Corene H. Crenshaw

                                                                         In Loving Memory

                                               The Life and Quiet Strength of Corene Hawkins-Crenshaw

 

Corene Hawkins-Crenshaw was born May 30, 1931, to Columbus “Lum” Hawkins Sr. and Opal “Opie” Pugh-Hawkins in Bolling, Alabama, as the fourth of fourteen children. Corene departed this life on June 10, 2025. She was preceded in death by her parents and all thirteen of her siblings. That consists of eight sisters: Ruby Hawkins, Ella Mae Stanley, Opie Tompkins, Elizabeth Stanley, Helen Hawkins, Mary Hunter, Betty Ware, and Dorothy Hawkins; and four brothers: Horace Hawkins, Iziah Hawkins, Lum Hawkins Jr., and Lee Roy Hawkins Sr. Another brother, Willie Lee Hawkins, passed away as a six-month-old baby.

She was raised in a family and community that worked together to thrive despite the grip of America’s Jim Crow apartheid—in Alabama, where the Scottsboro Boys trial had unfolded only two months earlier. The family’s house in Bolling, a rural town about 55 miles south of Montgomery, was hand-built by her father, Lum, from simple wood and clapboard. It was a mini-farm, complete with a chicken coop, rows of seasonal crops, and a mule hitched to a wagon for transportation. The Hawkins household was full of love and Missionary Baptist values, with an emphasis on instilling a strong work ethic in the children. Those values were taught and stressed by her homemaker mother and railroad-worker father, who was also employed at a lumberyard. Her father grew vegetables and plowed the family’s field every day after finishing his two jobs, laboring until the moon rose over the red-clay fields of Butler County.

Growing up, Corene was a traditional southern girl who learned a great deal from her mother about running a meticulously kept household. She spent countless hours assisting Grandma Opie with cooking, caring for younger siblings, gardening, and the cleaning chores that would later shape the immaculate home she maintained throughout her adult life. As a young teen, one of her favorite pastimes was sitting on the front porch with her sisters and neighborhood friends at the home of her grandmother, Ella Pugh, every Sunday after church. Not long after she turned fourteen, she caught the eye of L.C. Crenshaw, the son of Alma and Bossie Crenshaw, who lived nearby. L.C. was a lean, broad-shouldered soldier in the U.S. Army who became enamored with Corene’s flawless skin; mezzo-soprano voice and laugh; impeccably ironed dresses, earrings, necklaces, patent-leather shoes; and the unwavering confidence and toughness that both intimidated and captivated most of the teenage boys in Bolling.

Determined to spark Corene’s interest and slip past the formidable stare of a skeptical Grandma Ella and Corene’s sisters and cousins, L.C. approached the bottom step of the porch every Sunday, hat in hand, enduring the girls’ taunting giggles and the kind but stern, deliberately aloof Corene, who always required him to walk all the way up to the porch instead of meeting him halfway.

By this time, Uncle L.C. was a decorated World War II soldier who had seen action—impressive

to most folks, yet no guarantee of winning Corene Hawkins’s heart.

Finally, after countless Sundays of braving Grandma Ella’s penetrating glare and the girls’ laughter, and unsure whether Corene—and her father, Lum—would let him take her off that porch for a real date, he found the nerve to ask her out. Early on, he confessed how rough it felt to be sized up from head to toe by the whole porch full of women and girls. In a 2015 interview she recalled that exchange on that first date:

“L.C. was trying to argue,” she said. He told me, “When you get ready to walk up there to the church, you let me know. I don’t run up to girls like that—you had me running up to you.” And I said, “Well, you could keep walking.”

Of course, L.C. was too smitten to keep walking. He came every Sunday he could while home in Bolling. After two years of courtship—most of it by letter and furlough—they married on June 7, 1947, about a year after L.C.’s honorable discharge and five years before the Hawkins family moved to Greenville, Alabama.

They entered their life together on the heels of an impressive military service record and campaign. LC Crenshaw served honorably in the U.S. Army from October 1942 to July 1946, earning the Good Conduct Medal, American Campaign Medal, European African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with two bronze stars, and the World War II Victory Medal in recognition of his exemplary conduct and service overseas. As his wife, Corene was his unwavering pillar—supporting him through training at Fort Benning, deployments across multiple European campaigns, and his return home—helping him carry the weight of wartime duty with grace and devotion.

In Alabama they faced discrimination harsher than anything L.C. had seen overseas; Black veterans were routinely denied GI-Bill mortgages and educational aid through redlining and other Jim Crow roadblocks. In the early 1950s they joined the Second Great Migration, the six-million-strong exodus of Black Southerners between 1910 and 1970.

Their act of quiet protest was to buy a house at 787 Fuller in St. Paul’s historic Rondo community, scraping together every paycheck—he butchered meat by day and poured concrete on weekends, while she cleaned offices at Farwell, Ozmun, Kirk & Company and in several state buildings.

Family pilgrimages south continued—first in the Fairlane, later in a Cadillac Coupe DeVille whose long hood and crushed-velvet seats signaled early-’70s road luxury. Corene stepped out in her red sequin dress at reunions and met Minnesota winters wrapped in sweeping mink coats, proof that the North, racist though it was, still left room to rise.

Around the mid-1950s, Corene’s mother, Grandma Opie, began having kidney trouble. Corene brought her to a Black doctor in Minnesota, who urged her to stay for treatment. She declined—family was still in Alabama—and confided that she felt God might be calling her home. Her dying wish: that Corene and L.C. move her youngest children north to finish school and start

fresh. Though barely thirty, they agreed.

In January 1961—two days after the funeral—the three youngest siblings climbed into the Fairlane with Corene and L.C. and headed up the interstate toward a new life. They soon joined Corene and L.C. at Mount Olivet Missionary Baptist Church, planting the first seeds for the wave of Hawkins relatives who would follow them to Minnesota, some ready to serve in ministry and music.

Over the next decades, Corene and her sister, Helen Hawkins, became the main matriarchs for their younger siblings. The Crenshaw home stood as a base for the family, a place where Corene laid out lavish Southern-style soul-food dinners, both for family members and visiting preachers from Alabama and across the South. Her cornbread had a buttery taste that melted on the tongue and left guests asking for thirds. Her house always smelled freshly scrubbed, complete with linens on every table, polished utensils, and candles burning at dinner.

In 1989, tragedy struck when, after forty-two years of marriage, L.C. died of lung cancer. Crushed and determined not to remarry, she spoke lovingly of him for the next 36 years. Corene was her own woman. Though she grew up when smoking and cocktail hours defined American social life, she never touched either. At a time when more than half the country lit up, her quiet abstinence spoke volumes about a woman who always made her own rules—and reaped the health rewards for it.

 

That discipline shone again in the early 2000s, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Although mastectomy was still routine for early-stage patients—especially women over seventy—Corene charted her own course. She declined surgery, kept every follow-up appointment, prayed daily for healing, and overhauled her lifestyle: boiled greens and piles of vegetables replaced her delicious fried chicken and rich gravies, and gardening, staying active, and long, fast walks became part of her day. The payoff was a healthy weight drop, renewed stamina, and—most important—remission. In 2003, St. Joseph’s Hospital honored her courage with its Lion Heart Award.

Corene spent her final three years at Lyngblomsten Care Center in St. Paul, a facility that promises safety, dignity, comfort, and person-centered choices.

From the hand-built wooden home her father raised in rural Bolling to a Cadillac DeVille cruising up I-94, Corene Hawkins-Crenshaw’s life embodied the American Dream. Her faith, grit, and love carried an Alabama girl to a Minnesota house forever filled with laughter, music, and Sunday prayer—one that opened the door for hundreds of Hawkins and Crenshaw relatives to find new opportunities, meet future spouses, and welcome children. She didn’t just read about the Great Migration; she lived it—spotting opportunity and daring to pursue it. In our family, she was the first one who made the journey north, a Black woman who embodied the dignity of her era’s greats—Rosa Parks, Mahalia Jackson, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Lena Horne. She was our Rosa Parks and our Lena Horne—quicker wit, sometimes sharper tongue, always pure class.

That strength and spirit were exactly what it took to overcome—and thrive upon—every barrier in her path. Had she and L.C. told Grandma Opie no—that taking on five kids would be bad for their marriage, that the younger children should stay in Alabama with Papa and the rest of the family—some of us might still be in Butler County, and many of us born in Minnesota would never have existed.

That sense of divine assignment—spirit, tenacity, commitment to health, and unwavering faith—enabled Corene Hawkins-Crenshaw to live 94 years and outlive all sixteen of her nuclear family members. Now she walks through Heaven’s gates into L.C.’s waiting arms, reunited with Papa Lum and Grandma Opie, no longer relying on memories and the oil painting that hung so prominently in her living room.

The descendants of Lum and Opie Hawkins extend heartfelt thanks to the Lyngblomsten team and everyone who cared for or visited her. Special gratitude to Corene’s nephew Tony Ware and his partner Jenna—who we all love—for their steadfast devotion to Aunt Corene; may God bless you both richly.

Corene Hawkins-Crenshaw has traded Minnesota’s chill for eternal spring, leaving a legacy of worship, service, and family that will light our family’s path forward, for generations.

 

Service Friday, June 20, 2025 at 10:45 a.m. at Mount Olivet Baptist Church, 451 Central Ave. W., St. Paul. Interment at Fort Snelling National Cemetery. Visitation 45 minutes prior to the service at church on Friday (10:00 – 10:45 a.m.)