Rising from the Segregated South with Dr. Helen Benjamin

Dr. Helen Benjamin is the president of HSV Consulting, a company that provides board and management development, strategic planning, and equity, diversity and inclusion services to community colleges. She’s had a long career in education: With a master’s degree and doctorate from Texas Woman’s University, Helen began as a teacher, and has also held positions as a professor, dean, chancellor and president during her more than 30 years in administration for community colleges in Texas and California. She retired in 2016 and is living in Dallas, TX, though retirement for her looks like sitting on the board of several organizations, serving through HSV Consulting, and writing and editing books.

Helen and I met at the Feathered Pipe Ranch in summer 2022, where she attended a retreat hosted by San Diego-based yoga teachers Lanita Varshell and Diane Ambrosini. She signed up hoping to find peace and respite, and as she shares in this conversation, she was able to access it—in the innate beauty and tranquility of the Ranch, the movement classes, and the like-minded people she met.

Born in 1950, Helen grew up in Alexandria, Louisiana, in the heart of the segregated South, when African Americans were forbidden by law to attend certain schools, restaurants, churches, shops and other public places. Of course we learn about slavery and racial segregation in history books, but how often do you have the chance to hear from someone whose early life was so directly affected by the fear that upheld these beliefs?

This history isn’t as old as we might imagine, and at age 73, Helen speaks of her upbringing, how she found inspiration, community and love despite the bigotry that surrounded her family and friends. She’s a similar age to many in the founding group at the Feathered Pipe Ranch, but her reality during the “hippie era” we speak of so mystically and magically was drastically different than that of our founders—and that’s why we want to highlight this story.

I ask her about her inner process of alchemizing the feelings that can stem from injustice, her spiritual path and ability to find peace and freedom within, and the importance of documenting the stories of her community and preserving history in order to move forward.

We talk about her recent book, How We Got Over: Growing up in the Segregated South— a memoir of 24 personal accounts from African Americans who graduated from Peabody High School in Alexandria, LA in 1968. This book captures the essence of Black life in the Deep South during Jim Crow laws and was born out of an epiphany Helen had while attending a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion workshop. She realized that where she grew up, between the railroad tracks, was systematically set up through redlining, and that her rise to where she sat now—in a leadership role for a college in New York—defied all odds. The stories of her and her classmates, who also went on to live full and accomplished lives, had to be told.

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