Page 53 - BusinessWest October 28, 2024

BusinessWest
Women of Women of IMPACT
2024 W31
Stories Worth Sharing
Taylor Rees, director of Ashes to Ashes, will certainly never forget her. “Dr. Shirley is a neighbor of mine who lived on the same street as my family in Massachusetts when I was growing up,” he wrote. “In 2015, she asked for help documenting her memorial, and throughout the year, we worked together to also visit with and listen to the personal and lived experiences of Winfred, her friend. The film evolved over time into an homage to both Shirley and Winfred and their work using art to address racial injustices in America.”
Whitaker has also made a powerful impression
on Anika Lopes, who nominated her as a Woman of Impact a year after Lopes, president of the Ancestral Bridges Foundation, earned the same honor from BusinessWest.
“Dr. Whitaker is a woman of impact with every step she takes, a tireless giver, sharing all she has with others,” Lopes wrote. “As a medical doctor, Shirley has and continues to dedicate herself to the wellness of others; she goes far beyond expectation and keeps going. In addition to caring for her patients’ health, Shirley brings joy and hope. Her contributions to
her community through educational programs have provided many with opportunities that would not have been afforded without her initiatives.”
Lopes added that Whitaker believes we all have a collective responsibility to create a better future, “and she sure is walking her talk.”
She’s doing so at a time when too many people don’t truly comprehend the horrors of slavery or the more recent legacy of Jim Crow, or are actively trying to erase that history. But she’s also hopeful about
the future, currently working on a screenplay called Blanket, noting that “a blanket of hate can never cover the resilience, remembrance, and hope.”
As for Rembert, he spent more than 50 years struggling with sleep issues, stemming partly from the trauma he experienced in 1967, as he describes in Ashes to Ashes.
“Even today, now, it’s dragging me down. I can’t rest. I can’t rest. I lie in my bed, and I can’t rest. I’m running for my life every night. Somebody’s after me, and I don’t know what to do.”
And later in the film:
“I don’t think I can be healed. I think I’ll go to the grave with what I got, holding me down and holding me back. Even though those things were done to me years ago, they’re still holding me back. Can I send the message? Can I change this? I can’t change this world. I know I’m not a big enough man to do that, but I can put a dent in it. But you just keep going, and going, and going, and going.”
Whitaker has kept going as well, maybe not changing the world, but impacting her corner of it in profound ways as a doctor, educator, artist, and filmmaker. And she empathizes with the pain of friends like Rembert and thousands of people she never knew, but wanted to memorialize through a unique funeral service and a story that will live on as people continue to watch it.
“I talked to him like two days before he died,” she said of Rembert, “and he said, ‘I just want to know what it’s like to go to sleep.’”
“We’re looking back in history so this patient can live,” Whitaker said during that 2017 memorial service in Springfield, referring not to a nephrology patient, but to a nation with deep, unhealed wounds. “We’re looking back in history so this patient can thrive. We’re looking back in history so this patient can become very strong. But this patient could only live and get stronger if we’re willing to look back. So tonight, we start.” BW
“
IMPACT A PROGRAM OF BUSINESSWEST A PROGRAM OF BUSINESSWEST
We’re
looking back in history so this patie”nt can live.
DINA’S
SHOWBIZ POP
QUIZ
Women of Women of IMPACT
947WMAS.com for details...
IMPACTA PROGRAM OF BUSINESSWEST A PROGRAM OF BUSINESSWEST
WOMEN
Impact