Carolyn Dungee Nicholas

Hilda Carolyn Dungee Nicholas

HILDA is the epic story of five-term District of Columbia Councilmember Hilda Howland Minnis Mason. The daughter of aspiring and determined, third-generation emancipated slaves, Hilda overcame a legacy of slavery, "Jim Crow" legal, social, economic, and political oppression of Afro-Virginians that followed closely behind the Emancipation, personal tragedies, and hardships to achieve social, economic and political prominence beyond her forbears' wildest imaginings. Hilda's story begins like that of every other American whose African forebears were brought to the Jamestown Colony against their will to provide free labor for the English settlers who brought with them a cultural predisposition towards blackness as symbolic of things dirty, evil, and inferior; setting the stage for generations of enslavement and the cruel and inhumane treatment of African-descended people for hundreds of years. Hilda's slave ancestors survived the cruelties, oppression, arduous conditions, and other inhumanities of slavery. Hilda's emancipated, slave ancestors survived abject poverty and seemingly insurmountable odds in an environment which denied equal rights, equal opportunities, and equal justice to Afro-Virginians. Their determination proved true the words of Roscoe Dunjee, founder and editor of The Black Dispatch, compelling civil rights activist, and one of the most powerful editorial voices anywhere in America: "Some people succeed because they are destined to, but most people succeed because they are determined to". Hilda became the beloved wife of Charles Noble Mason, Jr., a multi-millionaire descendant of English Separatists (the Pilgrims) who settled the second English colony in America at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Hilda and Charlie dedicated their lives to helping others; generously giving of their time, talents, energy, and treasure. Notwithstanding, they spent their last years in pitiable circumstances and were taken advan