‘A mighty force’: Lifelong achiever leads Black women’s group into a new era | Opinion

There was a time when Black women were not allowed to join White women volunteer civic/service organizations. So, many Black women started their own organizations. To these trailblazing women, community and civic duty was important.

While chapters of post-college sororities worked at trying to instill the importance of education and civic duty among Black youth, there was room for more women to join the effort to get Blacks into the mainstream of life. Black communities needed to be uplifted. Their children needed to see more examples of Blacks as leaders in their communities, helping to upgrade the status of living for their people.

In the early days, Miami’s Black women organized garden clubs, which served as more than groups of women meeting to see whose garden was prettier. These clubs helped to support Miami’s first and only all-Black Christian Hospital. The ladies made layettes for the hospital’s newborns and held teas to raise money for medicines and other medical necessities.

I thought about the Black women volunteer civic and service organizations recently when my goddaughter Cecily Robinson-Duffie, Esq., was elected the 22nd president of The Charmettes, Inc. at the 66th National Convention held in June, in Atlanta. I couldn’t think of a more capable person to head the national organization.

Robinson-Duffie practically grew up attending Charmettes’ meetings with her late mother. It was while she was at those meetings, she said recently, “that I was inspired by the finer womanhood exhibited by the members. I watched everything they did. I wanted to be just like them, and I knew that one day I would become a Charmette.”

Now, after being a Charmette for 31 years, and having served in several offices both local and national, including president of the local Dade County Chapter; national legal advisor, national Parliamentarian, and chaired the organization’s Constitutional Bylaws Committee, Robinson-Duffie said she is ready to lead the organization into a new era.

Last Sunday (Aug. 28), members of the local chapter, her family and a host of friends gathered at the N’namdi Contemporary Fine Art Gallery at 6505 NE Second Ave. to celebrate her newest accomplishment.

With only 500 members nationally, The Charmettes is one of the smallest national Black women’s organizations of its kind. “We are small in number, fewer 1, 000 members nationally,” Robinson-Duffie said, “but we are a mighty force. On the national level, we have raised nearly $900,000 for the Howard University Cancer Center in Washington, D.C. Our goal on the local level this year, is to raise $50,000 for UM Sylvester Cancer Center. We have already raised more than $48,000. And we raised most of that during the pandemic.”

Dade chapter founded in 1955

The Charmettes, Inc. was founded in 1951 by two West Palm Beach women. Frankie Drayton (Thomas) and Gwendolyn Baker (Rogers). The organization began to grow as more chapters were being installed. The Dade County Chapter was installed in May 1955.

It was also in 1955 that the need for a “general governing body” was recognized and the Executive Board was founded with Eunice Thompson serving as the first national president. The organization’s first general meeting was held in Miami, where Althmena Coachman Sample, then president of the Dade County Chapter, served as hostess.

The Charmettes as an organization has come a long way. And Robinson-Duffie wants to take it even further. A native Miamian, she is the daughter the late Charmette Thelmarie Mitchell Robinson and Charmer (as the husbands and significant others are called) Andrew Robinson.

Always a high achiever, in 1982 Robinson-Duffie was selected as a U.S. Congressional Page and studied at the National Page School while in Washington. A 1983 honor graduate from North Miami Senior High School, she earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida in 1986, where she was one of the youngest graduates in her class. She was also a Presidential Scholar and a recipient of the Karl and Madira Bickel Assistantship.

Robinson-Duffie earned a juris doctorate from Nova University in December 1988, where she was the youngest to graduate with her law school class. While at Nova, she excelled in Moot Court and was a freshman Moot Court finalist and a Florida Bar Moot Court semi-finalist.

She married her high school sweetheart right after graduating from college. When she decided to go to law school her husband, now Minister Troy Duffie, was one of her biggest encouragers.

She was two weeks away from giving birth to twins, when she sat for the Florida Bar and passed. She was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1989, where she served two terms on the Florida Bar’s Committee on the unlicensed Practice of Law. She later got a job with the 11th Judicial Circuit, Legal Services of Greater Miami, and the State of Florida Attorney General’s Office, prior to entering private practice in 1994. She is a Florida Supreme Court certified circuit civil mediator and a Florida Supreme Court qualified arbitrator.

Active at home, in church as well as work

Robinson-Duffie stayed involved in her children’s education, homeschooling them for a while before sending them off to public school. In 1993, she fought for the rights of her children, as well as the children of others, when she successfully challenged and changed the Miami-Dade County School Board Policy as it relates to the admission of twins and multiples to magnet schools.

Meanwhile, Robinson-Duffie remained active in her church, St. John Missionary Baptist Church, where her family has worshiped for more than a century, where she serves as a deaconess, and where her husband is an associate minister. Married 37 years, she and her husband are the parents of five, which includes twins, the Rev. Dr. Cecil Andrew Duffie and Cecily Anastacia Duffie, Minister Troy Adam Duffie, Caitlyn A. Duffie and Trinity A. Duffie.

While her parents, her late grandmother Hanna Mitchell, and her godparents marveled at her accomplishments and stamina, Robinson-Duffie always acted like it was no big deal. It’s how she has always taken on every task.

Now that the baby of the family is in her second year of college, Robinson-Duffie feels it is time to venture even more. She said she looks forward to the future, and perhaps even passing on the torch to her three daughter, who she said, “… are looking forward to becoming Charmettes.”

Bea Hines can be reached at bea.hines@gmail.com