North Bay Woman

F A L L 2 0 2 0 NORTH BAY WOMAN 41 to leadership kicked in early. Educated in Marin County during the school integra- tion years of the 1960s and early '70s, for several years she was catapulted daily from her home and extended family in the 99% Black community of Marin City, into White neighborhood schools with predominantly White students. "I grew up in two worlds. I had this rich Black cultural experience at home. My parents and especially my grandmother Viola Janice, my mom, and my dad (the fi rst Black policeman in Marin County, in 1958) were very strong, caring individu- als and inspirations to a lot of people in Marin City. I felt that love, even though there were a lot of things going on all the time that weren't good. I grew up in the midst of the crack epidemic. And yes I was bullied by a White kid I carpooled with. Every day, he would hit me on the head and call me 'jungle bunny.' The White woman who drove the car probably knew and was embarrassed by it; she did nothing." None of this stopped the young Diana Marcus from organizing other kids into various games and forging ahead into a variety of performing arts. "Even though tough things were going on around me, I always had this ability to know, as if the ancestors, these guardian angels, were always with me. In those White schools I was very creative and I was a leader. I was even vice president of my class. So early on, I was coming from my own strong sense of personal identity." She said she often thinks about the beauties and challenges of her admit- tedly unusual childhood and adoles- cence, and how much it helped shape the person she became. "I always had a strong sense of my own Black identity, which wasn't easy to embrace when you grow up in a country always telling you you're a minority," she said. "But I wasn't a minority in the town I grew up in. I always had a sense of my identity and culture thanks to my family from early on. Also, Marin City in the 1960s and '70s was surrounded by beauty. I was always running in nature, with wildlife, the bay, the hiking. There was plenty of freedom. I will say that Marin City could have been a perfect 'forcing.' I was really shaped by my younger self, including the things that could have held me down. There was a freedom in being Black around Black people. I didn't have to apologize for my culture or that I was listening to Malcolm X." A fascination with theater and role play games inspired Marcus to embrace Black literature, poetry and plays by authors such as August Wilson, Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes. In her teens, she trained as an actress at the American Conservatory Theater Black Actors Workshop and performed as a young actress with Ron Stacker-Thompson at the Oakland Ensemble Theater. These skills helped her gain enough theatrical roles to win membership in the Top to bottom: Tango on the rocks with dance partner Jean-Pierre Sighe taken offshore in Half Moon Bay; Marcus with Zwanda and Orin Carpenter, two artists from the MC Arts Collective. – Photo by Guillermo Hernandez, courtesy of Oshalla Diana Marcus

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