2,300-year-old boots that belong to a Scythian woman, preserved in the frozen ground of the Altai Mountains. The Scythians (pronounced 'SIH-thee-uns') were a nomadic tribe that lived in southern Siberia from around 900 to 200 B.C. Much of our knowledge about the Scythians comes from the writings of Greeks, Assyrians, and Persians, as the Scythians themselves did not keep written records.
The Greek historian Herodotus wrote, "None who attacks them can escape, and none can catch them if they desire not to be found. For when men have no established cities or fortresses, but all are house-bearers and mounted archers, living not by tilling the soil but by cattle-rearing and carrying their dwellings on wagons, how should these not be invincible and unapproachable?"
Herodotus also describes how the Scythians enjoyed a ritual involving getting high on hemp in a type of mobile "weed sauna":
"They anoint and wash their heads; as for their bodies, they set up three poles leaning together to a point and cover these over with woollen mats; then, in the place so enclosed to the best of their power, they make a pit in the centre beneath the poles and the mats and throw red-hot stones into it... The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp and, creeping under the mats, they throw it on the red-hot stones; and, being so thrown, it smoulders and sends forth so much steam that no Greek vapour-bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapour-bath. This serves them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water."
Archaeologists have also discovered that nearly a third of all Scythian women were buried with bows and arrows and other weapons; they had injuries from war just like their male counterparts. These were female warriors who trained, hunted, and fought alongside men on the Eurasian steppe. It is believed that these Scythian women were the Amazon warriors described in the stories written by the Ancient Greeks.
Gregorio Menendez Bustelo, a Spaniard, founded Café Bustelo in the Bronx in 1928. He moved to the United States in 1917 after spending many years in Latin America, including Havana, Cuba. He and his wife bought a roaster with their savings and roasted coffee at home.
They sold the coffee to neighborhood restaurants during the day and door-to-door at night. In 1931, Bustelo opened his own store on Fifth Avenue, between 113th and 114th Streets. He called it the Bustelo Coffee Roasting Company.
Female photojournalist Jessie Tarbox on the street with her camera, 1900'
Prison Garb 1924. Belva Annan murderess whose trial records became the musical "Chicago."
Amy Johnson, English aviator 1903-1941 One of the first women to gain a pilot's license, Johnson won fame when she flew solo from Britain to Australia in 1930. Her dangerous flight took 17 days. Later she flew solo to India and Japan and became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic East to West, she volunteered to fly for The Women's Auxiliary Air Force in WW 2, but her plane was shot down over the River Thames and she was killed
Phoebe Mozee (aka: Annie Oakley). Famed for her marksmanship by 12 years old, she once shot the ashes off of Kaiser Wihelm II's cigarette at his invitation. When she outshot famed exhibition marksman Frank Butler, he fell in love with her and they married. They remained married the rest of their lives
Leather gloves worn by Lincoln to Ford's Theater on the night of his assassination. Blood stains are visible at the cuffs
A cigarette-smoking, pants-wearing, animal-dissecting painter, Rosa Bonheur spent her life doing exactly as she pleased. 2022 marks the bicentenary of the birth an artist who opened countless doors for female creatives, both in her home country of France and abroad.
Rosa
Speaking of petticoats. One of the most notable things about Bonheur was her love of wearing pants, a reflection of her personal style as well as her status as a woman who rode horses, visited livestock fairs, and painted on a daily basis, all activities that would be hindered by wearing heavy skirts. She held a permission de travestissement, effectively a legal document from the French government which had to be renewed every six months, allowing her to “cross-dress”.
Rosa Bonheur’s permission de travestissement
Rosa took full advantage of the permissions granted by creating something of a trouser-based uniform for herself while she worked. According to the archivist at Château de Rosa Bonheur, it was only really when she posed for the occasional portrait that she’d wear a dress. Not-so-fun fact: Until January 31st of 2013, it was illegal for women in France to wear trousers. It made headlines at the time when the 200 year-old law requiring women to ask police for special permission to “dress as men” or else risk being taken into custody, was finally revoked.
The history of Onna-Bugeisha (Onna-Musha) traces back to Empress Jingū (169-269), one of the earliest female warriors in Japan. After her husband’s death, she took the throne and led an invasion of Silla (present-day Korea).
Remarkably, she fought while pregnant, defying societal norms, and ruled Japan for the next 70 years until the age of 100. In 1881, she even became the first woman to appear on a Japanese banknote.
Bette Davis with Hattie McDaniel. Davis was the only white member of McDaniel’s troupe of performers to perform for black servicemen during WWII. McDaniel was the Chairman of the Negro Division of the Hollywood Victory Committee. She formed the troupe.
An ancient Romanmosaic from the 4th century CE depicting an Amazon warrior in mounted combat against a Greek rider. The Greek is seizing the Phrygian cap of the Amazon. Cropped detail of a mosaic from Daphne, a suburb of Antioch on the Orontes (modern Antakya, Turkey), now on display in the Denon Wing of the Louvre Museum.
Drawing on a wealth of textual, artistic, and archaeological evidence, Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons, dispels these myths and takes us inside the truly wild and wonderful world of these ancient warrior women
What archaeological proofs have been discovered to show that these mythical beings actually existed?
They've been excavating Scythian kurgans, which
are the burial mounds of these nomadic peoples. They all had
horse-centred lifestyles, ranging across vast distances from the Black
Sea all the way to Mongolia. They lived in small tribes, so it makes
sense that everyone in the tribe is a stakeholder. They all have to
contribute to defense and to war efforts and hunting. They all have to
be able to defend themselves.
The great equalizer for those peoples was the domestication
of horses and the invention of horse riding, followed by the perfection
of the Scythian bow, which is smaller and very powerful. If you think
about it, a woman on a horse with a bow, trained since childhood, can be
just as fast and as deadly as a boy or man.
Archaeologists have found skeletons buried with bows and
arrows and quivers and spears and horses. At first they assumed that
anyone buried with weapons in that region must have been a male warrior.
But with the advent of DNA testing and other bioarchaeological
scientific analysis, they've found that about one-third of all Scythian
women are buried with weapons and have war injuries just like the men.
The women were also buried with knives and daggers and tools. So burial
with masculine-seeming grave goods is no longer taken as an indicator of
a male warrior. It's overwhelming proof that there were women answering
to the description of the ancient Amazons.
Why were they called Amazons?
[Laughs.] That's such a complex story that I actually
devoted an entire chapter to it. It's the one thing everyone seems to
think they know about Amazons: that the name has something to do with
only having one breast so they could easily fire an arrow or hurl a
spear. But anyone who's watched The Hunger Games, or female
archers, knows that that is an absolutely physiologically ridiculous
idea. Indeed, no ancient Greek artworks—and there are thousands—show a
woman with one breast.
All modern scholars point out that the plural noun
"Amazones" was not originally a Greek word—and has nothing to do with
breasts. The notion that "Amazon" meant "without breast" was invented by
the Greek historian Hellanikos in the fifth century B.C.
He tried to force a Greek meaning on the foreign loan word: a
for "lack" and "mazon," which sounded a bit like the Greek word for
breast. His idea was rejected by other historians of his own day, and no
ancient artist bought the story. But it stuck like superglue. Two early
reviews of my book even claimed I accept that false etymology.
Linguists today suggest that the name derives from ancient Iranian or
Caucasian roots.
The three women pictured in this incredible photograph taken on this day in 1885 -- Anandibai Joshi of India, Keiko Okami of Japan, and Sabat Islambouli of Syria -- each became the first licensed female doctors in their respective countries.
The three were students at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania; one of the only places in the world at the time where women could study medicine.
As Mallika Rao writes in HuffPost, "If the timing doesn't seem quite right, that's understandable. In 1885, women in the U.S. still couldn't vote, nor were they encouraged to learn very much. Popular wisdom decreed that studying was a threat to motherhood." Given this, how did three women from around the world end up studying there to become doctors? The credit, according to Christopher Woolf of PRI's The World, goes to the Quakers who "believed in women’s rights enough to set up the WMCP way back in 1850 in Germantown.”
Woolf added, "It was the first women’s medical college in the world, and immediately began attracting foreign students unable to study medicine in their home countries. First they came from elsewhere in North America and Europe, and then from further afield. Women, like Joshi in India and Keiko Okami in Japan, heard about WMCP, and defied expectations of society and family to travel independently to America to apply, then figure out how to pay for their tuition and board... . Besides the international students, it also produced the nation’s first Native American woman doctor, Susan La Flesche, while African Americans were often students as well. Some of whom, like Eliza Grier, were former slaves."
Eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Cochrane was living in Pittsburgh when the local newspaper published an article titled “What Girls are Good For” (having babies and keeping house was the answer, according to the article). The article displeased Elizabeth enough that she wrote an anonymous rebuttal, which in turned so impressed the paper’s editor that he ran an ad, asking the writer to identify herself. When Elizabeth contacted him, he hired her on the spot. It was customary at the time for female reporters to use pen names, so the editor gave her one that he took from a Stephen Foster song. It was the name under which she would become famous—Nellie Bly.
Bly’s passion was investigative reporting, but the paper usually assigned her to more “feminine” subjects—such as theater and fashion. After writing a controversial series of articles exposing the working conditions of female factory workers, and after again being relegated to reporting on society functions and women’s hobbies, at age 21 Bly left for Mexico on a dangerous and unprecedented (for a woman) assignment to report of the conditions of the working-class people there. After her reporting got her in trouble with the local authorities, she fled the country and later published her dispatches into a popular book. At age 23, having established a reputation as a daring and provocative reporter, Bly was hired by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and there she began the undercover project that made her famous. In order to investigate the conditions inside New York’s “Women’s Lunatic Asylum,” Bly took on a fake identity, checked into a women’s boarding house, and faked insanity—so convincingly that she soon found herself committed to the asylum. The report she published of her ten days there was a sensation and led to important reforms in the treatment of the mentally ill.
The following year Bly undertook her most sensational assignment yet: a solo trip around the world inspired by Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. With only two days’ notice, Bly set out on November 14, 1889, carrying a travel bag with her toiletries and a change of underwear, and her purse tied around her neck. Pulitzer’s competitor, the New York Cosmopolitan, immediately sent out one of its reporters—Elizabeth Bisland—to race Bly, traveling in the opposite direction. As Pulitzer had hoped, the stunt was a publicity bonanza, as readers eagerly followed news on Bly’s journey and the paper sponsoring a contest for readers to guess the exact time of Bly’s return (with the correct guess winning an expense-paid trip to Europe).
Seventy-two days later, Bly made her triumphant return (four and half days ahead of Bisland), having circumnavigated the globe, traveling alone almost the entire time. It was the fastest any human had ever made the journey. Nellie Bly was an international celebrity. At age 31 Bly married industrialist Robert Seaman, a 73-year-old millionaire, leaving behind her journalism career and her pen name. As Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman she helped run the family business. She patented two inventions during her time as an industrialist, but business was not her really in her skillset and under her leadership the company went bankrupt. When World War I broke out, she returned to journalism, becoming one of the first women reporters to work in an active war zone.
Kalpana Chawla was an Indian-born American astronaut and aerospace engineer who was the first woman of Indian origin to fly to space. She first flew on Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997 as a mission specialist and primary robotic arm operator aboard.
Chawla's second flight was on STS-107, the final flight of Columbia, in 2003. She was one of the seven crew members who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster when the spacecraft disintegrated during its re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere on 1 February 2003. Chawla was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, and several streets, universities, and institutions are named in her honor
The lady in the picture is Sara Mayer, the first non Japanese woman to receive a black belt in Judo, back in the thirties in Japan. This lady born in England in 1896 decided she wanted to learn judo and after starting to study it in London at the Budokwai, the oldest european dojo founded in 1912, she travelled for weeks all the way to Japan.
After years of hard training with men in Tokyo and Kyoto, refusing to train in the women only classes, and having to cope with the traditional Japanese culture that at the time didn't like to see women training with men, she was awarded the rank of shodan, black belt.
When asked why she was not embarrassed when ground fighting with men, she replied that during training one's sex didnt count.
Famous bald eagle mates Jackie and Shadow watched closely as the first of two chicks began to hatch Monday in Big Bear Valley, California, after nearly three years without successful hatching.
In the brisk early hours of Tuesday morning, Jackie and Shadow welcomed the second chick into the world.
"My first big recipe was shark repellant that I mixed in a bathtub for the Navy, for the men who might get caught in the water."
Before she mastered the art of French cooking, Julia Child cooked up shark repellent while working for the precursor to the CIA as a covert operative during World War II. Sharks kept unintentionally setting off underwater explosives meant for German U-boats — until Child came up with an inventive recipe that saved the day.
Newspaper photography as a vocation for women is somewhat of an innovation, but is one that offers great inducements in the way of interest as well as profit. If one is the possessor of health and strength, a good news instinct . . . a fair photographic outfit, and the ability to hustle, which is the most necessary qualification, one can be a news photographer.
Jessie Tarbox Beals The Focus, St. Louis, Missouri, 1904
Portrait of Jessie Tarbox Beals standing on a city sidewalk with her camera. New York, USA. Ca. 1902. Beals was the first published female photojournalist and first female night photographer in the United States.
Jessie Tarbox Beals is known as America's first female news photographer because The Buffalo Inquirer and The Courier hired her as a staff photographer in 1902. Although rarely hired again as a staff photographer, her freelance news photographs and her tenacity and self-promotion set her apart in a competitive field through the 1920s. At a time when most women's roles were confined to the home and most women who ventured into photography maintained homelike portrait studios, Jessie called attention to her willingness to work outdoors and in situations generally thought too rough for a woman. She excelled in photographing such news worthy events as the 1904 world's fair as well as documentary photography of houses, gardens, Bohemian Greenwich Village, slums, and school children.
The boy, Ronald McNair, went on to get a PhD in Physics from MIT and became an astronaut. Sadly, McNair died during the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. The library that refused to lend him books is now named after him.
The shorts and kneepads scream 1965.
But who is that lanky seven-foot-tall, 17-year-old high school athlete
standing with teammates from Power Memorial Academy at the Catholic High
School Athletic Association Championship game?
College recruiters were pursuing the
center with intensity, harassing him in the street and searching for his
unlisted phone number. The athlete, Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr., was a
giant, an epic talent. But he eschewed the spotlight. He referred each
scout to his coach.
“I want two things from college,” Alcindor said. “I want to be treated like Lew Alcindor. I want an education.”
Eventually he settled on U.C.L.A., then a
career in the N.B.A., starting with the Milwaukee Bucks. He led the
Bucks to a championship in 1971, and the day after that victory, he
changed his name to one we are a bit more familiar with: Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar.
Thousands came, from 30 states, to the
Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on
May 17, 1957. They wanted more, and faster, action on civil rights
issues and to look back and forward on the third anniversary of Brown v.
Board of Education.
In a speech to the crowd that day, the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described that landmark Supreme Court
decision as “a joyous daybreak to end the long night of enforced
segregation.”
But even then, it was clear that
segregation in schools would outlast its historic defeat in the courts,
in part because efforts to put the ruling in effect were weak or
nonexistent.
“The Supreme Court’s decision is not
self-enforcing,” said an article in The New York Times Magazine a few
weeks after the pilgrimage, “and instead of spelling the end of an era
of civil-rights litigation, it has marked the beginning of a new and
even more bitter phase.”
The photograph above seemed to capture
perfectly the mood of the time: No one in the picture looks satisfied or
triumphant. But our article that day relied only on words. No
photographs were included.
“Princeton’s two elementary schools were integrated 16 years ago,” reported
The Times on June 21, 1964. “Thus began a three-act racial drama —
first, a period of Negro hopes; next, Negro frustration and
disillusionment; and then, a limited degree of fulfillment.”
An article in The Times Magazine — with a
picture showing high school students in Princeton, N.J., between
classes — assessed the school system’s progress in integration, which
was trumpeted as a model for struggling integration efforts in schools
across the country. It also offered a caveat that still resonates,
noting that in the search for a thriving and equal community, “good
schooling is not enough.”
In January 1967, Representative Adam
Clayton Powell Jr., Democrat of Harlem, was prevented from taking his
seat in Congress. The House had voted to keep him out while he was being
investigated by the Judiciary Committee for a number of scandals, but
among some of his constituents, there was a sense that he was being
unfairly singled out.
“He was just too powerful for a Negro,”
one supporter said. “Keep the faith, baby,” said another — and he did.
He took his fight to the Supreme Court, and in 1969 he prevailed in
Powell v. McCormack, in which the justices ruled that Representative
Powell, being duly elected by the people, could not be voted out of his
seat by members of the House.
Chester Higgins Jr. spent 40 years
as a staff photographer for The Times before retiring in 2014. Writing
from Ethiopia, he described covering Run-DMC at Madison Square Garden in
1986 for a benefit concert against crack cocaine. We never published
photographs from the show or wrote about the performance.
Arriving to photograph this new group
Run-DMC, I had mixed feelings. The music was slamming. The wordplay
structure was mesmerizing, delivered as a diatribe that delineated the
injustices experienced by this generation of young black people living
in a society that held them in contempt. It resonated as a cry for
justice giving voice to frustrations. The music’s relentless tempo,
driving earnestness and poetic structure had become a new creation with
its own energy that spoke to these young people, but I found some of the
lyrics horrifying, especially the use of the word “nigger.”
Growing up in the South, I felt the sting of this derogatory word; to embrace it in a song smacked of self-hate.
But at the same time, it was clear these
entertainers connected with the youth of their generation. The audience
loved them, and I realized how powerful and totally off the radar the
new music called rap had become.
She was one of the most famous performers in the country, a recording star, a Hollywood actress and a nightclub sensation.
But in the late 1950s, Lena Horne still
struggled to find property owners in Manhattan who were willing to sell
co-ops or condominiums to African-Americans, even very wealthy ones.
So how exactly did she snare the
penthouse apartment, featured in this photograph, at 300 West End Avenue
on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? With the help of a good friend, Harry
Belafonte.
Back in 1958, Mr. Belafonte, who was the
first recording artist to sell more than a million LPs, was turned away
from one Manhattan apartment after another. And he was furious. So he
sent his publicist, who was white, to rent a four-bedroom apartment in
the building at 300 West End Avenue. His publicist passed on the
paperwork, and Mr. Belafonte signed the one-year lease in his own name.
Within hours of moving in, Mr. Belafonte
said, the building’s manager “became aware that he had a Negro as a
tenant.” The building’s owner asked him to leave. Mr. Belafonte refused.
Instead, he bought the building, using
dummy real estate companies to cloak his identity. Some tenants who had
been renting there bought their apartments and some of Mr. Belafonte’s
friends moved in, too. “Lena Horne got the penthouse,” said Mr.
Belafonte, who described the real estate deal in his memoir, “My Song: A
Memoir of Art, Race and Defiance.”
By Dec. 17, 1964, when this photograph
was taken by our photographer, Sam Falk, Ms. Horne and her husband,
Lennie Hayton, a white composer and conductor, were comfortably settled
in. She was hanging Christmas decorations that day as she prepared for
the debut of her television show, “Lena.”
In the article that ran 10 days later,
accompanied by a different photograph, a close-up, she mentioned her
difficulties in finding an apartment, but not the back story to where
she had landed.
“Lennie and I lived in hotels for years
while we were on the road,” said Ms. Horne, who was 47 then. “And then
we went through the hysteria of trying to find an apartment – all those
stupid problems – and when we finally found a place that would admit
both me and Lennie, we put our roots down.”
Malcolm X was sleeping when firebombs
crashed through his living room windows shortly before 3 in the morning.
Jolted awake by the explosions, he rushed his wife and four young
daughters out into the cold before fire engulfed their modest brick
house in East Elmhurst, Queens.
We published an article about the attack
on Feb. 15, 1965, and paired it with a photograph taken by a news agency
that captured Malcolm X stepping out of his car, in front of his house.
What our readers did not know was that one of our own photographers,
Don Hogan Charles, had walked through the house, shooting powerful
pictures of the damage.
This stark image of the shattered
windows, singed walls and sooty debris, shown here for the first time,
offers a glimpse of the private life of a man who spent much of his time
in the public eye. Malcolm X gave speeches in Manhattan, Detroit and
other cities around the country and overseas. But he came home to
Queens.
The two-bedroom house at 23-11 97th
Street, which was owned by the Nation of Islam, had a small living room,
a dining room, a bathroom, a kitchen and a former utility room, where
Malcolm X’s 5-month-old daughter slept in a crib. Few of the family’s
possessions survived the blaze. Malcolm X, who told our reporter that he
had been receiving daily threats, escaped that firebombing unscathed.
He was assassinated one week later.
Hundreds of stunning images from black
history, drawn from old negatives, have long been buried in the musty
envelopes and crowded bins of the New York Times archives.
None of them was published by The Times until now.
Were the photos — or the people in them —
not deemed newsworthy enough? Did the images not arrive in time for
publication? Were they pushed aside by words here at an institution long
known as the Gray Lady?
As you scroll through the images, each
will take you back: To the charred wreckage of Malcolm X’s house in
Queens, just hours after it was bombed. To the Lincoln Memorial, where
thousands of African-American protesters gathered, six years before the
March on Washington. To Lena Horne’s elegant penthouse on the Upper West
Side of Manhattan. To a city sidewalk where schoolgirls jumped rope,
while the writer Zora Neale Hurston cheered them on, behind the scenes.
Photographers for The Times captured all
of these scenes, but then the pictures and negatives were filed in our
archives, where they sat for decades.
This month, we present a robust selection for the very first time.
Every day during Black History Month, we
will publish at least one of these photographs online, illuminating
stories that were never told in our pages and others that have been
mostly forgotten.
Among them are images of confrontations
between the police and demonstrators, including a rally that erupted in
violence after the assassination of Medgar Evers, the civil rights
leader.
There are pioneers in Hollywood and
hip-hop and in the ballpark, as well as ordinary people savoring daily
life. And there are prominent figures, such as James Baldwin and the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in photographs with stories of their
own.
Consider the close-up of Dr. King above.
It is the only photo in this project that has been previously published;
it has appeared many times over the past 50 years, as the backside of
the print clearly shows, and it looks as if it might have been taken
during a formal sitting.
But it was shot during the summer of 1963
on a day when black protesters hurled eggs at Dr. King as he arrived at
a church in Harlem. Earlier that day, he criticized black nationalists,
saying that those who called for a separate black state were “wrong.”
Some believed that those remarks inspired the attack that night.
Our photographer snapped Dr. King’s
picture as he participated in a round table that was broadcast on NBC.
The photo below, unpublished until now, captured that discussion. (Click
on the image for a larger view, and to scroll through the other
photos.)
Credit
Allyn Baum/The New York Times
Sometime later, an editor cropped one of
those images from the NBC appearance to create the head shot of Dr. King
that is now so familiar and so disconnected from the tumultuous events
of that day.
Many of these photographs, and their
stories, are equally intriguing. But the collection is far from
comprehensive. There are gaps, for many reasons.
We had a small staff of photographers —
the first was hired sometime after 1910 — and nearly all of them were
based in New York City. As a result, most staff photographs depicted
events in New York and places nearby, though The Times also bought
pictures from freelancers and studios in other parts of the country and
overseas. (The Times’s picture agency, Wide World News Photo Service,
which had staff members in London, Berlin and elsewhere, was sold to The
Associated Press in 1941.)
More than now, we also put a premium back
then on words, not pictures, which meant that many photographs that
were taken were never published.
But other holes in coverage probably
reflect the biases of some earlier editors at our news organization,
long known as the newspaper of record. They and they alone determined
who was newsworthy and who was not, at a time when black people were
marginalized in society and in the media.
In our archive of roughly five million
prints, after weeks of searching, we could not find a single staff
photograph of W.E.B. Du Bois; of Romare Bearden, one of the country’s
pre-eminent artists; or of Richard Wright, the influential author of
“Native Son” and “Black Boy.” (The Times did publish a handful of
photographs of these men taken by freelancers, friends or private
studios.)
It was 1949, the year Jackie Robinson
would bat .342 for the Brooklyn Dodgers and receive the National
League’s Most Valuable Player Award, just 31 months after becoming the
first black player in the major leagues.
But on Feb. 14, before the season
started, before the crowds poured into Ebbets Field, Mr. Robinson spoke
to the Sociology Society at City College in New York.
This photograph, unpublished until now,
documents the moment, with the students leaning forward to hear him
speak. But what was he discussing? The photo caption offers only a hint,
saying that Mr. Robinson was speaking about “his work with Harlem boys’
groups.”
We know that Mr. Robinson coached children at the YMCA in Harlem a year earlier, to help, as he put it,
“keep them off the streets.” And it is easy to imagine how his
successes and struggles would have resonated with African-American boys
and teenagers at a time when racial discrimination was rife. “I had to
fight hard against loneliness, abuse and the knowledge that any mistake I
made would be magnified because I was the only black man out there,”
Mr. Robinson wrote in his memoir, “I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography
of Jackie Robinson,” describing those early years with the Dodgers.
But The New York Times didn’t publish an
article about the ballplayer’s visit to City College that day. So this
morning we turned to you for help.
Several readers (from Brooklyn, San
Francisco and elsewhere) pointed us to City College’s undergraduate
newspaper, “The Campus,“ which published an article about Mr. Robinson’s speech to students on Feb. 18, 1949.
The article said that Mr. Robinson had
spent five months, during his off-season, working with underprivileged
children at the YMCA in Harlem. “I’ve learned more from the kids than
they’ve learned from me,” said Mr. Robinson, who described his work to
members of the Sociology Society, adding that it had given him “great
satisfaction.”
