Column: Nanny who started annual Stand Up to Hate Play Date after racist letter targeted her is now mom to a baby girl

Editor’s note: This profile is the first of a series where we catch up with the original group of activists featured last year in our Faces of Change series. Look for more online Friday and in the paper on May 30.

For most of her adult life, Ferrai Pickett has been planting seeds. Doing the work, hoping the roots take, watching to see what grows.

After George Floyd was murdered, Pickett took the model for buttons she created for her Stand Up to Hate Play Dates — “Black Lives Matter,” “Kind is the new cool,” and “Black boy joy” — and started cranking them out double time. She added more designs to the mix: “Justice for Ahmaud.” “Justice for George.” “Justice for Breonna.”

She launched an Etsy page and filled orders from across the world. She donated the proceeds to Black-owned business that were harmed during last summer’s looting.

“It’s a physical representation of alliance,” she told me at the time. “You can wear love on your sleeve. Some people have yard signs. Some people are vocal on Facebook. A button is a great way to show people, as soon as they meet you, ‘I’m an ally. I’m a welcoming person.’ People see your button and know immediately where you stand.”

Now Pickett, 27, is a mother. Baby girl Frances joined a besotted Pickett and her fiance in March.

“Since I’ve had her I feel like I have to work harder and faster,” Pickett said earlier this week. “Because there’s going to come a time when my child is going to be made to feel less than, and there’s nothing I can do to stop that. I can only hope that with the work that I do, parents are educating their children to defend her innocence, to stand up as allies.

“I don’t want her to grow up thinking that being made to feel less than is normal,” Pickett continued. “I don’t want her growing up thinking racism is normal, like I did.”

She’s planning this year’s Stand Up to Hate Play Date to be the largest one yet. She’s recruiting musicians and educators and therapists and yoga instructors. She wants to set up resource tables where parents can find literature or launch into conversations about raising allies, about teaching their kids about the history and culture of people who don’t look like they do, about helping kids know what to do when they encounter racism.

Ferrai Pickett holds her 10-week-old daughter, Frances Geiger, while playing with the children she nannies on May 17, 2021, in West Town. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)

She found a coloring book that she’ll be handing out that celebrates the full array of life in a garden.

“The idea is showing that humans all come from different backgrounds, but we all grow the same,” she said. “We all need the same water and soil.”

The letter that kicked off all this in 2017 arrived in the mailbox of Heather DeJonker, a Ukranian Village mom whose children Pickett nannied for at the time.

“Honestly, you need to fire her because otherwise it looks like she is your modern-day mammy,” the note read. “Please take heed to the advice being shared in this letter, find a new nanny. We do not need an infestation in our community.”

As it happens

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The letter writer used racial slurs. It was signed, “Concerns Ukrainian Village Moms.”

DeJonker filed a police report and alerted her alderman. She posted a note on a neighborhood website explaining what had happened. A neighbor suggested they respond with a giant, racially diverse play date. Pickett took things from there, and a beautiful tradition was born.

It brings to mind a phrase held up during all sorts of protests and rallies on behalf of humanity: “They tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.”

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