Interview with Joyce Seals, Saginaw (Michigan) Mayor

Joyce Seals in 2003 stepped down from 10 years of Saginaw (Michigan) City Council service and publicly revealed that she was fighting breast cancer. She was 54 years old at the time. My assignment, reporting for The Saginaw News, was to interview Joyce Seals for this revelation. Her words are unforgettable.

"I'm not afraid to die," Joyce Seals said back then, "but I'm not afraid to live, either."

To live, indeed! Joyce Seals brought breast cancer to its knees. It didn't hurt that her husband and the father of their eight outstanding children (seven girls!), Dr. Eugene Seals, is a family physician. Also, both of them are products of the University of Michigan, which oversees one of the world's finest hospitals.

Within a year, breast cancer was in remission and Joyce Seals was back in action. A commission was formed in 2004 to update the Saginaw City Charter, which in this hard-hit "Little Detroit" city of 60,000 is like the local version of the U.S. Constitution. There were 24 candidates from various walks of life for these nine City Charter Commission seats, and Joyce Seals received so many more votes than any of the others, it wasn't even close. Keep in mind that this is an African-American woman in one of the nation's most segregated cities. Joyce Seals has bridged that chasm with her universal appeal to the common good.

Then came 2007. Saginaw's City Council elections are in the odd-numbered years, and Joyce Seals became a candidate for an inspiring return to the local governing body, where she previously had served from 1993 through 2003. Once more, voters provided overwhelming support, and Joyce Seals returned to the City Council. And then, on the Monday after the election, her council colleagues appointed her Mayor of Saginaw.

Joyce Seals' two-year tenure as mayor concluded November 9, 2009. Someone else, an advertising executive named Greg Branch, now is mayor. Joyce Seals remains as a City Council member, but to me, she will always henceforth remain Mayor Seals.

When I asked Mayor Seals if she would take time for an interview with Associated Content as "the most famous person I know," she giggled with laughter. "Me? Famous?" was her response. Her humility is one reason why I admire her so much.

This obviously is not an audio interview, but it would be good for you the reader to have sort of a vision for Mayor Seals' manner of speaking. She has a rapid-fire cadence that is similar to Oprah Winfrey, but an octave or two higher. The difference is that we often observe Oprah pontificating on petty stuff, such as chatting up Ellen DeGeneres on "allowing" Ellen to join her on the cover of 'O' Magazine. How trivial, when we face so many collective challenges these days. When Mayor Seals speaks, in contrast, there is true content to what she is saying. Mayor Seals can speak in an expert manner, for example, on the rules for federal monies to be delivered to distressed cities such as Saginaw, but at the same time, Mayor Seals will break down these details so that the everyday citizen can understand.

Furthermore, if Mayor Seals had her own magazine, she would not place her own image on the cover over and over again. Mayor Seals instead would prop up others in the community, and place their photographs on the cover. This is the kind of person she is, always striving to bring out the best in others, for what President Obama describes as a "multiplier effect" in leadership development. Mayor Seals constantly will prop up other people and then sort of hide in the background, like she didn't really do anything.

The Associated Content offer to interview "the most famous person I know" arrives at an ideal time. Mayor Seals' mother, Mary Viola "Jean" Aldridge, was a school teacher who passed away into a higher place in 1999. I only barely had a chance to meet Mrs. Aldridge. However, Mayor Seals' father, the Rev. William Aldridge, endured remarkably until he passed away in August 2009. Ever since then, my goal has been to write some sort of tribute for Mayor Seals, just a modest sort of gift for her. And now, good 'ol AC provides an opportunity.

You see, my good fortune to meet Pastor Aldridge happened even before encountering Mayor Seals and her other family members. This was way back in 1976, at the age of 20 years old. I had volunteered for a project that nowadays is like AmeriCorps, volunteer community service, and was assigned to Saginaw's poorest and most ravaged neighborhood. The assignment was to go house to house and find neighbors who would be motivated to form their own neighborhood group, to take action on concerns such as rundown housing and overgrown vacant lots and streets with potholes and youth recreation, anything the neighbors identified as positive. Well, we needed a place to meet, and Pastor Aldridge agreed that we could meet at Christ Community Church. Even though many of the neighbors were members of other churches, this didn't matter to Pastor Aldridge. He attended the first meeting but he didn't get up and preach, he just listened to the neighbors discuss their various concerns. Then, after the meeting, I asked if it would be possible to continue meeting in the church. Pastor Aldridge not only said "yes," but he took a key off of his chain and gave ME a key to the church. Not only was I appreciative, but totally flabbergasted. Like, thank you thank you thank you. Our group for seven years met in this modern burnt-orange-brick church, complete with handicap-access ramp, but even when neighbors took a collection to help pay the heat bill for Pastor Aldridge's church, he declined to accept.

Now that you know a little bit about Joyce Seals and her family, this is where we will begin.

Mayor Seals, it's been 33 years and it's still hard to believe that your father gave me the key to the church.

"That's the kind of person Daddy was. He could see, Mike, that you were getting the people involved as citizens. In Eupora, Mississippi, back in the 1940s and 1950s, there were only eight Black people who were allowed to vote, and then only if they voted the 'right' way. So after we moved to Saginaw, in 1953, Daddy always spoke about the importance of getting out to vote and getting involved. He would say that if something is going to go right, we have to make it go right.

"On my mother's side, my grandmother was a teacher and my mother was a teacher. Education also was very important to us. I'm a product of those kinds of experiences."

Only eight people allowed to vote? But Mayor Seals, you really haven't talked much in public about racism.

"My grandparents in Mississippi had to pay for their house three times over. The White people cheated them. Back in those days, we didn't complain. We might have been killed. I vowed at the age of 3, 'God, get me out of here.' And when I was 4 years old, that's when we moved to Saginaw."

But it's not as though Saginaw was, or is, free of prejudice, either.

"We moved into a house on Bundy Street, on the South Side. I never had a Black teacher until I was in seventh grade. Her name was Doreen Leek. But like I said, education was very important in my family, for all seven of us children. There were men working for General Motors at the time in Saginaw who had to sign their names with an 'X.' My parents were going to have none of that with us.

"My mother never allowed us to have idle time. I always had a workbook around. And those Readers Digest condensed books, I don't know how many dozens of those I 'digested.'" (Chuckles.)

Okay, how was it that young and book-smart Joyce Aldridge met tall and handsome Eugene Seals?

"There was a basketball game at Central Junior High School, and Eugene was on their team, and he came running onto the court, and somehow he knocked me down. So, being the gentleman that he is, he smiled and picked me back up, and then he went into the game. Later he asked his friends, 'Who is that girl?' And I asked my friends, 'Who is that guy?'

"I was at Webber Junior High and he was at Central, so it took months before I could see him. We just constantly talked on the phone. Finally, one Sunday the next spring, Eugene's family lived only a few blocks from the church, and so I left church in the afternoon and walked to meet him. We shook hands for the first time. That's how things were, in those days.

"On my birthday, June the 8th, Eugene's mother drove him over, and then she drove us around while we sat in the back seat. We were just happy to be able to talk in person. He was also academically inclined, like myself. This was the man I wanted to marry. I knew it in the 10th grade."

Dr. Seals "accidentally" knocked you down and picked you up, Mayor Seals?

"He would do some clumsy stuff back then."

We will let the readers be the judges. Your husband may have had some strategy in that case. Anyway, please tell us about your lives as a young couple at the University of Michigan.

"Actually, the first year I was at Saginaw Valley State College, which was newly opened at the time, and there were two Black students, Benjamin Banks and myself. But then Eugene decided he was going to go to U-M, and so of course, I wanted to go too. We also decided we would be married, and so on December the 20th, 1968, we were married during the Christmas break. My parents had a fit at the thought of us marrying so young, both of us in college, but I've always been a determined person, and Eugene and I have defied the odds at every level.

"We didn't know anything about any birth control pills and let me tell you, they can say what they want about condoms, but condoms don't always work. Before I knew it, I was expecting with our first girl, but this was no time to quit school. A year later, our second girl came along. Eugene and I both found a way. Our schedules were so hectic that for three years, we never had lunch hour at the same time, but somehow we made it.

"Eugene had a science major from U-M and so he was able to get a teaching job in 1973 with the Buena Vista schools (a suburb of Saginaw), but overall the teaching market was glutted at that time, and so I went to work with the State of Michigan unemployment office in Saginaw."

They put you on the radio for the Job Line, to announce the local job listings.

"Yes. I was providing information about all sorts of available jobs, federal and state jobs, which in the past had not been advertised to everyday people."

Let's move ahead to 1982. The economy goes in the tank, and your husband is laid off.

"Eugene Junior had just been born, our only son but our seventh overall. My husband was able to find some substitute teaching work, but we had to go in a different direction. In 1986, Eugene enrolled in medical school at Michigan State University at the age of 38 years old and soon after, I found a job with the Michigan Department of Education in Lansing (the state capitol). We moved to Grand Ledge, near Lansing. We were so poor; 1987, 1988, that was a rough time for us, but we had a good family network to support us. Eugene finished medical school and we came back home in 1990, although I kept my job in Lansing and continued to commute."

This was when your older children had become grownups and had moved out of the nest, and you started to become involved in neighborhood organizing work.

"I had been involved somewhat previously back in the early '80s with SNI (Saginaw Neighborhoods Incorporated, which folded in 1986), but then when we came back home, the Houghton-Jones Neighborhood Task Force was just getting started in the area where we made our new home. This was where I started to learn about going door-to-door, house-to-house, to get people involved.

"I learned those lessons in the trenches, and decided those lessons could be applied on a higher level. Then, in 1993, there were openings in local government. At first I wanted to run for the school board, but decided on the City Council.

"I went into it with no training, and nobody told me what to do. All I could do was pray. There was a public forum for all the candidates and I walked in with no pieces of paper, nothing written down. I could only think of Luke Chapter 12, Verse 11: 'When they take you before rulers and authorities, do not worry about what you will say.' And at this forum, I blew that audience away. I remember a little old White lady coming up to me afterwards and telling me, 'We felt a tingling go up and down our spines.'

"So, I won the election. Until then, I had felt powerless in my life to do anything about the conditions. When I was elected to the City Council, I told myself, 'I want to be sensitive enough to see all of the junk, and powerful enough to do something about it.'"

Please tell us about your first steps on the City Council.

"From the work I had done in the trenches in the Houghton-Jones neighborhood, I could articulate the needs and the feelings of the grassroots people. I started to make sure there were mini-grants available for these groups, priorities like that.

"I had a great deal of training about how the federal block grants work (for low-income areas). I had all of that information before I hit the door. So I just asked the Lord, if you want me in this position, please guide me.

"Another of my goals, having a background as an educator, was to make sure that people understood things. At lot of times, we use acronyms and all that. I'm sensitive to the fact that people need things broken down so they can understand how it impacts them.

"I didn't realize back in 1993 that the City of Saginaw was in such bad financial shape. I asked myself, Lord, what have I gotten myself into? And now, 16 years later, the situation is even more difficult. It's like your home when you have a financial crisis or you're laid off. You have to make accommodations to your income, and that's what we've done in city government. A lot of cities are dealing with the same problems."

Your time on the City Council was interrupted. Please share with us how you learned of contracting breast cancer.

"My husband examined me, and found a lump. At first the lump was only the size of a beebee, but within a year, it was the size of a grape, and he insisted that it come out, and so I had the surgery.

"I figured after the surgery that I wasn't just going to sit around, and so I drove to the airport in Chicago to pick up our son, who had been overseas playing basketball in Europe. Then I drove him back to college in Oxford, Ohio, and then drove home. All in all, this was two days. And Eugene didn't want to tell me while I was on the road that the biopsy had shown that the tumor was malignant, so he waited until I was back home. It was 2 o'clock or 3 o'clock in the morning and Eugene said, 'There's something I have to tell you.'

"I didn't cry. I didn't sleep much, but all I could say was nothing. I just listened. By the next Monday morning, I was sitting in the waiting room at the (University of Michigan) hospital in Ann Arbor, and that's when the treatments began. Needless to say, these were some stressful times, but I am one of the fortunate ones. I had been reluctant to take the mammograms but now I will be the first to preach, women should be tested, and tested on a regular basis. Tests can be taken for free in most communities, for women who don't have the money."

In closing, even though the City Council is nonpartisan, there's still a lot of politics. Please tell us about the politics.

"When I started, I didn't understand the ulterior motives that some people have. Some of the things that people say and do, I just have to ask, 'How do you get away with stuff like that?' This can still be a racist town. The treachery is what can get to me at times.

"Still, the goal is to try to help people. If they don't have anybody to advocate for them, then where do they have to turn? I don't know what else to do, but to stay involved. Thank God for the husband I have. He understands that I'm trying to do my best to help the City of Saginaw."