?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
(EDUCATION.) Papers of Hampton Institute student and trailblazing elementary school teacher Bessie Emanuel. 116 items in one box (0.3 linear feet); condition generally strong. Various places, 1914-1979
Bessie Emanuel (1902-1984) was raised in White Plains, NY, attended an integrated public high school, and then received an elementary education degree from the Hampton Institute. She later received a master's degree in education at Columbia University, and had a long career in education, eventually returning to White Plains. This archive includes her high school diary, extensive correspondence with a fellow Hampton teaching student and her future husband; and other papers relating to her distinguished teaching career.
Diary kept by Emanuel during her junior year of high school. 20 manuscript diary pages. Intermittent entries, mostly recording her social activities. Mentions joining her school orchestra (26 January) and glee club, adding "1st colored girl to ever join in W.P.H.S." (27 January). She was not the last, noting on 3 February "Went to Glee Club. Dorothy Jefferson joined." She had a love-hate relationship with her high school: "School--I am in this prison for life's sentence" (1 February). "School, oh how I love the word. My lessons are going good so far, especially American history. I am a genius in A.H.????" (14 February). "S-c-h-o-o-l & f-o-o-l. They rhyme, alright, when applied to me" (15 February). White Plains, NY, 1 January to 20 February 1921.
Other papers from elementary and high school, including a geography essay from 1914, a shorthand notebook from 1919, and an undated school notebook.
47 letters (100 pages) plus 5 postcards to Emanuel from her future husband Jacob Estey Smith (1896-1961) of North Carolina. The letters are written while he was studying to be a teacher at Hampton, the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and Shaw University in North Carolina, where he received his degree. Other letters are dated from Philadelphia, and while working at a hotel in Sayville, Long Island. Various places, 1925-1929.
4 letters written by Emanuel to her parents from Hampton Institute, September-October 1929 and undated; plus 2 letters and 11 postcards to Emanuel from various friends and relatives, 1916-1957.
12 professional and business letters to and from Emanuel, 1923-1976. They include a job offer for a 2nd-grade teaching position from Hampton, 1923; alumni correspondence from Hampton; her acceptance of a teaching position at White Plains, 1945; and her appointment as a permanent teacher there in 1948. Also included is her long draft letter from circa 1947 seeking better housing for her aged parents. It includes her discussion of her career: "I am now teaching in the public school system in White Plains, being the first member of my race to receive such an appointment in this city. . . . It is a great privilege to be able to have such a nice group of Italian and Negro kindergarten children . . . at the Ferris Avenue School."
A thick folder of Hampton Institute printed ephemera collected as a student, staff member, and alumna. 22 items, 1925-1979.
A folder of 9 miscellaneous items, including: an unidentified group photo; a color-coded weekly schedule for a class she taught; a program from a 1976 testimonial dinner in her honor; a typescript introduction from the same event, listing her accomplishments; and a page from her 1922 high school yearbook annotated "First Black to graduate from College, Hampton Institute."
