Dinner for Sarah Elizabeth Frazier, Path-Breaking African American Educator
One hundred years ago today … Sometime over the weekend, Sarah Elizabeth Frazier was given a dinner at the palatial Rose’s Hotel, opened the previous Fall at 246-250 West 135th Street. (It would close later that year.)
Frazier, in 1896, had been the first African American to teach in an integrated school in New York State. According to Mary White Overton’s Half A Man: The Status of the Negro in New York, Frazier had:
insisted upon her right to be appointed as teacher in any school in which there was a vacancy. She visited the ward trustees and the members of the Board of Education, and represented to them the injustice done her and her race in refusing her the chance to prove her ability as a teacher in the first school that should need a normal graduate. She was finally appointed to a position in a white school. Her success with her pupils was immediate, and since then the question of race or color has not been considered in the appointment of teachers in New York. (p. 19)
At the dinner, Frazier spoke of her recent experiences with a group of US teachers traveling through England and France. She recounted some of the racist treatment she had overcome related to the trip, from officials trying to prevent her participation to attempts at making her sit separately from her group while in France.
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); Washington D.C.; NARA Series: Passport Applications, 16 Sep 1919
Frazier, a New York City native, was born in 1864 and attended Hunter College, graduating in 1892. That same year, she had published a paper, “Some Afro-American Women of Mark” in African Methodist Episcopal Church Review.
According to The New York Age of Feb. 21, the dinner was a celebration of Lincoln’s Birthday, hosted by the Women’s Police Reserve, 38th Precinct (a precinct that no longer exists) and by Captain Clara M. Harris.
The New York Age Feb. 21, 1920, p. 5.
Precinct Captain Wm. J. McGrath gave a speech in support of the Reserve’s work, exhorting more “colored me” to join the NYPD, and promising to eliminate “street corner preachers.”
The Age lists many of the attendees, and reports the menu: “Grape Fruit Supreme” and “bouillon.”