MOUNT VERNON  

How It Was Before Jim Crow Laws

      The daughters of a slave, the Delany sisters remember life in their native Raleigh, N.C., before the passage of Jim Crow laws that institutionalized segregation by race at the turn of the century. As young women, they moved to New York City, living in Harlem during its heyday in the 20’s and 30’s. They have stories to tell.
      The sisters attribute their longevity to their life style. They perform yoga exercises each morning except Sunday. They never drink water from the tap without boiling it first. They start the day with a swallow of cod liver oil and a chopped clove of garlic. They attend St. John, St. Paul and St. Clement Episcopal Church in Mount Vernon and hold daily prayer vigils at home. And they enjoy each other’s company.
      The sisters added, in jest, that another reason they have lived so long is that neither one ever married. "We never had husbands to worry us to death," Bessie Delany said.
      As for other secrets of longevity: "No drinking, no chewing, no smoking," said Sadie Delany, sweetly but firmly. "And always clean your plate."
      The Delany Sisters were born on the campus of St. Augustine’s College, a school for blacks in Raleigh where their father, Henry Beard Delany, was a teacher and administrator and their mother, Nanny James Delany, was the matron supervising day-to-day operations.
      Their father was born into slavery in St. Mary’s Ga., on the coast near the Florida border. Henry Beard Delany was 6 years old "when the surrender came," she said referring to Gen. Robert E. Lee‘s surrender to the Union at Appomattox Court House.
      Their mother was an issue-free Negro whose ancestry was mostly white and who could have passed as a white woman if she had wanted to, the sisters said. An issue-free Negro was an individual who had some black ancestry but whose mother was a free person.
      When their father was a young man, a white Episcopal priest encouraged him to get an education and become a minister. Thus, their father began a long career as a distinguished theologian, eventually becoming the first elected black bishop of the Episcopal Church in America.
      The sisters recalled that their parents were strict and held high expectations. There were 10 children. As adults, they all enjoyed successful careers. Among them were two dentists, a doctor, two lawyers (one of whom became a judge ) and three teachers. Besides Sadie and Bessie, another sister, 87-year-old Laura Edith Murrell of Oakland, Calif., is also alive.
      The family was poor, the sisters said, and the siblings worked and saved to pay for college. "We had everything a family could want except money," Bessie Delany said. "We didn’t have one cent."
      As young girls, the sisters said, their lives changed abruptly with the passage, around 1900, of the Jim Crow laws. "Suddenly, everything was different," Bessie Delany said.
    "All of a sudden," she recalled, "we were told we had to sit in the back of the streetcars. Before that, we sat anywhere we wanted to."

Continued top of next column.  

All Patients Accepted

      Sadie Delany attended a two-year program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and graduated at age 31 with a bachelor’s degree from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1920. In 1925 she earned a master’s degree in education from Columbia. Bessie Delany graduated in 1923 -- when she was 32 -- from the School of Dental and Oral Surgery at Columbia University. She was the second black woman licensed to practice dentistry in New York City.
      Bessie Delany became known in Harlem for never turning away a needy patient, no matter how poor or sick. "I remember a child with syphilis, and nobody else would touch her," she said. "I said, Well, somebody’s got to help her, so I did."
      The sisters shared an apartment at 145th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem, 10 blocks north of the office where Bessie Delany practiced dentistry. Harlem was lively and prosperous, and "a woman could go where she wanted without being afraid," Bessie Delany said. The sisters socialized with many of the most prominent blacks of that era, including W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes.
      While Bessie Delany practiced dentistry, Sadie Delany taught home economics at P.S. 119 in Manhattan, Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Bronx, Girls High School in Brooklyn and finally, at Evander Childs High School in the Bronx. "I was the first appointed Negro in home economics at the high school level in new York City," she said. That was in 1926.

Obstacles to Becoming a Teacher

      But Sadie Delany recalled obstacles she faced. "High schools would boast that they did not have Negro teachers," she said. To get her first high school teaching position, she skipped a meeting she was supposed to have attended, received her teaching appointment though the mail and "just showed up" on the first day of school, she said. "They just about dropped dead when they saw me," she said with a laugh.
      One way black teachers were prevented from teaching at certain schools was that administrators would refuse to hire anyone with a Southern accent, claiming it was bad for the children, Sadie Delany said. "Of course, many black teachers had Southern accents, so it was just a way of keeping us out."
      Bessie Delany said she also had encountered prejudice. She recalled an incident in dentistry school at Columbia. An instructor was dissatisfied with her work and told her to do an assignment over. Bessie Delany and her friends believed the instructor had failed her because she was black. To prove it, one of her white female friends – there were 11 women in a class of 200 – volunteered to secretly present Bessie Delany’s failed work as her own. It was promptly passed by the same instructor, she said.
      There were other frustrating and humiliating incidents, such as one that occurred at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan in 1924 when Bessie Delany asked a man at the front desk for directions to the room where she was to attend a medical conference. "That louse directed me to the men’s room," she said, her voice rising in anger. More than 65 years after the incident, she says, "I have never gotten over that."
      Bessie Delany retired in 1950 to take care of the sisters’ widowed mother, who had moved from North Carolina to the Bronx, where she died at age 95. Sadie Delany continued to teach until 1960. In 1957, the sisters moved to their house in Mount Vernon, where they have lived quietly ever since.