Segregation determined where this 100-year-old built her Fresno home. She never left

Corine Burton Reed, who turns 100 years old Monday, has been living in the same house in southwest Fresno for nearly 70 years.

“I never did like it, but my husband liked it,” Burton says of the city from within the home her late ex-husband finished building in 1950. “He wanted to raise the children in Fresno, that’s why I’m here – and I still don’t like it, but this is where I am.”

Reed made the most of the place over the past seven decades. Her late ex-husband, Milton Reed, chose the location after he was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy after serving in World War II – but it wasn’t much of choice.

At that time, much of Fresno’s property came with deed restrictions about which races could purchase land in certain areas. The Reeds, who are African American, could buy in southwest Fresno, which had a predominately black population, but first they had to get a mortgage. Milton Reed couldn’t get one in Fresno after arriving in the city in 1948. Loan corporations in the city had color-coded maps, shading areas with large minority populations red, labeling them “undesirable” and denying them mortgages – a practice that became known as redlining. So the Reeds got their loan at a little place in Merced.

Milton Reed, a construction worker, built their two-bedroom, one-bathroom Fresno home, and later added an additional bedroom and half bath after the couple had three children, all girls.

“Daddy did all that by himself,” Reed says proudly of his work. He made graceful archways, installed hardwood floors and planted fruit trees in the backyard.

“The west side, it was alright – but it’s still hot,” Reed says.

The retired seamstress has helped make her community better. In honor of her contributions, City Councilman Oliver Baines will give Reed a proclamation declaring her birthday, Oct. 29, Corine Burton Reed Day in Fresno. It will be presented Sunday, during her 100th birthday celebration at New Light For New Life Church of God in southwest Fresno.

“I think that’s nice,” Reed says of the proclamation. “I think it’s very nice.”

One of her five grandsons, Anthony Hadley, a Fresno County deputy sheriff, said his grandma “was never one to make a big fuss about anything.”

“She would react the same way if someone gave her a roast beef sandwich, ‘Oh, thank you. That’s so sweet,’” he says with a laugh of Reed accepting her award.

Reed says, “If I could help you, I would, and I pray a lot.”

Reed grew up as a tenant farmer’s daughter in rural Texas. She was one of 15 children. Only 13 survived through infancy. She was 21 years old and working as a housekeeper when she married Milton Reed.

“Daddy and me worked real hard for what we accumulated, and we did that when we was young,” Reed says of her life with Milton. “And we bought our home in Texas, we worked hard for that, too. This is the second one that we bought. I said this was the last one I’m going to buy, not thinking I was going to live this long, but I thank God. I didn’t have nothing to do with that; I just try to tend to my own business, and my family.”

That extends to her neighborhood and church community. She sold lots of chicken and fish dinners to help build Mount Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church.

“Church always is a help,” Reed says.

The Rev. Floyd D. Harris Jr. of New Light for New Life, also in southwest Fresno, considers her the “General Mother,” queen and president of his church’s Fresno Freedom School, which teaches children a number of life skills, including farming.

“She’s a pioneer, she’s a building block, she’s an inspiration,” Harris says. “She’s been through the civil rights movement, she’s been through the King era and the Black Panther era, and she’s been through the Barack Obama era, to see the first black president here in America. I think that’s very, very huge, to be here that many days.”

Harris admires her for staying in southwest Fresno, although it’s not something that happened in complete free will.

“I can’t move my house, and that’s all I have here,” Reed says. “So, I’m here, and the good Lord let me live.”

Surviving segregation

Reed says Fresno hasn’t changed much over her lifetime except it’s grown in size, “that’s about all.” As for problems that need changing, “I maybe can’t put my finger on it. It’s a lot that needs to be changed.”

Was she ever told she couldn’t buy in certain areas because she is black?

“Well, we couldn’t get no loan,” Reed says, then purses her lips and sits in silence.

Her daughter and caretaker, Aline Reed, shakes her head in understanding, “Yeah, I get you. I get you.”

“Do you think that if we could have bought one here in Fresno, we woulda went to some little place outside of Fresno?” Reed asks. There’s disbelief and frustration in the question, which is more of a statement.

“Outside the west side, I know what you’re saying,” her daughter responds. “So basically they were redlined into the west side, and not just them, a lot of people, and a lot of professional people.”

Aline Reed says it’s not easy for her mom to talk about discrimination because “she lived it.”

“What she said was, ‘We bought where we were able to buy.’ That’s how her and pop put it. He had to fight for every single thing that they got.”

Aline Reed really admires her mom.

“In the face of racial segregation and sexism and all the things that she had to go through, she came through and was able to give a lot of love to her children.”

The discrimination her parents faced wasn’t gone by the time Aline Reed reached adulthood. She graduated from Edison High School in the 1970s, and just missed the forced busing of some Edison students to north Fresno schools, and north Fresno students to Edison. She remembers it being discussed and debated.

“I remember sitting in class and having this caravan of white parents and teachers – it felt like being in a zoo – checking us out to see how vicious we were and how violent,” she says. “And, you know, that does something to a kid, to know that other people don’t want to sit next to you.”

100 years of hard work

Reed did her best to protect her children from racism and give them opportunities she didn’t have. She worked hard to pay for music, singing, tennis and swimming lessons for her daughters.

“Oh, I do a lotta work,” Reed recalls. “I done hair, I cooked, and I’m a seamstress. I done whatever came along. I’d sit on a stool and seen the sun come out a lotta days, right in the kitchen, doing hair.”

Aline Reed often went to bed when her mom was still up sewing, and woke up to find her already at the sewing machine.

What did Reed like about sewing – or did she like it?

“That’s how come I got this,” Reed responds, pointing to a scar on the back of her left hand. It comes from a ganglion cyst that developed after she fell while working in the alterations department at Gottschalks.

For most of her longtime career as a seamstress, however, she worked from home. She’d go downtown to see the latest women’s fashions in popular shops, then make the same outfits herself.

“She was very fashionable, very glamorous,” her daughter says. “I always thought she should have been in the movies.”

As for her cooking, Reed is partial to barbecue chicken wings and spaghetti. When it comes to breakfast, “I might wake up and feel like I just want me a cup of coffee and a doughnut.”

She stays away from alcohol. “I never did want to drink, either, because some people, they act so bad when they drink.”

She has beaten the odds for southwest Fresno, which has a lower average life expectancy than other communities within Fresno County, often attributed to pollution and poverty.

She and her neighborhood together pushed for changes that have improved their community. The street no longer floods up above the curb outside their house, Aline Reed says, and southwest Fresno got sidewalks, trash service, street lights and a more diverse population.

Aline Reed says her mom would have been a missionary if she didn’t have children to raise.

As for Fresno, is there anything she does like about the city?

“Oh, it’s OK. I’ve been here for years!” she says, then chuckles to herself and smiles a sly smile.

Reed wisdom

Reed says that the “good Lord let me be 100 years old.”

“I don’t know why, but I can say one thing for sure: If you take care of your own business and not try to run somebody else’s, I think that’s very good advice. It helped me a lot.”

Parents, on the other hand, should be more involved in their children’s lives, she says.

“When you have children, you’re supposed to take care of ‘em, and I don’t mean just feed ‘em. You teach ‘em. You take ‘em to church, you go to church with ‘em. That’s the whole trouble today, I see these young people, they don’t take care of their children. When I had my children, I took care of my children. And if there was any children that needed taking care of, I helped take care of them, too.”

The “tough-talking Texan” was known for breaking up many fist fights between neighbor boys on the corner outside her house.

“I don’t like no fights,” she says sternly.

As for what parents should teach their children: “I think it would be important for them to teach their children how to tend to their business – stay outta drugs, stay outta that bottle, work for what you get, not try to take it from somebody else.”

A lasting legacy

She passed those lessons on to her daughters, grandsons and six great-grandchildren.

Hadley describes her as the “matriarch” of the family who “taught us to be respectful to people.”

“There were certain rules you had to abide by,” he says, “and if you went against them, there was hell to pay.”

At the same time, she was so loving that Hadley says he cried every time he had to leave her home. Reed is so loved by her family that she receives presents on both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

Aline Reed feels lucky.

“I tell people, ‘You can’t judge a book by its cover.’ Just because I grew up on the west side didn’t mean I didn’t know how a good life looks, because they provided that for my sisters and I.”

And Reed “did it with such dignity and grace.”

Of turning 100, Reed says, “I don’t feel no different. I don’t have a lot of pain. Once in a while my knee hurts sometimes but I never was sickly.” Of hard work, she says, “I’m not going to let nobody else do it.”

She continues to inspire many, including the Rev. Harris.

“We have been able to take lemons and make lemonade until we can do better here in this community,” Harris says. “West Fresno is still neglected. It still has the highest concentration of poverty. It still has the worst air and it still has poor schools.

“Who cares about that? People like Mom (Reed) does because she brings the children into her home, she loves them, she feeds them. She lets them know it’s going to be alright and don’t give up hope.”

This story was originally published October 26, 2018 at 5:16 PM.