The 10-year-old makes her weekly trip to the neighborhood movie theater in West Philadelphia, where she devours films like some people gobble popcorn. For her, movies are journeys around the world. But of the dozens of films she’s already seen, the one playing this week is different.
Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier star in Paris Blues, a movie about two expatriate jazz musicians living in Paris. Sharon Freeman is most intrigued by Poitier’s character, who is judged by his acts, not by his race, in the City of Lights.
When the movie ends, the black, middle-class youngster walks out of the movie theater, vowing to live where people accept her, race and all. She’s willing to travel around the world to find that place. She returns home to write a list of the skills she will need to become a “global citizen.” Learn to shoot a gun, ride a horse, fly a plane are good starts, she figures.
“I certainly wouldn’t have had any way of being able to say exactly what I wanted to do as a global citizen, because I never really met one,” says Freeman (BHA’74, HNZ’79), nearly 50 years after she saw the film. “My actual experience exceeded my imagination.”
Since graduating, Freeman has helped women and minority business owners in 110 countries. She founded Lark-Horton Global Consulting, a business specializing in global commerce and development, and has addressed inequities in the global marketplace in six books.
This year, the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Washington, D.C., district office awarded her the Small Business Journalist of the Year Award in recognition of her efforts to write specifically for a female, immigrant, and minority audience. — Allison Schlesinger
