Angels of Mercy: White Women and the History of New York's - download pdf or read online

By William Seraile

ISBN-10: 0823234193

ISBN-13: 9780823234196

William Seraile uncovers the background of the coloured orphan asylum, based in ny urban in 1836 because the nation's first orphanage for African American young children. it's a impressive establishment that remains within the leading edge supporting little ones. even supposing now not an orphanage, in its present incarnation as Harlem-Dowling West facet middle for kids and family members prone it continues the foundations of the ladies who equipped it approximately two hundred years ago.

The supplier weathered three wars, significant monetary panics, a devastating hearth throughout the 1863 Draft Riots, a number of epidemics, waves of racial prejudice, and serious monetary problems to take care of orphaned, overlooked, and antisocial teenagers. finally monetary aid could come from a few of New York's most interesting households, together with the Jays, Murrays, Roosevelts, Macys, and Astors.While the white girl managers and their male advisers have been devoted to uplifting those black youngsters, the evangelical, almost always Quaker founding managers additionally exhibited the extraordinary paternalistic perspectives endemic on the time, accepting the recommendation or aid of the African American group merely grudgingly. It used to be frank feedback in 1913 from W. E. B. Du Bois that highlighted the clash among the orphanage and the group it served, and it wasn't until eventually 1939 that it employed the 1st black trustee.

More than 15,000 youngsters have been raised within the orphanage, and all through its historical past letters and visits have published that enormous quantities if now not hundreds of thousands of outdated boys and girlslooked again with admiration and admire on the domestic that nurtured them all through their formative years.

Weaving jointly African American heritage with a different historical past of latest York urban, this isn't basically a painstaking learn of a formerly unsung establishment of black history yet a different window onto complicated racial dynamics in the course of a interval while many did not realize equality between all voters as a necessary goal.

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Extra info for Angels of Mercy: White Women and the History of New York's Colored Orphan Asylum (Empire State Editions)

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5 The indignities that blacks faced in life often did not end with death. Just as many of their ancestors were buried in an area then beyond the city’s limits known as the Negro Burial Ground, African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century faced difficult burial decisions. Many white churches would not bury them in their burial grounds, and unless they were members of a benevolent society, they might lack funds for a decent funeral. The managers’ concern for the proper interment of their deceased charges was alleviated after Samuel N.

His father, Noel, was a respectable free man who had purchased the freedom of his wife and son for two hundred and fifty dollars. His wife’s death led him to bring his two sons, Robert and William to the asylum. Childhood death was common, as reflected in the last stanza of a poem. The Dying Boy Oh! Tis their songs [angels] so sweet and clear— I think I hear them softly say dear children stay no longer here; come, come with us, we’ll lead the way. It must be heaven where they dwell—22 Annual reports provided narrative and statistical descriptions of diseases that kept the physician and nursing staff busy, often to the point of exhaustion and risk to their own health.

The dining room, one of the infirmaries, and one of the school rooms were heated by hot water running through iron pipes. Friends of the institution aided their first year in their new home with donations of beef, mutton, fruit, crockery, furniture, carpeting, soap, books, tools, sheets, eating utensils, and pies and cakes. Good news came in early 1844, when the city provided twenty additional lots adjacent to their home. The extra space was used to keep several cows and to grow vegetables. Within a few years, the managers had earned income from the vegetable garden; they had built a brick stable and erected a garden fence.

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Angels of Mercy: White Women and the History of New York's Colored Orphan Asylum (Empire State Editions) by William Seraile


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