Middle School for "Decca," a salute to their mother. It's a warm Sunday morning and later that night the siblings will appear at Martin Luther King Jr. Treuhaft, 59, and Romilly, 65, are sitting in a living room in North Oakland, close to the neighborhood where Mitford, who had moved to the Bay Area in the 1940s, lived until her death in 1996. From the beginning, sister and brother called their mother Decca or Dec, her nickname from childhood, instead of Mom.įrequently, Mitford took them leafleting or on marches with the Civil Rights Congress: to protest housing discrimination or police brutality, to demand a retrial for Willie McGee, an African American unjustly convicted of raping a white woman. Indeed, theirs wasn't a typical mother-child relationship. "You raised me, didn't you Dinky?" Treuhaft asks his sister, using the childhood name that Romilly still goes by. She had her own things to do, and she expected us to have our own things to do." "She didn't like us much when we were little," adds Romilly with a merry grin. "I just think she didn't like touchy-feely anything - including motherhood." "There wasn't really a negligence," Treuhaft says.
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