Christine Adams Tripp, J.D.
Sunrise: September 11, 1945
Sunset: May 26, 2002
The following was written in October 2001
for Breast Cancer Awareness month. At the time, neither
one of us knew Christine's cancer was back.
Christine Adams Tripp is
not only my best friend, she has also been my teacher and has
taught me the meaning of the word “survivor.” Her life has been
one survival story after another and to quote Maya Angelou, and
still she rises.
She was born and raised in
Watts, California. As an infant, she was handed over to
surrogate grandparents when her mother’s husband came home from
military service and found his wife had an infant that was not
his child. As she tells the story, “she was playing around
while her husband was at war, when he came back from the war, he
told her ‘you need to get rid of that baby or I’m leaving.’ She
got rid of me to keep him.”
“Nana,”
and her husband were the surrogate grandparents who took both
Christine and her sister. She stayed with Nana from the time
she was two weeks old until she was nine. Unfortunately, her
surrogate grandfather began molesting her and the state
intervened telling her mother, either take the children back or
they would go to foster care. She reluctantly took the children
back and told them she was only doing this because she had to.
“She said she did not like us and the only reason why she was
taking us was so we didn’t have to go to foster care, so I had
to go live with her,” Christine recalls, “she didn’t like us and
we didn’t like her. This was the first time I ever met a woman
who was smoking and drinking and carousing in the streets.”
[Picture left, Christine and I At Nancy Wilson Benefit for
Minority AIDS Project]
Her mother never
encouraged her children to excel, quite the contrary, she did
more to douse their dreams and aspirations than to encourage
them. However, Christine still managed to overcome her mother’s
damaging insults and became a voracious reader, a violinist, a
member of the chess team, and a top student in school. “I
remember coming home one day” Christine recalls, “I was a
straight ‘A’ student. I came home one day with my good grades
and she said ‘I don’t know why you’re studying this way; you
ain’t never going to be nothing.” This is one of many examples
in which Christine has had to overcome adversity in order to
survive.
Christine knew,
definitively, she was a lesbian at 13 years of age. Although,
when she was 4 or 5 years old, there was this female minister at
church she liked. She told her Nana she wanted to marry her.
Her grandmother told her “you cannot marry her.” She, as
children are wont to do, thought it was because she was simply
too young at the time, so, at 8-year old, she asked her Nana,
“now can I marry her?” Her grandmother’s answer was the same.
At 12, she fell in love
with her gym teacher, Miss Johnson. As she describes it, “I
walked in and saw this fine, fine woman! She said ‘okay, listen
up girls . . .’ – I was in love. She had this pretty dark skin,
she had on some white shorts, she was wearing white tennis shoes
with white socks, she had on a starched white shirt and the
collar was turned up just a little bit – she was a dyke’s dyke.
That’s when I fell in love with butch women. When I found out
she was the tennis coach, I took up tennis.”
At about 10 or 11 years of
age, she and her brother (who is also gay) and a gay cousin
started running the streets together. “I was about 12, 13, 14”
she recalls, “I was the only girl with all of these gay guys at
the ‘quads’ at school. My brother and my cousin introduced me
to them and I went home with each of them because I was always
someone’s girlfriend.” Sylvester was one of these young men.
Christine
married young and the marriage was one of convenience – he too
was a gay man. “I needed to get away from my mother and he
needed to get away from his.” They tried to make it as a
straight couple, but as Christine puts it “we tried it for a
minute and moved on.” The couple had one son, Darrell.
[Photo left:
Christine's son Darrell]
During this time,
Christine became active in theatre, music, and became active in
the Civil Rights Movement. She sang in the choir at James
Cleveland’s church; performed with Ben Vereen for a year and a
half in the Los Angeles Production of Hair; was in the Los
Angeles production of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Universal
Amphitheater; sang with various theatrical productions; and sang
with the Clara Ward Singers and the Caravans. She also did solo
tours with USO during the Vietnam War, and marched with Martin
Luther King in Selma, Alabama in 1964.
On September 22, 1969,
Christine received the offer to take the female Black role in
Hair and to appear for rehearsals that evening. Within the
hour, Christine received another monumental phone call from the
Los Angeles Police Department notifying her of her husband’s
murder. Her celebration was put on hold, but she continued on
and the next week, she joined the company of Hair.
Christine did her first
solo album entitled “Mr. Soul Brother,” produced by Robert
Mercer of Cyclone Records, in 1970. Water and Power, a group
comprised of both she and her brother and another artist, came
out with two albums produced by Fantasy Records.
Christine became an
ordained minister on March 22, 1972. Her ministry is focused on
Social Justice and as a minister of social justice, Christine
was active in community affairs and helped start many
organizations such as Consultants for Community Programs;
Peoples School of Law; helped to organize and was the Director
of Pregnancy and Abortion Counseling of the Los Angeles Free
Clinic and was a board member; organized Do It Now Foundation;
organized and was first president of the Crenshaw Free Clinic;
was the co-founder and first president of the Educational Center
For the Deaf; and she established House of Concern in 1983.
Christine is also a founding member of Unity Fellowship Church
and the Minority AIDS Project. Unity’s first church meetings
were held in her home in Los Angeles for approximately seven
months before they moved to the Ebony Showcase on Washington
Blvd. Currently, Christine is an Associate Minister at Christ
Spiritual Truth Ministries in North Long Beach, California.
This is the 48th ministry/organization Christine has
been involved with.
In 1975, after graduating
from UCLA with honors, she was accepted at UWLA School of Law.
Upon entering the school, she discovered there was a “practice
where the school graduated one Black student every year. Since
I knew I was going to graduate, and I saw 45 other Black
people that came into the same class with me, I knew I had to
organize. In 1976, I founded and became the first president of
the Black American Law Student Association at UWLA. In 1979,
when I graduated as Vice President of the Senior Class, 17 other
Black students graduated with me. That was the largest number
of Black law students that ever graduated at that school.
Subsequent to that, they now graduate between 10 and 12 Blacks
every year.”
Christine was faced with
another challenge in December 1990, when she was diagnosed with
breast cancer: She recalls, “I was going in for routine
checkups at the time because I had been diagnosed with a
fibrocystic condition of the breasts in 1973. The doctors were
taking approximately 60cc’s of liquid from each breast every
three or four months. 10 years prior, doctors wanted to remove
my breasts and suggested I get implants. They were sure I would
eventually be diagnosed with breast cancer. I told them then
that I’d take my chances and waited. In 1990, my doctor found
an unusual cyst and performed a biopsy and it turned out to be
malignant. First the doctors wanted to take one breast. After
careful consideration and realizing I had the same condition in
both breasts, I told them to take both. I thought this would be
better than me walking around looking all lop-sided. I had the
surgery (double mastectomy ) three months after diagnoses on
March 28, 1991.” She waited, because she was involved in the
planning of the Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum
conference in Atlanta. After the conference she went in “to
have my titties cut off.”
Post-surgery, the doctors
wanted her to undergo chemotherapy treatment. She asked, them,
“what are my options?” They told her “if you take chemo, you
will have a 40% chance of the cancer recurring. If you do not,
you have a 50% chance the cancer will come back.” She didn’t
like the odds, so she opted not to take the chemo and took her
chances again. She did, however, take the drug Tamoxifin, which
she took for seven years until it made her hair fall out. At
that time, she decided to stop because, as she put it, “she
decided not be bald-headed.”
Her Warriors
– “I always had a firm belief I had warriors
in my body. Whenever I felt ill, I’d call upon my warriors.”
She started her healing process through the use of creative
visualization and created for herself little warriors. “I’d
load them up with vitamins,” she said, to fight the cancer
cells. She imagined little bullets flying through the air
attacking the cancer and healing her body. Using this creative
visualization technique not only help her deal with her cancer,
it got her back to work 3 ½ weeks after surgery. At the time,
she was an trainer at CalTrans and she told her students she was
going on vacation and would be back in three weeks. She gave
them homework and within three weeks time, was back in the
classroom. When she gets sick, she says she calls upon her
troops – her warriors – to attack “whatever negative energy
invades my body.”
In 1983, Christine
established House of Concern (“HOC”). “I got this divine
inspiration to create a place for gays and lesbians to go where
they could learn that God loves them as they are and to develop
their spiritual consciousness. As I was working on this, in
1984, I met the Reverend Carl Bean and he too was interested in
doing the same.” She put her plans on hold to help him build
this dream. He was a pulpit minister and she was a social
justice minister not interested in being in the pulpit at that
time. While working on his project, “I formed, under HOC, a
women’s group called Makita for Black Lesbians. We had a weekly
rap group and we put out a monthly newsletter, which continues
today.”
HOC today is a nonprofit
organization. One of the many programs provided is counseling
services for those who have been diagnosed with breast cancer.
“We follow them from the early stages – the beginning – to the
point where they feel they are able to proceed on their own. We
are there before surgery, we are at their homes post-surgery to
assist them, and we provide emotional support, because they’re
bodies are mutilated at that point and it’s a lot to overcome.”
Christine is a true
survivor. She has survived mental and emotional abuse from her
mother; the loss of her husband; the loss of her breasts to
cancer; the loss of her home in 1994 in the Northridge
Earthquake; the loss a mother should never experience, the loss
of her only child, Darrell, to a gunman in 1995; and due to
staff reductions at CalTrans, she lost her job, in the same
month she lost her son.
Like a Phoenix rising from
the ashes, she too continues to rise. In 1995 – the year I met
this remarkable woman – after losing her job, she started her
own business and subsequently owns herself. She is a survivor –
the personification of the word really – and even in her pain
and through her pain, she can still reach out to assist another
in need. I trust she has helped others to survive as well.
My "bestest" friend in the
whole wide world (you were loved) – Christine Adams Tripp, J.D.
[Photo right, Christine
and A.D. Odom at the Black Lesbian & Gay Leadership Forum
Meeting in Dallas, TX.]
Source: Angela D. Odom, FemmeNoir
™
