to value making a difference, because my parents said each one of us — we were going to work hard and we were going to have opportunity,” Russell said. “Many of our ancestors did not have those opportunities and we owed something to society. We owed something to our people and we owed something to our black history.”
