Backbone of the Black Home honoree would never 'follow the masses'

May 11—CHAMPAIGN — Thanks to her years of driving buses, both for schools and the MTD, lots of people recognize Delores Derricks, but she says she doesn't really know many of them.

Like many things in her life, Derricks sacrificed time that could've been spent making connections in order to support her five sons.

"It was a whole lot of denying yourself, a whole lot of trying to do what you thought was best," Derricks said.

That's why she'll be honored this Mother's Day weekend alongside other moms with a Backbone of the Black Home award from the Not On My Watch organization (10 a.m. today at Douglass Annex).

The award recognizes Black mothers whose hard work may go unnoticed.

Derricks describes her childhood home as abusive and remembers her mother as a survivor.

"I learned at a young age that you got to do what you got to do. You can't follow the masses," Derricks said. "You got to make up your mind about what you're going to do and stick to it, so I guess that's what I chose."

By the time she graduated from Central High School, Derricks was married to her first husband, which she felt she had to do after getting pregnant.

After their divorce, Derricks raised her five sons alone.

Today, people in the Champaign area will know son Anthony Cobb as the former police chief and son Domonic Cobb as the University of Illinois associate vice chancellor for student success, inclusion and belonging.

Her other sons are practicing law in Chicago, education in New York and — this time of year — helping Derricks with yard work in Champaign, respectively.

It was important to Derricks to lead by example, so she started attending Parkland College at 41 years old, hoping to encourage the boys' interest in education.

"What you tell them, they may miss that. But if you show them, they can see that," she said. "I tried to show them by going to school."

It wasn't easy; Derricks was driving school buses for work, taking classes and raising her sons all at once.

"I knew at an early age that I was raising fathers, husbands, citizens. I loved them, but I raised them — I didn't baby them," she said. "I raised them, I held them accountable, and I required of them."

She used to have the boys sit at the table and work on the monthly bills with her, because they needed to see where the family was financially.

Once they were off to school, she'd do the shopping; Salvation Army and Goodwill clothed her family, but Derricks' children never knew where anything came from.

"I let them know that Michael Jordan shoes might make you run fast, but he ain't going to give me no money," Derricks said. "'The only name you got is yours, which is Cobb, C-O-B-B, and that's the only name you'll ever have."

Even though they helped fill out bills, the kids never really understood how little money their family had.

"They didn't ever have to go without," Derricks said. "I always told them, 'You can be the president, you can be whatever you want to be.'"

When Domonic started filling out financial-aid forms to attend the UI, he called his mom up to ask "How did you raise us like this?"

No one else knew, either; Derricks remembers participating in some lessons on budgeting through Canaan Baptist Church and turning to the pastor when she couldn't get hers to turn out correctly.

He told her, "Well, I don't know how you're doing all you're doing with what you got. So we're gonna leave your budget alone. The Lord got your budget,

"And he's still got it," Derricks said. "He's still allowing me to do and to give and to share with the little bit that I have."

After graduating from Parkland, Derricks attended the UI, even taking a course alongside Domonic, but it was too much.

She pulled out of school with a 4.0 GPA to focus on raising her sons.

"And I happened to be chosen by this great old man — he was 24 years older than I am — and we dated and then we married," Derricks said.

That was Ezell Derricks, who died at the age of 94 in 2022.

"He taught the boys some of what a good man, a good, godly man, looks like," Derricks said.

She started driving for the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District rather than the school district in 2007, only retiring nine years later after a back injury forced her.

Derricks said she never had the chance to spend money on luxuries like nice nails or hairdos and never had time for live entertainment like concerts, and at 72, she fears she's too old for that kind of thing.

Still, she's spending time with her pastor, with her therapist and with herself, discovering what she likes to do.

"I'm not trying to rediscover my youth. No, I'm trying to learn how to be content where I am," Derricks said. "I'm going to do whatever he tells me to do, whatever the Lord tells me. I owe him that. As I look out, five grown sons, all of them almost 50-plus years old, I owe him."