Evelyn Comeaux

We would not exist were it not for Evelyn Fontenette Chisom Comeaux, the mother of co-founder Ronald Chisom. 

Evelyn was born in 1921 in New Iberia, LA, the youngest of 10 children. To understand her life and how she raised Ron is to learn from our history. By honoring her, we reject individualism and recognize that our leaders, even the charismatic ones, do not spring from the ether. There are people who shaped them, and made them who they are. 

As Ron put it, “It was a different time. Your mama had to discipline you to save your life as a young Black person. It wasn’t just police brutality, we had that. It was that white people could do what they wanted — she came from a time when everyone in authority was white.” 

Ms. Evelyn raised Ron as a single parent, and he credits her with being the one who taught him to be a disciplined person. She was disciplined herself. A faithful Catholic, she attended grade school at St. Catherine Catholic school, graduated from St. Mary’s Academy High School and was a faithful parishioner of Holy Rosary Catholic Church until she could no longer walk to church. She worked as a pediatric medical secretary for 25 years.

While she didn’t necessarily talk to him about racism, he shared that in retrospect, he can now see how much she understood in the ways that she raised him. 

“She would tell me, come home early, and I’d think it was a punishment. She knew the danger you could get into if you strayed too far from home. She kept me focused and grounded. Respecting your elders, that was built into me by her.

Your peers have some influence. For me, the world stopped when she called me, I knew I had to go. I didn’t care what kind of teasing I would get.” 

In the summers, she would put young Ron on a train to go to Chicago to visit his father. Though his parents were separated, she knew it was important for him to have a strong relationship with both of them. 

Ron says he believes she knew some things, even intuitively. “She understood colorism, she wanted me to see a diversity of cultures.”

 He credits his ability to talk to people from all over to spending those summers in Chicago: “I got to meet so many beautiful people.”

Ms. Evelyn was nervous when her son began to do community organizing work. Her understanding of what could happen to a Black man speaking truth about oppression caused her fear. 

“She’d see me on the TV talking about racism and she’d be terrified. She would tell me, are you sure you should be doing this? I’d tell her that I was working on making the community better, cleaning it up.” When I started out, I was fighting slum landlords, sometimes making the front page. 

With time, and as PISAB came together, Ron could see a shift in her. He said she’d be sitting in the lobby of her apartment building with her friends, and they’d recognize him from the work PISAB was doing. She began to start saving some things, articles and pieces related to the work. She began to take pride in it. 

“Maw maw,” as she was known to many, loved her family, especially her grand-children and great-grand-children. After Hurricane Katrina, she was displaced to Houston, TX, where she departed this life only a few months later. 

 — Thank you to Ron Chisom and Tiphanie Eugene for sharing their history