Lesson 83: "If we cannot do great things, we can do small things in a great way."
I'll admit to having wanted to share this amazing lady's biography for a while now. Meet "The First Lady of Roxbury," Melnea Agnes Cass (neé Jones). Born in 1896 Richmond, Virginia, Melnea later moved with her family to South End, Boston --at the time less of a cultural/arts center than a working-class neighborhood but no less populated with an astounding diversity of immigrants, including a substantial Black population. Melnea returned to Virginia to finish school (St. Frances de Sales Convent School, where she graduated as valedictorian), but then moved back to Boston where she married soldier Marshall Cass. While her husband was deployed in World War I, Melnea became deeply involved in her community and in particular took up the cause of registering Black women to vote.
Cass later joined the NAACP, and in tandem with that activism, became an advocate for labor rights. Inspired by Asa Philip Randolph (see Lesson #68 in this series), she eventually organized/founded the Boston chapter of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In 1949 she founded Freedom House, whose mission of advocacy for Black Americans continues to this day. In 1950 she was the only woman appointed to the Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD), an important advocacy group for people who had lost their homes to so-called "urban renewal," whose mission also continues to this day. In the early 1960s she served as President of the Boston NAACP, where she organized demonstrations against segregation in Boston Public Schools.
Among other honors Ms. Cass has been named "Massachusetts Mother of the Year" and "Grand Bostonian," but perhaps most significantly she is known by residents as the "First Lady of Roxbury" for her lifelong civil rights efforts. Melnea Cass Boulevard was dedicated in 1981.
https://freedomhouse.com/about/
