It’s a Family Affair

Top, L-R: Hazel Eileen Ford and Helen Leola Ford; Bottom: Lou Ford Crockett portrait and on the swim team. (Images courtesy of the Crockett-Ford Family)

When Louistine “Lou” Ford Crockett, ’49 ED, was a student at the University of Illinois in the 1940s, one of her science professors said that all Black people had flat feet. Crockett promptly told the professor that was not the case and she welcomed him and her classmates to examine her feet.

“Come look at my feet and see that they are not flat,” Crockett recalls telling her professor and classmates.

Decades later, three of her daughters—Kim, Lori and Bobra—would walk in their mother’s footsteps, graduating from Illinois.

“Education was highly valued in our family, going back generations,” says Lou’s daughter, Kim Crockett, ’79 LAS, who graduated with a degree in speech communications and a minor in journalism.

“I liked the University,” says Lou. “I thought it was a great institution.”

Lou, who turned 97 in August, was not the first family member to attend Illinois. Her father’s baby sister, Helen Leola Ford, ’35 ED, now deceased, attended in the 1930s. Lou’s brother Edwin Ford, ’43 LAS, and his wife, Hazel Eileen (Smith) Ford, ’44 LAS—both also deceased—attended Illinois in the 1940s.

Helen Leola Ford was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the first Black sorority, and Lou followed in her aunt’s footsteps, pledging AKA and living in the sorority house on campus. Black students were not allowed to live in University residence halls until 1946 and often faced discrimination in the classroom and at local businesses.

“If you didn’t belong to a sorority or a fraternity, you had to live in town with Black families,” Lou says. “That involved a long walk at least twice a day.”

Despite the challenges of being a Black student in the 1940s, Lou appreciated her time at the University. Her daughters describe their mother, who was born blind in one eye, as someone who has always been determined, outspoken and athletic. They also say she was a trailblazer at Illinois.

Lou learned how to swim at an early age on Chicago’s South Side at the Wabash Avenue YMCA. In a 1948 yearbook photo of the University’s synchronized swimming team, the Illini Terrapins, Lou is in the middle of the third row. The family believes she was the first Black woman to be a member of the swim group, which was founded in 1924 and is now known as The Illini Synchro, one of the world’s longest consecutively running synchronized swimming programs.

Lou also met her late husband, Dr. Fred Lee Crockett Jr., at Illinois. After graduating from Evanston High School, Fred served in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1944 to 1946. He attended Illinois on the GI bill to get his prerequisites to transfer to Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn. The couple married in 1951.

After Fred graduated from medical school in 1955, the Crocketts moved to Danville, Ill., where they raised their five children. Lou was a stay-at-home mother and later became a teacher for homebound students. Fred established a family practice and eventually served as the state president of the NAACP. The Crocketts were the first Black family to integrate an all-white Danville neighborhood in 1969, when Kim was 12 years old.

The family faced harassment, including name calling and people throwing trash in their yard, but Kim says her parents made it a learning moment for their children.

“What I remember most is them putting us together as a family and saying, ‘Listen: This is an important lesson,’” Kim says. “No one can ever tell you what you can and cannot do. While it’s not going to be easy, if you work hard and stick together, you can accomplish great things.”

Attending college was non-negotiable for the Crockett children. The eldest, David, attended Morehouse College in Atlanta. The next oldest, daughter LuJuane, went to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. But when it came time for the last three to go to college, their father said he would only pay for Illinois and their mother agreed. “I thought it was a privilege to go to the U of I,” she says.

Members of the Illini Crockett family gather in Chicago (left to right): Bobra Crockett, Lori Crockett Harris, Lou Ford Crockett, Fred Crockett Jr. and Kim Crockett. (Image courtesy of the Crockett-Ford Family)

“Our parents absolutely raised us with the mentality that ‘I’m sending you to college,’” says Lori Crockett Harris, ’84 AHS, who graduated with a degree in therapeutic recreation. “That was the only message I ever heard. They raised us thinking we’re going to send you to school and after that we expect you to fly.”

And Lori was happy to go to Champaign-Urbana. “My experience there was phenomenal,” she says, crediting her Illinois education with launching a “wonderful” career. Lori, who lives in the south suburbs of Chicago and works as an analyst for the U.S. Dept. of Labor, is grateful for her family’s Illinois legacy. “I’m proud to be a part of it and that it’s a part of me too,” she says.

When Lori arrived on campus, her cousin, Kevin Ford, ’83 FAA, the son of Edwin and Hazel Eileen Ford, was also at the University. Despite the challenges that Kevin said he and many Black students faced  on a predominantly white campus in the 1980s, he enjoyed the U of I. Kevin and Lori shared many of the same friends.

“We had a really good camaraderie,” says Kevin, who majored in industrial design and now serves as a brand design leader for Molson Coors Brewing. “I felt proud to go there.”

The youngest of the Crockett sisters—and the last member of the family to attend Illinois—arrived on campus the year after Lori graduated. Dr. Bobra Crockett, ’88 MEDIA, said she was initially disappointed that she didn’t get to choose her college but she came to see that Illinois was the perfect place for her, even though at times she felt like a “dual citizen,” navigating between her white friends and the Black community on campus.

Like her parents, Bobra was a trailblazer, becoming the first Black member of the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority at Illinois. She also was a member of the “sweethearts” group for the historically Black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha.

“I had the best balance of all worlds and the best education,” says Bobra, who graduated with a degree in advertising and worked for Leo Burnett and the Chicago Bulls. “I was given such amazing opportunities.”

The family has a long tradition of teachers, and Bobra is following in that tradition teaching business, marketing and management at a community college in Scottsdale, Ariz. Lou lives nearby with Kim.

After graduating from Illinois, Kim, who is now retired, went on to work for several newspapers and won two Pulitzer Prizes as a staff member of the Miami Herald. Kim, the family historian, says her family’s long legacy of not just attending Illinois, but valuing education gave her family members a confidence that enabled them to succeed in life.

“I’m profoundly grateful that I stood on the shoulders of such accomplished, loving people,” Kim says. “They persevered and they kept their eye on the prize and were able to accomplish great things.” 

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