Established in 1982 at LaGuardia Community College/ CUNY with a mission to collect, preserve, and make available primary materials documenting the social and political history of New York City. We hold nearly 5,000 cubic feet of archival records and 3,200 reels of microfilm with almost 100,000 photographs and 2,000,000 documents available on our website.
In commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Archives is featuring the story of Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of Fiorello and Holocaust survivor, on our website. Fiorello's and Gemma's mother was Jewish and Gemma had married a Hungarian Jewish man and settled in Budapest before World War II. To read more about Gemma's harrowing story and her correspondence with Fiorello when he helped her and her family emigrate to the U.S., click here.
Steven A. Levine Coordinator for Educational Programs
With
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s announcement that the Pentagon will lift the ban on women serving in combat, it
seemed an opportune moment to watch the La
Guardia and Wagner Archives’ video on the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), a branch of the
Navy during World War II. The WAVES were the first women to serve in
the Navy beyond traditional roles as secretaries and nurses and many of them
trained at Hunter College in the Bronx (now Lehman College). Despite their limited roles, which included
detasseling corn in Iowa, the women of the WAVES (and their Army and Air Corps
counterparts in the WACs and WASPs)
played a crucial role in the victory during World War II and opened the doors
for women in the military in the future.
To
learn more about women and their role in the military and on the home front
during World War II, check out the New-York Historical Society’s exhibit
WWII &
NYC, the Archives’ lesson Women and World II, and a website on the WAVES created by the US Military.
P.S.
If you would like to see more Archives materials, check out our Facebook
page and Like us.
Steven A. Levine Coordinator for Educational Programs
In celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I hope you
will take the time to watch two videos about the life of Judge Constance Baker
Motley, a lesser known but key figure in the legal battles of the civil rights
movement in the 1950s and 60s. In the first
video, her son, Joel Motley, describes his mother’s ideas on women’s
leadership and how her sex might have played a role in her being passed over as
director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1961, after President Kennedy
appointed Thurgood Marshall a judge in the 2nd Circuit Court. In the second
video, Joel Motley describes her
appointment to a federal judgeship and how it was delayed by a controversy in
the NY State Senate involving US Senator Robert Kennedy. This led to the direct intervention of
President Lyndon Johnson and a fascinating phone conversation between Kennedy,
Motley and Johnson, included in the video.
Constance Baker Motley worked for the NAACP Legal Defense
Fund with Thurgood Marshall, winning 9 out of 10 cases she argued before the
U.S. Supreme Court. She also argued
some of the most important desegregation cases, including the James Meredith
case which desegregated the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in 1962. Her NY Times obituary described her work this
way:
She visited the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in jail,
sang freedom songs in churches that had been bombed, and spent a night under
armed guard with Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was later murdered.
But her métier was in the quieter, painstaking preparation
and presentation of lawsuits that paved the way to fuller societal
participation by blacks. She dressed elegantly, spoke in a low, lilting voice
and, in case after case, earned a reputation as the chief courtroom tactician
of the civil rights movement. (Click here to read the full obituary.)
Motley
entered New York politics in 1964, becoming the first African-American woman
elected to the NY State Senate and later the first woman elected Manhattan
Borough President. But the law called
her back when President Johnson appointed Motley a judge in New York’s Southern
District in 1966, where she often used her position to uphold the rights of the
poor and powerless.
