Annie Mae Perry

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NAPLES — They weren’t her children, but they called her “mother” anyway. Everybody did.

Annie Mae Perry treated every person, every child, like they were one of her own. That’s just the kind of woman she was.

“Mother Perry” lived 98 years, most of them in Naples. On Monday morning, she passed away.

In the last year or so, Perry had slowed down a little, but up until then, she was very independent and strong, her daughters and granddaughters said, sitting around the kitchen table in Perry’s North Naples home.

“What I will remember about Mama is how she brought us up,” said Pearline Dixon, 74, Perry’s daughter. “She always talked about a lesson her daddy taught her.”

This is how Mother Perry told it: Her father held up a single match stick and showed her how easy it was to snap in half. Then, he held up a bunch together and showed her how, together, they were unbreakable.

She was an inspiration to the family, and also to the community, Dixon said. Mother Perry’s daughter Earlene Avant, 72, and granddaughter Catherine Alexander, 49, nodded in agreement. People took notice of her: Her faith in God, her strength, her service — and her sense of humor.

“She was a little lady, but she was big in spirit,” said Alma Cambridge, a friend of Mother Perry’s for nearly 50 years. “I tell you, I’ll miss her.”

If you needed help and there was something Mother Perry could do, she would do it, said Cambridge, 76. The women met in 1959 and worked together at Fun Time Nursery, a childcare center in downtown Naples.

“She just opened her arms to those children and said, ‘Come on, darlin,’ come to Mother Perry,’ with that big smile,” Cambridge said. “And they just went into those arms of love. She was a very loving person.”

Perry was born Annie Mae McKinney in 1910 in Monticello, a town near the Florida-Georgia border. Her grandmother, a midwife, delivered her, and saw to it that Perry learned to deliver babies, too.

When she was 16 years old, she married Willie Lee Perry, a farmer’s son who she’d grown up with. Before he died in 1999, they celebrated their 73rd wedding anniversary.

In 1947, the Perrys moved to Copeland to look for work. While her husband logged at the cypress swamp and their five children went to school, Mother Perry picked tomatoes for $5 a day. But she soon realized that people needed her help elsewhere: delivering babies.

“I felt just like they was mine,” she said, remembering all those babies during an interview in February 2008. “Felt just like my children.”

In her 25 years as a midwife, she delivered 514 babies in Collier County.

“She was a mother to all people black, white and Spanish,” said Joe Williams, Perry’s godson and the pastor at her church. “She was another Mother Teresa.”

Beyond her job as a midwife, Perry also was the director of Fun Time Nursery, a volunteer with the Division of Rural and Legal Services, a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a fierce supporter of civil rights.

Every year, she marched in the Martin Luther King Jr. parade and in early 2008, the NAACP gave Mother Perry a plaque recognizing her “life’s dedication to the civil rights movement.”

There wasn’t a high school for black children in Collier County when Perry’s children were growing up, so she sent them away to finish their education. She fought to open a high school for black students in Naples.

“Mother Perry was one of the first inspirational leaders of the black community here in Collier County,” said Anthony Denson, Collier NAACP president. “She went places and did things for people, all people, to bridge the divide.”

Annie Mae Perry is survived by four children: Willie Lee Perry Jr., Dave Perry, Pearline Dixon and Earlene Avant. Her husband Willie Lee Perry and son Arthur James Perry are both deceased. She has dozens of descendants spanning four generations, including a new great-great grandson who is just 8 weeks old.

She held him last week, and gave his mother, her great-granddaugther Rashonda Powe, 26, advice about raising him.

She was a mother and a caregiver to the end.

___

SERVICES

A service will be held for Annie Mae Perry, who died Monday at 98, at 11 a.m. at New Hope Ministries Church, 7675 Davis Blvd.

Her remains will lie in rest from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday at Triumph the Church and Kingdom of God in Christ, 1380 Fifth Ave. N., Naples.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to a scholarship fund that will be administered by the Collier NAACP. For information, call 455-2886.

___

Posted earlier:

Naples civil rights legend dies at 98

Annie Mae Perry’s life spanned nearly a century, and her story was intertwined with the stories of the Naples community, black and white, young and old.

For decades, Perry — who died Monday at the age of 98 — worked days, picking tomatoes, driving a school bus, fixing food in a school lunchroom and caring for young children at a downtown day care.

But it was often the middle of the night when she was needed most. She was the town’s “Mother Perry,” a woman with five children of her own whose hands as a midwife helped hundreds of babies into the world.

Her early days

Annie Mae McKinney came into the world on Feb. 18, 1910, in Monticello, a town near the Florida-Georgia border, delivered by her own grandmother, a midwife.

She grew up in the country, sandwiched between two brothers and two sisters and studying at a small, segregated schoolhouse where her father was the teacher.

At 16, she married Willie Lee Perry, a farmer’s son she’d grown up with and, before he died in 1999, they would celebrate their 73rd wedding anniversary.

Naples was “just a scrub town” when Mother Perry first set eyes on it in 1947. Where she and Willie Lee settled with their children in Copeland, everything around was swamp and farmland.

While her husband sawed logs at the Lee Tidewater Cypress Camp, Annie Mae started picking tomatoes in the fields for $5 a day. During the day she did any kind of work she could find, but she soon realized her hands were often needed elsewhere: delivering babies.

That midwife grandmother had seen to it that Annie Mae learned how to deliver babies, too. So she delivered babies first in Copeland, and then all over Collier County.

“There wasn’t nobody here and it was just a struggle for the women,” she said. “No midwife down here, no nurses, no nothing.” Ask her how many children she brought into this world, and she will tell you proudly: 514 babies in 25 years. Although some details are hard for her to remember after 98 years of living, that number sticks firmly in her mind.

“I felt just like they was mine,” she said, contralto voice deepening with her smile. “Felt just like my children.”

On a sunny weekday afternoon, Mother Perry sat in her living room, her spare frame cradled in an easy chair, and talked about Naples, her life and family, and the NAACP. Her daughter, Pearline Dixon, sat nearby, helping her mother remember details, dates and names.

“Everything in it has changed,” Mother Perry said. “The white and the colored got mixed and it wasn’t like it used to be. It used to be sitting on the seat on the bus and if a white person comes in, black people would have to get up.”