Gemma La Guardia Gluck: Sister of Fiorello and Holocaust Survivor

Gemma La Guardia Gluck

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.  

VIDEO: Women in the World War II Military

                                                                           WAVES Visiting USS Missouri, 1944

      National Archives

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.

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Judge Constance Baker Motley: Trail Blazing Civil Rights Attorney

Mayor Robert F. Wagner swears in Constance 

Baker Motley as Manhattan Borough President, 1965

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 2^nd 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.

The Archives also has a speech given by Mayor Wagner in praise of Constance Baker Motley and a lesson on Mississippi Freedom Summer from our Let Freedom Ring Curriculum.

Lyndon Johnson Appoints Constance Baker

            Motley to be a Federal Judge

Thurgood Marshall, The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 

and Constance Baker Motley's Role in Leadership

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, New York 1911 and Tazreen Fashions Fire, Bangladesh 2012: When will we ever learn?

Steven A. Levine 
Coordinator for Educational Programs

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire New York 1911

            When we shop for clothing, price is often paramount in our considerations and we too often neglect to ask who makes our clothing and what are their wages and work conditions, until these conditions become deadly and appear on the front pages of our newspapers.  I could be referring to last month’s factory fire in Bangladesh, but the “high cost of low prices” has a long history and the parallels between the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York and the fire  at the Tazreen Fashions factory in Bangladesh are eerily similar.  (To learn more about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, check out the memorial created by State Senator Serphin Maltese, who lost family members in the fire. For more information on the Tazreen Fashions factory fire go to “Fatal Fire in Bangladesh Highlights the Dangers Facing Garment Workers” “Garment Workers Stage Angry Protest After Bangladesh Fire” and “Horrific Fire Revealed a Gap in Safety for Global Brands.”)

            Both factories paid low wages to a predominantly female work force. In the early 20^th century, New York was the center of the garment industry and Bangladesh today exports $18 billion in clothing, second only to China.  Triangle sold blouses to the major department stores; Tazreen produced clothing for Wal-Mart and other global retailers.  The New York Times coverage of the two fires sadly makes clear that workers in both factories had similar deaths because of unsafe conditions.

Witnesses described a desperate scene, as workers leapt from the upper floors of the factory, trying to land on nearby rooftops and escape the smoke and flames. Others suffocated inside the factory building, as the blaze apparently rendered stairwells impassable.  .  .  “These international, Western brands have a lot of responsibility for these fire issues,” said Ms. Akter, the executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. “In this factory, there was a pile of fabrics and yarn stored on the ground floor that caught fire. Workers couldn’t evacuate through the stairs. What does this say about compliance?

The New York Times, November 26, 2012, “Garment Workers Stage Angry Protest After Bangladesh Fire”

Most of the victims were suffocated or burned to death within the building but some who fought their way to the windows and leaped met death as surely, but perhaps more quickly, on the pavements below.  . . .  The one little fire escape was never resorted to by any of the doomed victims.  Some of them escaped by running down the stairs, but in a moment or two this avenue was cut off by flame.  The girls rushed to the window and looked down at Greene Street, 100 feet below them.  Then one poor, little creature jumped.  There was a plate glass protection over part of the sidewalk, but she crashed through it, wrecking it and breaking her body into a thousand pieces.  Then they all began to drop . . .

The New York Times, March, 26, 1911, “141 MEN AND GIRLS DIE IN WAIST FACTORY FIRE; TRAPPED HIGH UP IN WASHINGTON PLACE BUILDING; STREET STREWN WITH BODIES; PILES OF DEAD INSIDE.”

            The Triangle Shirtwaist fire led to the creation of the Factory Investigating Commission led by Senator Robert F. Wagner (Chair), Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith (Vice- Chair), along with a reinvigorated movement to protect workers and improve factory conditions and the enactment of 25 New York State laws to implement the Commission’s recommendations.

  

            After the deadly fire in Bangladesh, thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand justice.  The horrific fire there, like the one a century earlier, makes clear that workers cannot achieve justice without the right to organize unions and employers and the global corporations whom they sell to must respect the rights and lives of their workers above that of their profits now stained by the deaths of 112 workers. As we shop for clothing, we must also think about the consequences of our consumption.

Public Housing Discussion on Brian Lehrer's CUNY TV progam

Archives staff Tara Hickman and Steven Levine and public housing historian Nicholas Bloom discuss the history of NYC public housing and how the Archives uses the NYCHA collection in teaching at LaGuardia Community College on Brian Lehrer.TV.  Check it out on You Tube.  The public housing segment begins at minute 31.

Mayor Wagner Campaigns for George McGovern, 1972

Standing on a sidewalk of New York are (L-R) Professor Richard Wade; Mayor Robert F. Wagner; Mrs. Matilda Krim; Senator George McGovern; and Arthur Krim, the head Of United Artists.

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs

“George McGovern is a man of tender and responsive conscience . . . of strong loyalties, high principles and fierce convictions. He has shown that he does not flinch or flag in the face of either opposition or of even the most prohibitive odds. “ Mayor Robert F. Wagner, New York State Chairman of the McGovern presidential campaign, at the opening of the Buffalo, NY Democratic Headquarters, 1972.

(Click here to read Mayor Wagner's complete speech.)

Senator George McGovern lost in a landslide to President Richard Nixon in 1972, but this son of a Methodist minister, decorated World War II pilot, and historian should be remembered for his commitment to peace, civil rights, social justice and opposition to the Vietnam War.  He was a hero and a patriot.  (Click here to read his New York Times obituary.)

Happy Birthday Eleanor Roosevelt, October 11, 1884

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Mayor Robert F. Wagner, 1956

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs

In 1963, a year after Eleanor Roosevelt’s death, Mayor Robert F. Wagner memorialized her at the National Roosevelt Day Dinner of the Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal organization she co-founded in the late 1940s. Click here to read Mayor Wagner's speech.

Wagner's relationship with President Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was closer than the ones he had with most New York politicians. His father, Senator Robert F. Wagner was a close confidant of the president, going back to their days in the New York State Legislature and the young Wagner knew the future president and first lady from his childhood. But in his years as mayor, Eleanor Roosevelt became both critic and adviser to him. “She instructed me, she criticized me, both publicly and privately. On more than one occasion, she censured me, to my profit, I might add. . . . She was more than a great lady, more than a great personality, more than a great humanitarian. She was a great phenomenon in a phenomenal age.”

If you want to learn more about Eleanor Roosevelt or use other Roosevelt related materials in your classroom, please contact me or Tara Jean Hickman thickman@lagcc.cuny.edu at the Archives.