Crystal Eastman

by Susan Zehnder, Education Director

Coming across a name twice in one week is a good sign to dig a little deeper, and this is how I was introduced to Crystal Eastman. Turns out not only did this woman have connections to Elmira, women’s suffrage and Mark Twain, she was among the first American women to receive a law degree. She was the first woman appointed by a New York Governor to a state legal commission dealing with employment - a group she was later elected to lead – and she was co-founder of both the National Women’s Peace Party and the American Civil Liberties Union (commonly known as the ACLU). Amazingly, she accomplished all of this before her untimely death at the age of 48.

Crystal Eastman

Crystal Eastman was born in 1881, the second of four children to Samuel Eastman and Annis Ford Eastman. The Eastmans had married after meeting as students at Oberlin College. Samuel was ordained as a Presbyterian minister, and his first assignment was to Canandaigua’s First Congregational Church.

Samuel and Annis Eastman

Samuel Eastman had served in the Civil War, and had suffered from terrible pneumonia. His health went on to bother him throughout his life. Soon health issues forced him to resign his Canandaigua ministry, and his wife Annis took up teaching to raise money for the growing family. They had four children. Annis soon discovered a talent for speaking and was asked and accepted offers to preach at various local churches. She became an early feminist and popular speaker. Notable speeches she gave were before the Congress of Women and the National Council of Women of the United States.

In 1892, Annis became the first woman Congregational minister, and was ordained by a council headed by the Reverend Thomas K. Beecher of Elmira. The Eastmans and Beechers became lifelong friends and colleagues. When Reverend Beecher died in 1900, both Eastmans were appointed to take his place and they moved their family from Canandaigua to Elmira.

Revs. Thomas K. Beecher, Annis and Samuel Eastman

Other members of the progressive congregation included Samuel L. -also known as Mark Twain - and Livy Clemens. They knew the Eastmans so well that when Twain died, Reverend Annis Ford Eastman was asked to give the eulogy at his funeral. She wrote the eulogy, but her failing health prevented her from delivering it. Her husband spoke on her behalf.

The Eastman’s oldest child had died early from scarlet fever. Now there were three children and Crystal was their only daughter. She left Elmira to study at Vassar College, with plans to pursue advanced studies in NYC while her brother Max finished up at Williams College. 

Vassar College

The family’s financial plans required her to compromise. Her parents decided Crystal would pursue her master’s degree in sociology from Columbia, while Max took a year off. Crystal would then return to Elmira and work while Max finished his studies. Everyone agreed, and upon completing graduate school, Crystal returned to Elmira to teach high school English and history for two years.

In 1906, Crystal returned to New York City to enroll in law school at New York University. The program had recently began to admit women students, and she earned her degree in 1907. She was particularly interested in labor issues and worked on a project called the Pittsburgh Survey. This was an in-depth look at workplace injuries, employment, and unemployment issues. Her scholarship on the project brought her to the attention of the NY Governor. Governor Hughes appointed her to the New York State Commission of Employee’s Liability and Causes of Industrial Accidents, Unemployment and Lack of Farm Labor. Crystal became the first woman appointed to any state level commission in New York, and went on to be the elected Secretary of the commission. 

Following in her mother's footsteps, Crystal became active in the suffrage movement. Ironically her first contribution to the cause was to help her brother Max establish the Men's League for Women's Suffrage, and important organization that fought alongside and boosted women's rights.

Crystal married Wallace Benedict and they left New York for Milwaukee, his hometown. In Wisconsin, she campaigned for suffrage issues which went on to be soundly defeated. Within the year, she moved back alone to NYC. The couple divorced two years later.

By this time, World War I was looming. Crystal, along with other prominent activists, turned their attention away from women getting the vote to working on Peace and anti-Militarism campaigns. Concerned about the state of civil liberties for all citizens, she co-founded the National Woman’s Peace Party to defend free speech during wartime. Her advocacy work gained her international experience, and she traveled and lectured throughout Europe. She worked closely with prominent social reformers, activists and radicals of the day, including Walter Fuller who became her second husband. Walter was an Englishman, poet, anti-war activist, intellectual and editor, and together they had two children.

In 1920, when the US Government began to suppress free speech and freedom of the press, Crystal co-founded the National Civil Liberties Bureau later known as the American Civil Liberties Union. This was her most significant legacy.

Her work to protect citizens’ civil rights targeted her, and she and her husband were blacklisted by the government. Unable to find work, they fled the country to work in London, England.

In 1927, Walter had a stroke and died. Crystal returned to the US only to die six months later from inflammation of the kidneys. She was 48 years old. Crystal Eastman is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Canandaigua, NY.

The Sisters of St. Joseph

by Rachel Dworkin, archivist

In spring 1907, Mother Agnes of the Order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Rochester knelt in the chapel of the Nazareth Convent waiting for a sign from god. J. John Hassett and Dr. John A. Westlake of Elmira had approached Bishop McQuaid of Rochester about opening a Catholic hospital in Elmira in the old Academy of Our Lady of the Angels school. The Sisters of St. Joseph were selected to run it and Mother Agnes was praying for guidance on who to send when Sister Alice Rose Conway walked in. She would serve as St. Joseph’s Hospital administrator until her death in 1939.

Sister Alice Rose Conway

The Order of the Sisters of St. Joseph was founded in Le Puy, France in 1650. They established their American chapter in upstate New York in 1836 and have served the Diocese of Rochester, which includes Chemung County, since 1868. Prior to establishing St. Joseph’s Hospital, the sisters were strictly a teaching order. Sister Alice Rose was a French and math teacher at Nazareth Academy. Of the seven sisters who helped to establish the hospital, only two, Sister St. Ann and Sister Jerome, had any previous hospital experience. The former teachers had a lot of learning to do.

St. Joseph’s Hospital opened for patients on September 24, 1908 after extensive renovations. The first few years were incredibly hard and the hours were brutal. The sisters rose at 3am to do laundry in the kitchen before seeing to their nursing duties. At the end of their shifts, they ironed before dinner and then attended classes on nursing after. Money was tight. While the sisters made sure the patients had food, they, on several occasions, had nothing more than soup made from potato skins. Gas and electric service was spotty and wards were often lit by candles stuck in potatoes.

Original St. Joseph's Hospital and adjacent convent

The hospital grew rapidly under the guidance of Sister Alice Rose. Despite her limited experience, she was an able administrator and skilled fundraiser. In 1909, they held their first fundraiser, a baseball game between Elmira and Wilkes-Barre. The following year they built a laundry building and almost immediately launched into a campaign to fund construction of an annex. By the time Sister Alice Rose died in 1939, the hospital had expanded from a tiny converted school with 26 beds to a goodly-sized hospital complex with 5 buildings, 245 beds, and a dedicated nursing school with dormitory.

Care at St. Joseph’s had a uniquely Catholic flavor. The sisters believed it was crucial to heal patients both physically and spiritually. Patients could pray with the sisters, receive sacraments, and attend mass. At the tail end of the 20th century, they could even watch an in-house religious channel on their room’s TV. The nursing school was decidedly Catholic too. Each floor of the dormitory was overseen by a resident nun who kept the girls from sinful behaviors like dating. Students not only took classes on nursing and health, but also on the Catholic faith. Everyone, Catholic or not, was required to attend chapel at 6:50 am and Mass twice a week. It’s no surprise, really, that over the years, upwards of 40 students ended up as nuns themselves.

Sisters of St. Joseph on hospital steps, ca. 1930s

Sister Ruth Schicker, the last of the founding sisters, died at age 81 in 1967, but there where still plenty of nuns at St. Joseph’s Hospital. At the Order’s peak in 1947, there were 40 sisters working as nurses, administrators, and clerks. As the 20th century progressed, however, the number of nuns across the nation as a whole began to decline from a peak of 180,000 in 1965 to 92,107 in 1996. By the turn of the 21st century, there were only four sisters still working at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Sister Marie Castagnaro was the last, finally stepping down as administrator in 2010, shortly before St. Joseph’s merged with the Arnot Health System. 

An interesting side note: in 1942, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Rochester established a mission in Selma, Alabama and founded Good Samaritan Hospital for the treatment of impoverished blacks who could not be admitted to the local white hospital. Sisters from St. Joseph’s Hospital in Elmira and the mother house in Rochester took turns working there. On March 7, 1965, Civil Rights activists lead a march for voting rights which was supposed to be from Selma to Montgomery. Instead, the marchers were brutally beaten by state troopers and white supremacists at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Four sisters from St. Joseph’s were working at Good Samaritan at the time and helped to care for the wounded from the march. Within six hours, the hospital treated over 100 patients and admitted 15. Martin Luther King later visited the hospital to thank the sisters personally. In 1989, Margaret Hanley, formerly Sister Michael Ann Hanley, gave an interview about her time in Selma. Thanks to a grant from the South Central Regional Library Council, we were able to digitize the interview and make it available on YouTube. A quick warning before watching: it’s an hour long, so maybe grab some popcorn first.

New Student Exhibit: The African American Experience in Chemung County

by Mr. John Liquori, 5th Grade Teacher, Horseheads Intermediate School

This is our country, as much as it is the country of any other race.... We may be the descendants of Africans, but we are citizens of the United States. This is our home... 

-Silas X. Floyd 

A large part of the 5th grade New York State Social Studies curriculum, which focuses on the history and governments of the Western Hemisphere, is the struggle for equality that happened to many groups of people in the United States throughout its history. This includes the Black struggle for racial equality, from the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage all the way through the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. Black history is American history and the two should not be taught as if one is only a small part of the other. The Black experience in America is the backbone of the history of this entire nation--a nation built by slaves, torn apart by slavery, and suffers from a continuous struggle for human and civil rights that impacts us even today.

March 11, 1968 protest at Elmira City Hall

As a Social Studies teacher, one of my goals is to show students that any historical topic that can be studied in the broad context of American History can also be applied at the local level. For example, while the American Revolution was being fought throughout the entire thirteen colonies, locally, General Sullivan led a campaign through the Southern Tier which included the Battle of Newtown right outside Elmira. When the Civil War was ripping apart our nation in the 1860s, Confederate soldiers were dying in a prison camp called “Hellmira,” located on the banks of the Chemung River. There are always local ripples that affect the history of our entire country. When we begin to understand that the history of a nation is molded by local events and people, we can then truly understand why local history is so important. That is why in our classroom, American History is taught through a microhistory lens to where we live. This makes history relevant and it makes it real.

John Jones and Ernie Davis

 Starting December 5, there will be a new exhibit at the museum detailing the struggles and victories that local Blacks experienced as they fought for racial equality at home in Chemung County. This exhibit was created by a team of forty-four fifth grade students at Horseheads Intermediate School. These students, only nine and ten years old, were able to do the extraordinary task of taking primary and secondary source material and using it to tell the story from the perspective of those who lived and experienced the struggle for racial equality. This is a project the students worked on over a few months and the end product is incredible. In this exhibit, you will learn about the courage of John W. Jones and other abolitionists. You will learn about the humanitarianism of the Neighborhood House as they worked with local youth. You will read about the activism of the NAACP as they fought against injustices and empowered the Black people in this area. You will see beautiful visuals, including original artwork from Alsace Blandford and much more. There is so much that you will take away after visiting this exhibit. The African American Experience in Chemung County will be on display December 5, 2019 through January 11, 2020.

Orpheus Club party, 1942

Please join us on Thursday, December 5th, 5-7PM at the Chemung County Historical Society as we celebrate the 5th grade students and the important historical work they did to tell this history. There will be food and drinks, the opportunity to see and celebrate the new student-created exhibit, and also the chance to view the rest of the museum as well. This event is free and open to the public. We hope to see you there!

Freedom Rider

By Rachel Dworkin, archivist

On May 4, 1961, thirteen members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) boarded busses in Washington, D.C. with plans to travel south to New Orleans. The mixed-race group consisting of seven African Americans and six whites planned to flagrantly violate local segregation laws in order to challenge the non-enforcement of the Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960). In both cases, the court had found that segregation in interstate public transportation and associated terminals was unconstitutional. The Riders hoped provoke a reaction that would raise awareness of the on-going problem. And boy, did they ever. 

As the Freedom Riders headed further south, they came under increasing attack. Several were arrested in the Carolinas and Mississippi for violating segregation laws. Their bus was attacked by multiple mobs in Alabama. By the time they reached Birmingham, Alabama, the Kennedy administration was urging them to stop. Instead, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) set out on another bus, this time from Nashville, on May 17. Over the course of the summer, some 450 people from across the country would join the movement. 

A white mob burned the Freedom Riders' bus outside Anniston, Alabama on May 14, 1961

 

One of those people was Patricia Bryant, a 20-year-old Elmiran and EFA graduate. She’d just finished up her sophomore year studying social work at Central Ohio State College in Dayton, Ohio when she told her father she was going south to test segregation. On June 9^th, she and four fellow CORE members took a train down the Illinois-Central Railroad to Jackson, Mississippi. Bryant was the only African American in her group. All five of them were arrested for breaching the peace after refusing to leave the whites-only waiting room at the station. 

Patricia Bryant

 

Bryant and her friends were given the harshest sentence of any of the Freedom Riders to date at that point: a $200 and 4 months in jail. By that point, the city and county jails were filling up as Riders intentionally got themselves arrested and prisoners were being transferred to Mississippi State Penitentiary where they were subject to abuse. Isaac Bryant was understandably worried about his daughter’s safety and turned to the local NAACP for help and advice. The same day Patricia Bryant was arrested, the NAACP asked the U.S. District Court to intercede on the Freedom Riders’ behalf and protect them from arrest.  The local NAACP could do little to help Bryant, but promised to back her if she attempted to appeal her conviction. They also planned a welcome home party to celebrate her scheduled release in October.

Luckily for her, Patricia Bryant didn’t serve her full sentence. She was released on June 16^th on $500 bond. A large crowd was on hand to greet her at the Chemung County Airport when she flew home after a brief stay with her mother in Long Island. In September, she transferred to Ithaca College where she received her degree in social work. No word on if the local NAACP ever threw her that party.

The Freedom Rider movement continued to build throughout the summer even as the violence against the Riders escalated. By September, leaders from CORE and SNCC began planning a mass demonstration in Washington, but their plans were interrupted by a ruling from the Interstate Commerce Commission. Effective November 1, 1961, all interstate transportation lines and terminals would be forced to desegregate everywhere. Black passengers could sit where they wanted, eat at the station lunch counters, and use what had once been whites-only bathrooms. The alliances formed between Southern and Northern activists became the backbone of the later civil rights movement and many individual Riders went on to participate in subsequent campaigns.  

*****

Patricia Bryant’s story is just one of those profiled in our up-coming on-line exhibit The Color of Change. The exhibit looks at the 100-year history of the local branch of the NAACP. It will go live on February 15^th. Come check it out at: https://cchsonlineexhibits.wixsite.com/naacp