Black activist Ada B. Jackson heads the Brooklyn Interracial Assembly and defeats Robert Moses: The Battle for Parks Part Three 1945
Cold War Progressives Women's Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom By Jacqueline Castledine · 2012

Black activist Ada B. Jackson heads the Brooklyn Interracial Assembly and defeats Robert Moses: The Battle for Parks Part Three 1945

In the winter of 1944 a Brooklyn Grand Jury, at the urging of Black lawyer Henry Ashcroft, created a committee made up of people of all races. Their two year task was to tackle some of Brooklyn's most serious problems. ?

The group was called the Brooklyn Interracial Assembly and a woman named Ada Belle Jackson was voted the leader of the group. Ada B. Jackson was one of those women who seemed somehow to have the time and energy to do everything.? In the 1940’s Ada was living in Bedford Stuyvesant on Decatur street and later nearby on Halsey Street with her husband Clarence, a postal worker.? They were raising teenagers, Clarence Junior and Bernice along with their two adopted sons Fred and Gerald ages 13 and 9.?

Their children were attending P.S. 35. ?Her children did really well in school but Ada quickly noticed that compared to schools with mostly white students in the area, P.S. 35 was overcrowded with many students and too few teachers.?? The other schools in the area for mainly Black students, like PS 3 and P.S.44 were also very overcrowded.?

Ada was originally from Georgia, and many of the students in the over crowded schools were also from Georgia and other southern states. She was determined to help these children and her own children, have a better school to learn in.

Black activist Albert L. Clarke was her neighbor. He was a post office co-worker of Clarence, Ada's husband.

In 1940, Ada and Albert began to collaborate on ways to bring large groups of Black parents to meetings held by the Board of Education.? At these meetings, Albert, Ada and the other parents demanded more teachers, new schools and new playgrounds and parks.

Soon it was very obvious to everyone that Ada was an effective leader.? Her background as a college professor in Oklahoma, her twenty-five years living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, her business sense running a successful dress-making shop, her deep involvement in helping people as a bible study leader at Bethany Baptist Church, her skill raising four children, the close connections she made with people from all ethnic backgrounds, her unusual ability to do many tasks well, all at the same time, taught her the skills she needed to lead. ?

By November 1943, when the call came for someone to lead the Brooklyn Interracial Assembly, Ada was the obvious choice.? Ada was experienced.? A few months before, Ada as a leader of the Brooklyn Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), worked with Alice Onque and White women leaders to open the Central Branch up to girls of all races.?? They also opened up a YWCA branch in Bedford Stuyvesant in the Reid Avenue neighborhood where many Black girls lived.? The YWCA leadership was very happy.? They created a pamphlet whose cover showed girls of all races playing together.? The banner on the top of the pamphlet was a statement from the National Board of the YWCA reflecting on World War Two and the struggle to end hatred in Europe. It read: “A worldwide struggle for freedom is meaningless unless Democracy is made real for all people.”? Below that, next to the photo of the girls playing together were these words: “The Brooklyn YWCA ‘Dares to Make it True’.”?

https://bcarchives1.omeka.net/exhibits/show/ywcabrooklyn/integration

Ada B. Jackson and Alice Onque were working to integrate Brooklyn's YWCA at the same time the Bedford Branch YMCA was denying Black boys the right to swim in its pool or attend summer camp. Brooklyn's YMCA building hosted the Midtown Civic League meetings where Father Belford spewed hate.? An yet at the nearby YWCA, Ada was convincing the community to take another path.? By placing her at the head of the Brooklyn Interracial Assembly, the Bedford-Stuyvesant community was hoping she could lead them down a similar path.?

Sumner Sirtl and Father Belford and the businessmen of the Midtown Civic League dreamed of making Bedford-Stuyvesant a community free of Black migrants from the South and purged of Black immigrants from the West Indies. They demanded that the city government keep their taxes low which prevented the Board of Education from having the money to build the new schools and playgrounds that Ada Jackson and Albert Clarke knew their children desperately needed.?

As the new head of the Brooklyn Interracial Assembly, Ada would somehow have to gain the trust and cooperation among white Brooklynites and also end discrimination and racial hatred toward her Black family and friends.? Her task would not be easy.? Besides the mean spirited comments made by the Midtown Civic League, even those in New York State government were not shy about being openly hateful.? The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that when Ada took the long train trip to Albany New York to try to get New York Governor Dewey to support a law ending discrimination, someone on his staff told her, “Why don’t the Negro people clean up their own dirt and filth before asking for equality?”


Ada B. Jackson in 1947

?Ada did not let comments such as these stop her.? She knew that the people of Bedford-Stuyvesant were from many different races and ethnic backgrounds. On a daily basis, they interacted with each other and enjoyed being with one another other.? Bedford-Stuyvesant resident Mary DeSaussure, years later remembered, her Gates Avenue of the 1940’s exactly like this.? A Jewish neighbor agreed to teach her father how to crochet fancy doilies for fun and relaxation.? Mary and her sisters helped the local Jewish Rabbi light candles in the local synagogue.? Their father told the girls they were not to accept any money for helping their Jewish neighbors.? Mary recalled: “We were a village, everybody taught us something. German candy shop, Italian beauty parlor. We learned love, no matter what, we learned love.? Mary Jane Peltier my kindergarten teacher [at P.S. 129] would bring me an extra cookie. Even though there were hard times, we knew changes would happen, change will get better.”? She remembered that after church on Sunday, families would walk down the sidewalk towards a park, “when you passed a group of white men, no matter if the family was white or black, the group of men would tip their hats to the family and say “How are you Mr. DeSaussure?” “How is your family?”?? A study of the US Census and Mary’s neighbors at 454 Gates Avenue during the 1940’s shows just what Mary spoke about.? Her neighbor Jacob Cohen was from Poland, Jack Lobel was originally from Romania.? They lived next to the Coopers, the Laudners, and Elcos; Black families, many originally from North and South Carolina.? On the other side of Mary’s family lived families from Italy, Austria and Poland along with Black families from Virginia. ?

Another interesting way to actually get a glimpse of Mary’s Gates Avenue community is to look at the New York City’s Department of Records and Information Services website.? In the 1940’s the New York City received funds to photograph every private home, apartment building, and business in all five boroughs of the city.? The Department of Records has painstakingly digitized all of the thousands of street views and organized them by address.? Thanks to their work, it is possible to take a walk down Gates Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant on a warm summer day in 1940.? In the photos are not only the buildings themselves but included in the photos are Mary DeSaussure’s ethnically diverse neighbors going about their everyday lives, working, playing and socializing.

In 1940 street photographer Joe Schwarz also captured on film the kind of natural integration Mary remember. It was this ethnically mixed group of people, accustomed to living and working together that Ada Jackson would need to attract.?

Joe Schwartz photo
Gates Avenue 1940 NYC building survey

These people were certainly capable of showing hatred toward one another, but Ada planned on changing Bedford-Stuyvesant by calling and attracting them to be their best selves rather than their worst.? When Henry Ashcroft stood beside Judge Sobel and spoke to the people of Brooklyn, he reminded them: “It is the stereotype thinking in respect of the Negro which must be changed. Mere tolerance and sympathy must give way to understanding and a spirit of fair play, so that such benefits may have a lasting effect.”? Ada had to help her white neighbors move from “tolerance and sympathy’ to “a spirit of fair play,” where anyone from any race or ethnic background was appreciated, valued and cared for by the community. ?

First Ada somehow managed to find the time to join even more community groups and political organizations and become the leader of many of them. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle awarded her with the title “Fighting Lady” thanks to all the work she did raising money and organizing people to help win World War Two. Ada was everywhere. She helped renters on Gates Avenue stage a rent strike against building owners who raised rents and did not improve housing.

Ada worked closely with the President's Office of Price Administration to end the unfair rent hikes on Black people during the war. Countless hours were spent with Jewish community groups discussing the racial hatred both Jewish and Black people experienced and developing ways they could partner to end hate in their neighborhood. ?She helped open the first healthcare center for people of all races in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Ada worked closely with the Federal Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), the Brooklyn Urban League, local labor unions, and the wealthy owners of Brooklyn’s factories to give jobs and good pay to the people of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Through each of these successes, Ada tried to show her community that life improved if they worked together to solve neighborhood problems.

Ada was a people person.? Besides meeting regularly with the dozens and dozens of people on the committees she led, Ada met with important people.? She met with Brooklyn’s Congressman Celler, City Councilmembers Genevieve Earle and A. Clayton Powell, community leader Lidia Wells Cleaveland (whose husband Edward was on Judge Sobel’s Grand Jury) fellow school reformer, Maude B. Richardson, Franklin Roosevelt’s political advisor Mary McLeod Bethune, well-known singer Paul Robeson and even the president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt.? Attending all of these time-consuming community group meetings and political meet and greets with politicians and celebrities, gave Ada B. Jackson real political power.? She joined the American Labor Party and became a candidate for Borough President, the New York State Assembly, and the US Congress.? She did not win any of these elections, but she received hundreds of thousands of votes, especially from men and women from Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Election Night in Bedford Stuyvesant 1948 Joe Schwartz photo

In December 1943, even before Judge Sobel’s Grand Jury finished meeting, Ada’s Brooklyn Interracial Assembly met and agreed on ten things that Mayor LaGuardia, Police Commissioner Valentine and Parks Commissioner Moses needed to do to improve life in Bedford-Stuyvesant.? The Interracial Assembly and the new Grand Jury, especially went after the Parks Department and its longstanding refusal to build new playgrounds in Bedford-Stuyvesant. ?

?Just two years before, Robert Moses had rudely ignored Albert Clarke’s maps suggesting new locations for parks and schools in Bedford-Stuyvesant.? Later Moses insisted that the outbreak of World War Two prevented him from building any new parks in that neighborhood. Now in January 1944, thanks to the pressure put on him by Ada’s Brooklyn Interracial Assembly and Judge Sobel’s Grand Jury, Robert Moses said that the New York City Parks Commission was ready to act.? Robert Moses announced that to help end the problem of ?crimes caused by young people, he would purchase and tear down buildings and create city parks in Beford-Stuyvesant.? One playground, Mary’s DeSaussuer’s park on Throop Avenue is now called the “Raymond Bush Playground.”? The second park on Patchen Avenue is now called the “Reinaldo Salgado Playground.“ ?Best of all, both of these playgrounds would have new schools built next to them.? Mary and Martha DeSaussure were thrilled to have new parks in their neighborhood to play in, likely knew very little about all of the racism Albert Clarke and Ada Jackson overcame to make those parks a reality.

Ada was not finished.? She had yet another important role to play in making Mary and Martha’s future dreams come true.? In March 1944, Ada worked with the Brooklyn Council for Social Planning to get eight New York City government agencies to join together to agree on some basic principles of fairness to all.? The most important were:

1.????? Playgrounds for children will be supervised and open to all children in Bedford-Stuyvesant. This first rule meant that Park Supervisor, William Jackson, a Black man, was hired at Mary DeSaussure’s park.

2.????? Any community service or recreation program will be provided to everyone without discrimination.

3.????? All recreational activities will first be approved by a bi-racial council to make sure they are open to everyone.

Next, Ada joined up with the police department.? In years past, they had a reputation for chasing groups of children off the sidewalks and empty lots in Bedford-Stuyvesant.? In July 1944, she helped create a coordinating council for the police that patrolled Gates Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant, the 79th Precinct.? The goal of this group was to end some of the reasons for boys and girls took part in crime in Bedford-Stuyvesant.? One of Ada’s big accomplishments was helping to establish a new Police Athletic League center on Gates Avenue.? After school, in the evenings and on weekends, policemen from the Gates Avenue Police Precinct 79, would coach boys and girls of all races and ethnicities in sports activities as well as arts, crafts and hobbies.?

要查看或添加评论,请登录

Daniel Meharg的更多文章

社区洞察

其他会员也浏览了