Lady Paula Merry

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Lady Paula Merry Mayowa-Harrison is an African-American author of children's books based in Houston, Texas.

Lady Paula holds a B.A. in education from Texas Southern University. Her book, The Buckaroos, an illustrated children's story about fighting crime, was published by Dorrance Publishing Co. in 2006. She currently also publishes The Investigator Paper of Treatment, a political newsletter addressing civil-rights issues in southeast Texas and in the Caribbean.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] The Buckaroos

Lady Paula dedicated her book, The Buckaroos, to her children. The story urges young African-Americans to reject crime and to live a life based on the three "unity principles" of Ujima, Ujamaa, and Kuumba that are common to African-American and Caribbean culture.

Lady Paula’s experience as a teacher and a mother prompted her to write The Buckaroos, as she saw the need to promote crime prevention to children. The Buckaroos is her first published book.

"Lady Paula Merry" is also the name claimed by someone who regularly posts Xeroxed copies of her writings on newspaper boxes in the downtown Seattle area near the intersection of 3rd and Pike. It is unknown if this "Lady Paula Merry" is the same person as the "Lady Paula Merry" originally mentioned in this entry. Most of these writings by the Seattle-based "Lady Paula Merry" are rambling, disjointed declarations that usually concern themselves with issues of race and religion. Since December 2007, Seattle-based artist and musician calling himself "Thorrific" has been collecting them whenever he can find them and scanning and posting them to his MySpace Page, which cannot be linked here due to the spam filter, but which can be found by adding "thorrificmusic" to a MySpace URL and then navigating to his blog section.

[edit] Personal life and community involvement

Lady Paula is a member of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Exchange Club for the Prevention of Child Abuse.^{[citation needed]} She also enjoys croquet and antique-collecting, and she has two sons: Vincent and Ronald, who are "Trooper crime fighters."

She is also an advocate of Caribbean immigrant rights for Houston's growing, but often politically marginalized Haitian, Jamaican, and Creole-Cajun populations. Lady Paula states that her inspirations are civil-rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.