.Legacy of the Parrish Family in San Jose

For five generations, the Parrish family has resided in our beloved San Jose. My late great-grandmother, Mary Parrish, who passed just shy of her 101st birthday in 2019, moved from Louisiana to the Bay Area when my great-grandfather, Edward, worked for Ford Motor Company. He landed at the San Jose Assembly Plant by way of Richmond, and the two—with their seven children—settled into a quaint, three-bedroom single-family home on an idyllic, tree-lined street corner on the East Side.

My siblings and I grew up with our great-grandmother: Grandma, as we in the third- and fourth-generations call her. She was our “babysitter.” We’d sleep over or be dropped off early at her home, drink Folgers coffee in the morning together, and get ready for the day. Then we’d hop in her gold Ford Taurus station wagon and she’d take us to our bus stops—first at Anne Darling Elementary in grade school, then at the corner of Alum Rock and King Road, just a few blocks away, for middle school.

After school, we and our busmates adventured back to our respective homes and grandparents’ houses ourselves.

Sometimes, we’d stop at the bowling alley on McKee Road, now the site of a Walgreens, and catch Grandma playing with her team before continuing along. Sometimes, we’d pick and chew these little yellow flowers growing on the edges of the sidewalk, a disgusting and bewildering habit, as we traveled. Sometimes, we’d dangerously teeter across the bridge of Plato Arroyo Park with the other walking children like a team of amateur gymnasts rotating on a balance beam.

On weekends, when Grandma wasn’t cleaning or cooking or entertaining, she was at church. Antioch Baptist Church, to be exact: the oldest African American Baptist church in San Jose, having started in 1893, and a City of San Jose Historical Landmark since 1996. The church is still home to some members of my family today and part of the larger community of Black churches—like Emmanuel Baptist Church and Maranatha Christian Center—in the area.

I attended for some time, too, before basketball became my religion. Each Sunday throughout my childhood, I played point guard for one team or another as part of the National Junior Basketball or Amatuer Athletic Union leagues. By high school, at Gunderson (oh, four!), I had discovered new interests and made new friends on my road to college. 

It was around that time that my older sister, Jeronica, landed a job at Peet’s Coffee & Tea on the iconic Lincoln Avenue in Willow Glen, further fueling her passion for coffee and launching a dream we would fulfill together nearly 20 years later with our own coffee and tea company, Nirvana Soul.

But in the meantime, our family continued to be active in the San Jose community. My mom’s mom, Nana Shirley, took on more official roles and responsibilities with the African American Community Service Agency, which runs programs for education, computer training, health and wellness, careers, and more, as well as hosts the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Luncheon and Juneteenth Festival. (Our family still has ties to the AACSA today.) 

My mother, perhaps the unsung hero of our story, has worked for the South Bay’s Valley Transportation Authority for over 30 years now. It is due to her stability and tireless work ethic that our coffee shop even stood a chance. She showed us what commitment and sacrifice looked like everyday and made a way for us to live our wildest, aforementioned dream.

As for Grandma, the woman who grew up picking cotton and was just a generation removed from slavery? She became quite the community elder, regularly attending ribbon cuttings and events in her later years. She was even interviewed by the local news when President Barack Obama was inaugurated! Never did she think she’d see the day…

We love being from San Jose, even though there seems to be fewer families that look like ours here. For all of the obvious reasons, this city is not an easy one to stay in even though it has so much to offer. Cost of living, for one, has pushed many hardworking, community-enriching Black families to the outskirts of the Bay Area or further over the last few decades. Then, when Black people visit or move to San Jose, for tech or otherwise, they’re often at a loss when it comes to finding community here, and everything that comes along with the shared experience of being Black here. 

And yet, I can’t understate how powerful growing up in such a diverse city is, too. 

We played outside on Grandma’s street with kids from every background. Our high school had such a vibrant mix of students that I was in culture shock when I got to my predominantly white college. Today, our coffee shops are filled with colorful groups of artists, professionals, activists, baristas, students and more—all different ages and backgrounds. Many are Black and brown and feel right at home, as was our intention. From the start, my sister Jeronica stated, “We don’t just desire community, we need it.”

Two things can be true: San Jose is wonderfully diverse and San Jose is further marginalizing certain people. Like my great-grandparents, who in another time were able to thrive in this city, buy their home in this city, raise a family in this city and stay for decades in this city. They were regular people, not extraordinary, and that was enough. But being enough seems an impossibly tall order today. And this isn’t just a Black problem; it’s a socioeconomic problem.

What I do know is that remaining here, generation after generation, has given my sister and me appreciation, opportunity, increasingly deep roots and a passion for inclusion. Building our lives and our business here has continued to reinforce our foundational belief in community—both the kind that looks like us, and the kind that doesn’t. None of us should be satisfied with a city that works for some, and not for all.

We’ve certainly come a long way from Grandma’s day, but we still have plenty of road ahead. One thing’s for sure: we’ll be here, in San Jose, every step of the way as long as humanly possible.