Richard Nixon was president of the United States when Lilada Gee was attending kindergarten at Lapham Elementary School on Madison’s East Side during the 1970-1971 school year.
Gee, the founder of Defending Black Girlhood, recently returned to her alma mater — 55 years later — to read to Lapham Elementary School students on Feb. 14 for Read Your Heart Out Day and to be part of a special assembly for the unveiling of four of her art pieces that will soon be installed at Lapham.
“It was exciting for me to be at the assembly where they unveiled my murals for the first time. I got a chance to share with the students about my Lapham Elementary experience and share about the art,” Gee tells Madison365. “I was interviewed by one of the fourth-grade students, which was really cute, and then I went into a classroom to read for Read Your Heart Out.
“There was a wonderful feeling of familiarity of being at Lapham once again. I can’t believe it has been 55 years since I was in kindergarten here!” Gee adds.
Gee was just four years old and her brother, Dr. Rev. Alex Gee, the founder and CEO of the Center For Black Excellence And Culture, was six years old, when their mother, Verline Gee, moved the family from Chicago to Madison in 1970. Verline Gee left her factory job behind in The Windy City to pursue higher education here in Madison, which she did, earning both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UW-Madison.
“It was a wonderful moment for me to read to the kids and be at the assembly with my artwork. It felt really full circle just coming back to a place that was my first introduction to Madison, and I can remember, even back then in the early ’70s, one memory that really stands out again,” Lilada Gee says. “I’m moving from the West Side of Chicago, and all I know is Black [people], right? People think Madison is white now, but, Madison was very white back in the early ‘70s. And I can remember in my kindergarten classroom, they had a Black doll and it made me feel like I belonged because I was the only Black girl in the class. It was very progressive back then to have a Black doll.
“Overall, it was a very interesting experience for me at Lapham on so many levels,” she adds.
Towards the end of the last school year, Gee received an e-mail from one of the teachers at Lapham who knew her and was familiar with her artwork and she told Gee that Lapham was looking for artists to paint some beautiful murals at the school.
“They had some old, antiquated murals, and they wanted to do something more updated with their murals,” Gee remembers. “And so when she mentioned it was Lapham, I told her, ‘Oh, I went to Lapham!’ When she told the principal that I was an alumnus, she told me I had the job because they were going to interview other artists. I ended up painting four panels of murals over the summer and into the fall.”
“We want to thank Lilada for sharing her gifts and talents with Lapham,” Lapham Principal Linda Zimmerman told Madison365. “She left a treasure that will be there for the next 100 years. It was a privilege and honor to have Lilada with us at Lapham and I am so proud to have her work hanging in our building.”
To this day, Lapham Elementary School remains special in the hearts of both Lilada and her brother, Alex, Gee says. In their young lives at the time, it was their first impression of Madison.
“So here I am coming from the West Side of Chicago in 1970-71 and this is my first school experience. And it was a wonderful … I have nothing but good memories from being at Lapham,” Gee says. “I was young. I started kindergarten at age four. One of the cool things for me, which I think stuck with me for a lifetime, is that Lapham was a mixed-ability school. We went to school with kids who were differently abled and I felt like that always gave me empathy, sympathy and normalization …having that exposure was pretty unique at the time.”
Gee would go on to have a more than 30-year career in the fields of education and social services in the Madison area. She founded Black Woman Heal — a Madison-based non-profit organization that inspires Black women to join her in her life’s work to defend Black girlhood by creating safe places for Black girls to heal. She says she’s proud to be a life-long resident of Madison where she raised two children who are now adults — Alexandra and Christian.
“I’ve had many challenges living in Madison and have thought on many occasions to move, but one of the blessings about staying in a city that you grew up in is that you get to have a rich experience like the one I had returning to Lapham Elementary,” Gee says. “I feel very proud and honored, and I feel like these murals will be part of my legacy.”
