From the South to the City by the Sea

Jackie Odom was born and raised in a different America — the Jim Crow South, where Black children were kept out of white schools, and Black adults found it difficult to vote and almost impossible to hold office.

That’s why Odom, who’s now 81 and is among Long Beach’s most prominent citizens, attaches such importance to February — Black History Month.

She observes the month privately, and reflects on its meaning. “It’s an opportunity to understand Black stories,” she said. “It’s also a time to uplift Black voices and shine a spotlight on those who have made a difference.”

Odom, who has lived in Long Beach for 63 years and is known to many as the “Queen of Long Beach,” was born in 1941 and grew up in Princeton, West Virginia, with her parents, Earlie and Ida Moon. Her father, Earlie, spent several years on the City Council, and even served briefly as mayor. Jackie was the second of eight children, and had three brothers and four sisters.

In ninth grade, she went to Genoa Junior High School, in Bluefield. “We passed by so many schools on the way to Genoa,” she recalled of her bus rides, “but because it was so segregated in West Virginia, I had to go there.”

Her father sheltered her from the worst of Jim Crow South racism, at least in at home.

For the rest of high school, she attended Park Central High School, also in Bluefield, one of two local high schools that enrolled Black students before Bluefield integrated its high schools in 1969. Odom went on to study at West Virginia State College.

But her life changed in her teens. The sister of one of her friends, who had moved to New York to be a housekeeper, came back to visit, and told Odom about all the things she had seen and done and what it was like to live in New York. Odom made up her mind that she was moving there, too.

“I wanted to come to New York, but my mother and father were very much against it, because I was going to West Virginia State College,” she remembered. “They couldn’t hold me down. So I went to my grandmother, and she told me, ‘I’m going to let you go, and once you’re gone, I’ll tell your parents that you’re gone.’”

So Odom set off for New York in the spring of 1960, at age 18. She took some clothes and a few small things her grandmother gave her — sandwiches, fried chicken and a crisp $20 bill — all packed in a shoebox.

After she arrived, she heard about Long Beach, and decided one day to pay a visit. She never left.

She was amazed by the city, and to be living by the beach. She vividly remembers the smell of the ocean, the brick roads, Long Beach’s openness and the old boardwalk. She also remembers being approached on the boardwalk one morning by an owner of a few hotels in the city, who offered her a job. She went to work, saved some money and rented a room in what was then the Bayview Hotel for $15 a week.

Odom enjoyed going to parties and having fun, and went to a party at her aunt’s house in Inwood, in the Five Towns, in the early 1960s. Her cousin Blanche had a friend named Rufus, whom she brought to the party. Jackie and Rufus Odom flirted. They have now been married for 60 years.

“He’s from South Carolina, and our culture was so different,” Jackie said. “In South Carolina then, the man was dominant and the woman has to listen to the man. Me, with my personality, that was not going to work. We had some hard times, but we both were young, so we sort of grew up together.”

The Odoms had two children, Angela, now 61, and Vida, 58. They also helped raise six other children, some of her sister’s and two grandchildren.

In the mid-1960s, Jackie got a job at the Tides Nursing Home, now Beach Terrace, on West Broadway. She enjoyed the work and the environment, so she attended BOCES nursing school in New Hyde Park, and finished her training in 1969. She worked at South Nassau Hospital, now Mount Sinai South Nassau, in Oceanside, and South Oaks Hospital, in Amityville. She was initially a nurse’s aide, but spent her last 20 working years as a geriatric nurse. She retired in 2010.

“That was my place,” she said of geriatric nursing. “I have a passion for young people and old people. As a nurse’s aide, I had so much exposure to older people. And that’s why I gravitated to older people.”

Aside from her professional career, Odom has done a lot for the Long Beach community. In the mid-1970s, she got involved with the Martin Luther King Jr. Center. In 1983 she became the center’s chair, a position she held for 17 years. During her tenure, educational programs were plentiful, doctors from Long Beach Hospital regularly administered immunizations and Long Beach held its first MLK Day march.

In recognition of her work with the center, she has won numerous awards, including citations from the state as well as the Beach to Bay Civic Association’s Woman of the Year honor. She is still active at the MLK Center and around the city, and doesn’t plan to stop. She helped city officials select Police Commissioner Ron Walsh.

“I still go to the march and help out around town as much as I can,” Odom said. “I have a lot of nicknames, but the big one is the Queen of Long Beach. That’s what they called me at the MLK march before I spoke this year.