Esther Lee Heritage Center introduced at the Kemerer Museum
The Esther M. Lee African-American Heritage Center got a good introduction to the public Feb.27 at the Kemerer Museum of Decorative Arts on New Street in Bethlehem.
The Esther M. Lee African-American Heritage Center has grown out of efforts to document the history of Black African-Americans in Bethlehem from the earliest days.
Levy was assisted in preparing for the exhibit by Elizabeth Saraceno and by Kemerer Museum of Decorative Arts’ Director of Marketing, Collections and Programming Lindsey Jancay.
In the collection so far, are documents, photographs and stories that are the warp and weft that make the French Bayeux-like tapestry of how enslaved people in Bethlehem, over time, became the complex and interconnected network of the diaspora.
Photographs and documents also tell of families coming from the Jim Crow South Carolina to the Jim Crow Bethlehem.
Most striking of the images mounted on the museum’s wall for the occasion of the fundraiser were the ones that showed the joys of everyday life in the Black community here in Bethlehem.
Pictures of weddings, pictures of friends relaxing, pictures of women outside their homes posing for snapshots taken by friends and a picture of young girl in her dance costume.
The guest of honor at the event was Esther Lee, who was accompanied by her daughter, Jessica Lee. Esther Lee is currently the president of the Bethlehem Chapter of the NAACP and is a veteran leader in Bethlehem’s civil rights movement out of the Jim Crow era.
Lee was regally dressed in purple for the occasion and wore a hat, a trademark by which people instantly recognize her. Age has forced her to sit in a wheelchair, but it took on the aspect of a royal throne as guests queued up to greet her, offering congratulations and well wishes.
Lee shared some of her perspective. She described what it was like to be a Black woman working in a white-dominated world in the 1950s and 1960s.
Among the guests attending the event were Dr. Donald A. Outing, Lehigh University’s vice president for equity and community, and Dr. Seth Moglan, a professor of English at Lehigh University.
Center city residents Dr. Steve and Mrs. Barbara Diamond attended, as did retired educator Dr. Wandalyn Enix, recently appointed member of Bethlehem City Council.
Magisterial District Judge Nick Englesson and his wife, former Bethlehem City Councilwoman Olga Negrón, came to support the project and to honor Lee.
Rev. Clinton Bryant, formerly with the U. S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, attended. His friend, U. S. Marine Corps veteran Ronald Kennedy from Jersey City, N.J., also attended.
Regina Kochmaruk attended as did state Rep. Steve Samuelson. Lehigh University student Nahjian Miller and retired Bethlehem Area School District educator Tomacene Nickens also attended.
The exhibit at the Kemerer Museum of Decorative Arts ran through March 25, 2022.
Women of Bethlehem Steel Series: Spotlight on Esther Lee by Hannah Provost
Southsider’s series focused on the Women of Bethlehem Steel Collection in the Beyond Steel Archives gives our readers the opportunity to explore the stories of women in our community who worked in the steel industry. Each article in the series will feature an introduction to one oral history, a link that allows our readers to listen to her oral history, and analysis of the major themes that the speaker addresses. This week we are honoring Esther Lee.
Many Bethlehem residents will know Esther Lee; she is the current President of Bethlehem’s chapter of the NAACP, served on the BASD school board, and generally has been at the center of Bethlehem politics and social justice work for decades. But, not many residents will know details about Esther Lee’s employment at Bethlehem Steel. As a part of the Women of Bethlehem Steel Oral History Project, Esther Lee shares intimate details about her experiences as a Black woman growing up in Bethlehem and eventually working at the Steel. Her oral history not only teaches us about what it meant to be a working woman during the second half of the 20th century, but also reveals her experiences of racism in Bethlehem. In many ways, her identity as African American and as a woman intersect and particularly inform her experiences. Below, I explore some of the fascinating personal accounts that Esther Lee offers us in her full length oral history, in order to capture some of the lessons that we, as residents of Bethlehem, can learn from her insights.
Racism and Employment
Growing up, Esther Lee and the other Black women around her were keenly aware that society was structured so that their employment prospects were incredibly limited. For Black women during the 1950s, when Lee graduated high school, domestic work was the primary option. Lee notes in her oral history that giant corporations like Bethlehem Steel were a “white world,” and if the Steel did hire Black folks, it was only men, and always in the cokeworks, the most dangerous part of the process of steel making. Lee remembers there being a “bleakness” to the future when it came to jobs, and she ascribes the flight of the Bethlehem Black community to cities like Philadelphia as directly related to being “chased out” by systemic racist restrictions on employment for African Americans.
Throughout her working life, Lee encountered racist attitudes and bigotry everywhere she worked, including the Steel. In her interview, she powerfully recounts the ways in which her managers, and later city leaders, treated her differently than white employees, which made her wonder: Is this because I am a strong willed woman, willing to talk back? When white co-workers and managers would act suspicious about the fact that she and her husband Bill, who also worked at Bethlehem Steel for many years, would talk so much together, she felt like it was as if they were asking: “Who gave you the right to talk?” For her, this bigotry portrayed an attitude that she, and other African Americans, weren’t supposed to be able to communicate with each other at work and instead should avoid common workplace banter and silently go about the day’s tasks. In remembering these racist attitudes, Lee reflects that her response then, and now, was defiance: “What do they expect us … to do? Become subservient to them? I am a human being. That constitution refers to me.”
In terms of her work at Bethlehem Steel, Lee has a different perspective than many of the white male workers who reflect on their time at the Steel as the best time in their lives. For Lee, it was a good job with good benefits, but she was always aware of racism. Her white male coworkers had the privilege of not having to consider the impact that racist attitudes can have on a person’s flourishing.
“What do they expect us … to do? Become subservient to them? I am a human being. That constitution refers to me.”
-Esther Lee
Esther Lee’s reflections also teach us about the direct impact of anti-racist policy change, and the power of Black networks. Repeatedly, Esther Lee contextualized her opportunity to work at the Steel and gain the affiliated benefits as directly related to the Consent Decree of 1974 . This agreement between the United Steelworkers of America, nine major steel companies, and the federal government promised to increase minority hiring and thus continue embedding the work of the Civil Rights Movement into the steel industry. Lee heard about the opening for an office job at Bethlehem Steel through NAACP networks. Just this small detail speaks to the countless undocumented ways that Black people look out for each other and find ways to substantially leverage opportunity and policy change for their own flourishing.
Photo Credit: Jessica Lee.
Other Challenges as a Black Woman
Esther Lee’s oral history also recounts much about the lived history of the way employers and the government have fallen detrimentally short in supporting working mothers in this country, and how mothers have persisted and raised incredible children anyway. In the interview, Lee recounts the ways she and her husband sacrificed to ensure their children could learn piano and engage in other cultural endeavors. She also notes that there was no such thing as paid maternity leave, and so after she had her second child, she only took a week off before returning to work. It was simply necessary to return to work so fast, as there were no policies that valued and protected working mothers by giving them valuable time with infant children. Esther Lee’s story about the lack of maternity leave is an important account of why we need to continue to fight for adequate leave for new mothers as they support their infant children through the first months of their lives.
Lee also reflects powerfully upon the impact of racism in housing, and the ways that housing policies like redlining affected African American communities just as much as employment discrimination. Redlining was a set of racist housing policies that refused to insure mortgages in and near African American neighborhoods, essentially entrenching residential segregation. When she was in school, Lee remembers shrinking into herself when the white students and teachers around her would talk about their expansive yards, the trees in front of their houses, and the robins that would flit by. Because many in the African American community of Bethlehem did not have the economic resources of white families due to job discrimination and low wages for work, her home was different than the pictures in textbooks and the stories of middle-class white students. She didn’t have a large yard, and she recounts this dissonance between her life and her classmates as a way to reveal that the white reality was construed as normal, as neutral, as expected. Similarly, she describes how her experiences with educational settings continued to prioritize the experiences of white Americans at the expense of providing histories and narratives of communities of color within the U.S. Her experiences as a child in Bethlehem public schools fueled her commitment to making curriculum more inclusive and effective for diverse students in our city. Her reflections on racism in the workplace, the lack of support for motherhood in places of employment, and the centrality of the whiteness in educational curriculum are still relevant for us to consider today as we work toward a more equitable future for all residents of Bethlehem.
Esther Lee, A Voice to Be Heard
After working at the Steel, Esther Lee’s rich working life would go on to include being the first African American woman elected to a school board in the Lehigh Valley in 1971. But her ambitions didn’t stop there. She repeatedly ran for a state representative seat and once again faced racism. For her, the attitude was clear: “they’d put a cat in office before they’d let me have a seat.” But this has not stopped her growth and success. Lee continues to be a powerful activist for education in the Lehigh Valley. Even here, in sharing her oral history and highlighting the history of racism in Bethlehem that she experienced, she is an activist for racial justice.
In sharing her life stories with the Women of Bethlehem Steel Oral History Project, Lee generously gives listeners a unique vision of local history, and points us towards ways we can learn from this history to change our present and our future. Lee reflected briefly on a moment from her husband’s childhood, when he had been on a school trip, and had to eat in the kitchen when all his white friends were allowed to eat in the dining hall. For her, this is just one example of the fact that each Black person “has some kind of experience like this” yet are not allowed to express these stories in public forums. She notes that these stories get shut down or tuned out, because our society doesn’t want to think about race or racism. Too many of us want to pretend it doesn’t exist, which only allows it to continue: “And [these memories of racism are] hurtful and you remember them. And because some of us … are not allowed the privilege of sharing, we’ll go to our death with that in us.”
In the conclusion of her interview, Lee reflects that Bethlehem still has much more to do in order to truly “open up” the conversation and truly be inclusive and anti-racist. By attending to her oral history, listeners have the opportunity to learn from one of our community’s important leaders about the history of Bethlehem, reflect upon injustice in our communities, and imagine more just futures
“And [these memories of racism are] hurtful and you remember them. And because some of us … are not allowed the privilege of sharing, we’ll go to our death with that in us.”
-Esther Lee
Black History Month spotlight: Preservation project spells out the story of Esther Lee’s political life, from the PTA to the NAACP
Before she became a prominent local civil rights and political activist, Esther Lee was a mother seeing her young Black children discriminated against in Bethlehem schools.
It was the mid-1960s, and Lee recalls a May Day celebration at the former Madison Elementary School in south Bethlehem. The event was meant to be a day of dancing and games for the children, but Blacks and whites weren’t allowed to dance together, so her son, William Lee Jr., was forced to leave his fourth-grade class to find another Black student to dance with.
Lee said that her son stopped participating in school events after that.
“Everyone comes from somewhere. What the hell made them think she came from Africa? Because she was Black?” an incensed Lee said in a recent interview. “That was my breaking point. I watched for everything that went on and made sure I was part of it.”
Lee joined the school’s PTA and her political life began. She said she was the only African American parent involved with the PTA.
“I wanted to make sure our children are educated, that they would have the ability to seek out whatever they wanted to do in life and not be hindered because of their race,” Lee said.
Those experiences propelled Lee into local politics. Now, Lee is working with Lehigh University’s Southside Initiative to archive materials from her political life and her many years as president of the Bethlehem NAACP.
Lee, 87, at the time, shared nearly a dozen boxes of materials from her time in local politics, including fliers, programs from NAACP events and video tapes of “Black Exposure,” a show Lee used to host for PBS39. Other items include family photos, such as Lee and her late husband, William, on their wedding day in January 1956.
Esther Lee’s wedding portrait will be included in the archive of materials from her life.
The plan is to scan those materials so they can be available online for anyone who wants to view them. The physical documents will be on loan to Lehigh University, where they can be safely stored in the archives at Williams Hall, said Mary Foltz, director of Lehigh’s Southside Initiative and an English professor there.
“This will be the personal archival collection of one of the most important Black leaders in our community, and also an archive of the activity of the NAACP,” Foltz said.
After serving on Madison’s PTA, Lee was elected president of the district-wide PTA. In 1971, she went on to become the first Black person to win a seat on the Bethlehem Area School Board, where she served until 1977, when she unsuccessfully ran for City Council.
She would fail again in bids for City Council in 1985, 1987 and 1989. She then ran for the state House in 1990 before switching parties from Democratic to Republican in 1993 to try to win a City Council seat.
She lost again.
“You tell me it wasn’t the color of my skin,” Lee said.
She led annual pickets against Bethlehem City Hall until city officials agreed in 1996 to close their buildings on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. That same year, she became involved in the Bethlehem chapter of the NAACP, where she has been president since the mid-2000s.
Through the NAACP, she has traveled the state promoting social justice. Elected officials have sought her out to serve on dozens of advisory boards involving law enforcement, diversity, economic development and other civic issues. She was asked to serve on an NAACP community advisory board that has been meeting monthly since the summer to review Bethlehem’s law enforcement policies.
Most recently, Lee and the Bethlehem NAACP called on Bethlehem Area School District to return students to full-time, in-person classes, saying online learning is stunting academic growth, particularly for minority students.
At 7%, Black people make up just a sliver of Bethlehem’s population, which is mostly white. Their numbers are eclipsed by the Hispanic community, by far the largest minority group in the city, census figures show.
‘I’m as outspoken now as I was then’
Lee’s history in Bethlehem began in the 1920s when her mother, Beolar, arrived in the city to join her older sister, who was running a boarding house for Black men in south Bethlehem. In 1925, Esther’s father, Jesse Grimes, left a plantation in North Carolina to come to Bethlehem, where he eventually met Beolar and they were married.
Lee and her eight siblings grew up poor but happy, with devout Baptist parents who provided the best they could.
Lee and her husband both attended Liberty High School and married in January 1956.
Lee worked as a housekeeper and later at a dry cleaner. William, who graduated from Lincoln University in Chester County with an economics degree, had to take a job as a bookkeeper at a south Bethlehem auto parts store because the better paying jobs were always taken by white people.
“God knows I’ve served on almost every board in the city and I’m as outspoken now as I was then,” she said.
But despite everything that happened, not much has changed, Lee says. For example, she says no Black person has been elected to Bethlehem City Council, though none have run in any recent election.
Lee hopes sharing her work will open people’s eyes to what it’s like to grow up Black and the issues minority residents face.
“We can make a better life for our children. To treat them more humane and not to be used by gangs and the dark side of life that seems to find the brown and Black young people,” Lee said.
Morning Call reporter Christina Tatu can be reached at 610-820-6583 or ctatu@mcall.com.