Jake and Mary Jacobs marked their 70th anniversary of a happy marriage last year, but their journey wasn’t simple.
Mary, who is White, and Jake, who is Black, lived in the same city in 1940s Britain. At that time, there weren’t many Black men there.
Even though Mary’s father told her to leave, Mary chose love over easy choices.
“When I told my father I was going to marry Jake, he said, ‘If you marry that man, you will never set foot in this house again.’”
Mary and Jake first met at a technical college where Mary was learning typing and shorthand, and Jake was undergoing Air Force training. They met during the war when Jake moved from Trinidad to Britain.
Jake impressed Mary with his understanding of Shakespeare, and they got to know each other. One day, they invited Mary and her friend to join them for a picnic. Unfortunately, someone passing by saw them and reported Mary to her father. The woman was shocked to see two English girls talking with black guys. After this incident, Mary wasn’t allowed to visit her father again.
After Jake returned to Trinidad, they kept in touch through letters. A few years later, he came back to the U.K. to find a better-paying job.
Jake surprised Mary by proposing, and she, at 19, said yes. However, when she told her family, they kicked her out.
“I left with only one small suitcase. No family came to our registry office wedding in 1948.”
Mary’s father was upset about her marrying a black man, and Mary didn’t realize that society felt the same way.
The early years of their marriage in Birmingham were tough. Mary cried every day, hardly ate, and they faced many challenges. Nobody would talk to them, they couldn’t find a place to live because nobody would rent to a black man, and they had little money.
Even walking down the street together was hard because people would point at them, Mary explained.
Mary and Jake were excited to become parents, but at eight months, Mary gave birth to a stillborn child. She mentioned it wasn’t due to the stress she was under, but it deeply saddened them, and they didn’t have any more children.
As time passed, their lives improved. Mary became a teacher and eventually an assistant principal, while Jake found a job with the Post Office. They made new friends, but Mary felt the need to explain to people that her husband was black before introducing them.
“My father passed away when I was 30, and even though we reconciled by then, he never approved of Jake,” she shared.
Currently, Jake, 89, and Mary, 84, live in Solihull, a town south of Birmingham. They recently celebrated 70 years of marriage.
Jake said he has no regrets, but he also mentioned that today’s black youth may not fully understand the challenges he faced in 1940s Britain.
“When I arrived in the U.K., I faced abuse every day. Once, on a bus, a man rubbed his hands on my neck and said, ‘I wanted to see if the dirt would come off.’ Back then, working in an office as a black man with white girls wasn’t considered safe,” Jake explained.
Despite all the challenges, bias, and abuse, the pair is still deeply in love and has no regrets about being married. They have been happily married for more than 70 years.
These two are a true inspiration, and I wish them a lifetime of pleasure because of the love they have for one another.
Check Out : ‘The View’ Audience Member Calls Whoopi ‘Old Broad’ During Live Broadcast.
An audience member during a recent episode of the ABC show “The View” called Whoopi Goldberg an “old broad.” It happened on Wednesday’s show when Goldberg and her cohosts took their seats to begin the show and the audience member shouted the words and Goldberg was taken aback.
We’re happy to see ya’ll. Cool, well, go on and have a seat, she said before addressing the heckler.
“Did you just call me an old broad? Yeah?” the 67-year-oId actress said to the heckler.
The camera then showed a woman who was wearing a large fur hat.
“She said, ‘You old broad,’ and I was like, hey, it’s Wednesday, and I am an old broad, and happy about it,” the host said before cohost Sunny Hostin said that being an “old broad” was better than “the alternative.”
The aIternative is not attractive to any of us, the stress said. “We all want to be old broads and old dudes, you know? The show’s cameras continued to show the woman again and again for the entire episode.
Goldberg caused controversy in December after making controversial statements again.
She had to apologize again for the comments she made about the Holocaust. As she was promoting her new movie “Till,” about a young black child who was viciously mur**red by a gang of white men in 1955, she was asked by a reporter about the comments she made on the show.
Earlier this year, Goldberg was suspended from “The View” for claiming the Holocaust was not about race. She apoIogized for the comments but in a new interview with the U.K. paper The Sunday Times, it appears her apology may not have been sincere.
“Remember who they were k!lling first. They were not killing racial; they were k*lling physical. They were k*lling people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision,” the actress said.
Journalist Janice Turner explained to Goldberg, whose real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson, that there were race laws the Nazis created against Jews and said that “Nazis saw Jews as a race.”
“Yes, but that’s the killer, isn’t it? The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying?” she said.
“It doesn’t change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street,” she said. “You could find me. You couIdn’t find them.”
“But you would have thought that I’d taken a big oId stinky dump on the table, butt naked,” she said, in reference to her comments that got her suspended from “The View.”
My best friend said, ‘Not for nothing is there no box on the census for the Jewish race. So that leads me to believe that we’re probably not a race, she said. But on Tuesday, a representative for Goldberg sent a press release that showed the host apologizing for the comments.
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