instance, she came upon a gaggle of white colleagues guffawing about something they referred to as a “Chinese fire drill.” Though unfamiliar with the term, she gathered that it was not one of endearment. When they explained, she was sure. As it turns out, the pejorative slang dates back more than a century and connotes a confused or chaotic situation. “Why would you think that was funny?” she recalls, stunning her colleagues with the announcement, “My grandfather was Chinese.” She told them she wondered how they spoke about blacks when none were around and added, “Oh, and I’ve got Puerto Rican and Cuban in my family, too.”
To those who say she takes herself too seriously, Madison’s retort is that she cannot help but be serious, having grown up aware of racial hierarchies and having seen the world through the eyes of parents she describes as “take-no-prisoners kind of people” who, like many immigrants, thought they had a stronger work ethic than most U.S.-born blacks.
By the time she took her first journalism job at 22, she and her brothers had bought their first real estate, a brownstone residential building in Harlem. They pursued an economic plan together that led to the creation of Williams Group Holdings and made retirement by 60 a reality. Within five months of leaving NBCUniversal, Madison was deep into the Samuel Lowe project, knowing little more than that her grandfather had owned a shop in Jamaica then returned to China and died there. Her education and her career, as it turned out, were perfect preparation. In college she studied African, Caribbean and Chinese history and in journalism she had learned to seek answers. “I guess I was getting myself prepared to find my family in
China, learning how to dig through records, follow the paper trail, what resources are out there, because when I started it just was very easy.” She began by interviewing her father’s family about Jamaican-Chinese ties.
Despite misgivings by her husband, Roosevelt Madison, who feared that she might be setting herself up for rejection in her boundless crusade to reconnect her Jamaican and Chinese roots, she says that acceptance by her newly-discovered Chinese relatives has proceeded fairly smoothly. She now travels to China every six months and has taken more than 20 American relatives with her. In keeping with the entrepreneurial tradition of Jamaican-Americans and the Chinese, the Lowe descendants have set up an import-export business that ships to China lobsters from Maine and wine from California.
In the meantime, Madison, who lives in Los Angeles, is shopping the film around, seeking a major distribution deal that will include a theatrical release and DVDs. The Africa Channel will eventually air it as well. Madison is also putting the finishing touches on a book, Finding Samuel Lowe: China, Jamaica, Harlem, scheduled for release by Amistad in the spring with a launch party at the National Press Club on April 16.
And she continues to carry a message she delivered to students at Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communication in November: “You need to go out and see the rest of the world,” she says, insisting that when black Americans view themselves in a global context, they can break
free from “the despicable institution of slavery… that continues to limit us economically, spiritually, emotionally and all sorts of
other ways.”
“We’ve just got to get past that.”
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