3 generations of Black women overcome boundaries and setbacks with love

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — At the red-brick high school Mattie Little attended in the 1960s, the idea that a Black girl like herself could go to college never crossed her mind. She hoped to become a typist, but teachers in her rural Kentucky town urged her to set aside that dream and focus on getting work as a maid.

“Those were the rules,” she recalled. “And that was how it was going to be.”

Mattie would prove those teachers wrong and decades later beam with pride as she watched her granddaughter, NaKayla Little, walk across the stage at the University of Louisville to receive her bachelor’s degree, becoming the first in the Little family to graduate from college.

It’s a classic American story, one generation building on the work of another. But progress isn’t always linear and neat. That’s certainly true of the paths followed by Mattie and her daughter, Myya, who is the mother of NaKayla.

The story of the Little family women — Mattie, Myya and NaKayla — is one of perseverance, of pushing a bit further than the previous generation and yet still starting from behind.

For each, there was no trust fund or inheritance, but a lineage of wisdom and love from Black women striving for