THE BLACK HISTORY LOST TO COVID-19
I ALWAYS TAKE NOTE OF PICTURES OF WOMEN WHO ARE not flashing a camera-ready grin.
They make me wonder what such a woman has done with her life that it need not be rendered more palatable with a big, uncomplicated, toothpaste-ad smile. So the first photo I saw of Claudia Booker—the one the people who loved her selected for her obituary when it ran nearly two years ago—held my attention from the beginning.
As I explored the life of Claudia Booker, who died on Feb. 19, 2020, at 71—after careers as a teacher, a community activist, a lawyer, a Carter Administration staffer, an administrative judge, and, finally, a doula, childbirth educator, and midwife—I found not simply the story of a woman with a remarkably agile mind. A few days before she died, Booker texted another Black birthworker, one of the women into whom she’d poured so much of what she knew, that
