A Hope business woman who has lived in Hope for a long time, says that Barack Obama was predestined to become the next president of the United States.
Hazel Simpson, who owns a barber shop in Hope, said “There were predestined plans put in place by God in Biblical times that we, as Black people, would go through trials and tribulations, because of Adam and Eve.
“The children of Israel were slaves also,” she said. “With the election of Obama, Ecclesiastes is what we’re fulfilling now. It says in that book that there is a time for everything and now is the time for a Black president. It was God’s will for a change to come to America. It says in the Bible that God chooses who will be elected and God chose Obama.”
Simpson has known times when segregation was strong. She was born on a farm in Nevada County in the Azar Community near Bodcaw. She was the 11th of 12 children, and in 1946, when she was five her family moved to the Rocky Mound Community.
“We walked to school for two-and-a-half-miles to Shover Street Elementary,” she said. “In 1947-1948 school year, buses came and we rode the bus from then on.”
Simpson graduated from Yerger High School in 1959 and attended barber school at Tyler Barber and Business College in Tyler, Texas.
“In 1960, I got my apprentice license and my business certificate both in 1960 when I was in barber school,” she said. “The owner, Henry Morgan, owned the college in Tyler and owned seven all-black colleges all over the country.”
She lived in Dallas and worked with her uncle in a seven-chair barber shop until 1963 when she went back to the Barber Board and received her license to own and operate her own barbershop.
“Segregation was very strong back then, even though they had removed all the ‘colored’ and ‘white’ signs by that time,” Simpson said. “Black America could get high-tech, quality jobs by then, but prejudice and segregation has not dissolved nearly 50 years later. It comes about in a more sophisticated manner now, but it’s still there.
“As a Black business woman, the world has progressed and life has been good to me in Hope,” she said. “I’ve been in the barber shop business and I am involved with the Business and Professional Women’s Club, being the past president; I am secretary of the Black Historical Development Program; I am the treasurer of North Side Park Summer Program and I am president of the Hempstead County Democratic Women’s Club.”
Simpson is also a longtime member of Haynes Chapel Baptist Church, where she has been a Sunday School teacher for 14 years and Missions President for 20 years and is involved with her two grandchildren and one great grandchild. She is a mother to one daughter and one son.
“As far as Obama being elected, charity and discipline starts at home and spreads abroad,” Simpson said. “A milestone has been achieved and things will go better in the future. The dream has been realized and the change is here.”
