About Constancia
Constance Romilly graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1958. She left college in April of her senior year, traveled around a bit with one of the SNCC field secretaries, and eventually ended up in NY working for the newly formed Friends of SNCC.
In the fall of 1963, Jim Forman and Casey Hayden ask her to come to Atlanta to help Jim work on an oral history of the work of SNCC. Like everyone else in the movement, she ended up doing all kinds of work, and they never did get the oral history edited. She did fund-raising, coordinated the Friends of SNCC, and managed the fleet of donated and purchased SNCC cars.
In 1965, she and Jim made a commitment of marriage to each other, and she moved to New York to work in the New York SNCC office, and later for the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF). Their two children, James Robert Lumumba and Chaka Esmond Fanon, were born in New York.
In 1972, they moved to Detroit where Jim worked with the Black Workers Congress and Constancia went to nursing school. Later they were divorced and she moved back to New York with the boys.
She worked at Bellevue Hospital in the emergency room on the midnight shift and got involved in community work. One huge project was the struggle for community control of the schools, and they fought a losing battle to keep their neighborhood school, PS 122, open.
In 1979, she and her sons moved back to Atlanta, where she worked at the county hospital, Grady Memorial in the emergency room. She completed a BSN and MS, met and married her husband, Terry Weber and his son Ben. During that sojourn in Atlanta, she was active in local political campaigns, improved health care for the indigent, and better wages and working conditions for hospital staff. Once the three boys graduated from high school, she and Terry decided to move back to New York. She went back to Bellevue as a Clinical Nurse Specialist, helping to establish the Pain Treatment Center. She retired from Bellevue in 2006.
For the past four and half years, Constancia has been serving as president of The Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre, supporting a cultural center in The West Bank, Palestine.
She also volunteered for the Obama for President Campaign, Health-Care Now, and Physicians for a National Health Program.
