Jane Hovington is not afraid to be heard

Jane Hovington is not a woman to mince words, and during a recent interview, she said she knows it.

"I'm usually the one with my mouth running," she said, with a here-we-go-again-smile. "I've never been a person to sit still. I don't always have to be the chief as long as the work is getting done."

Hovington, 66, is one of those people who seems to always be in the news. She's been a community activist for decades, galvanizing action on many issues. She's been a Georgetown Town Council member. She's been a foster parent.

She ran for a state Senate seat in 2012, losing to Sen. Brian Pettyjohn. She is a lifetime member and former chair of the Sussex County branch of the NAACP. Recently, she was elected to be the first African-American to chair the Sussex County Democratic Party.

Not everyone has the ability, or desire to speak on their own behalf, said Hovington on why she's constantly taking up causes. Over the years a lot of people have come to her asking for help and if it's a good reason, she said, she's always willing to help.

Born in New York, as a child Hovington bounced around the Rust Belt with her parents before they separated and she moved to Greenwood with her mother in the sixth grade.

Hovington said her first experience of racism was at the age of 5, while attending kindergarten in Pennsylvania. She said she was labeled as colored, and she and her white best friend could no longer be friends in school.

"I've been battling against racism and prejudice for 60 years," she said. "Anyone who says racism is dead is not African-American. It's not the blatant racism of my youth. It's more subtle."

When Hovington moved to Delaware, the state was in the middle of desegregation. She said all the kids played together during the summer, but when school opened, they went their separate ways.

Hovington says she's always been pushing for equality. The first time she remembers challenging the status quo was during cheerleading tryouts in high school. She said she was told she was good enough to make the squad but wouldn't because she was black. Well, she said, her cousins were starters on the ball team and they told the coach they weren't going to play unless she got a spot.

"The next day, I had a spot," she said.

Hovington grew up during the heyday of Martin Luther King Jr. and said her parents encouraged her to fend for herself. But it was a neighbor who taught her about activism and sticking together.

"I got into a few fights, but mainly I was an outspoken person in high school," she said. "I didn't cause too much trouble, but let's say the principal was happy to see me graduate."

After high school, Hovington attended Delaware State University, where she met her husband, Ronnie. The couple had a family and did their own version of moving around – New Jersey, St. Louis – before settling in Georgetown decades ago.

On a day-to-day basis, Hovington runs the Shechinah Empowerment Center on South Race Street in Georgetown. She describes the center as a community resource for people who need help with GEDs, computer training, certifications and re-entry programs for people released from prison.

"There's a host of programs," she said. "Anything we can do to assist someone in need, we do."

Hovington said she began the center in the office of her home after retiring from nearly two decades of running Small Wonder Ones Child Care Center. She said she hadn't really intended on opening the center, but people were coming to find her because they knew she would help.

She said the center moved from her house to South Race Street after a bus hit a telephone pole, and her husband suggested it was time to separate the center from their home.

"This is truly where the lord wanted us," she said. "So, here we are."

Education is so very important, Hovington said. "It's paramount."

She said that as soon as the kids at her day care could talk, they were reading and doing extracurricular activities. The children visited zoos, and she took kids on trips to Disney World.

"You can read all about cows and kangaroos, but you have to see a cow to understand what one really is," she said.

Hovington, who is also board president of the Richard Allen Coalition, has been working hard to turn Georgetown's Richard Allen School into a cultural, civic and educational center. Allen was a freed slave and founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the late 18th century in Philadelphia. The school was one of 80 built in the 1920s by Pierre du Pont to educate African-American students. Following desegregation in the late 1960s, it became a school for elementary students of all races in the Indian River School District.

Hovington said young people today don't know the history of the school or of desegregation, taking a lot of things for granted. "It's my main focus," she said.

It was a colored school that educated so many people, said Hovington, and it's part of a greater African-American history of Sussex County that doesn't get told very often.

She said restoring the old schoolhouse serves as a cultural resource for the kids of Georgetown, many of whom don't have anything to do once they've grown out of Little League baseball.

"We're trying to find the resources," she said.

Hovington said her husband, a former Department of Correction officer and pastor, isn't as outspoken with his thoughts, but she said their feelings on issues fall in line with each other.

"He's vocal within these four walls," she said. "And he's been a Jane Hovington supporter from the beginning."

Moving forward, Hovington said if she could pass the baton to someone to carry on the causes, she would. Until then, she said, she's not tired, and she's going to keep moving, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached.

"If you can't fly, then run; if you can't run, then walk; if you can't walk, then crawl – but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward," she said, then added her own. "You can't become stagnant."