Island to Honor Unlikely Ladies’
Fight for Rights ~ from The Vineyard Gazette
By JULIA RAPPAPORT Sept 21, 2007
Fab Five: Nancy Whiting, Peg Lillienthal, Virginia Mazer,
Polly Murphy, Nancy Smith. |
[Also read student Mike Kendall's 2007 paper
on these women.]
On Sunday afternoon, a plaque will be unveiled in West Tisbury in
celebration of a small group of town women who, nearly 50 years
ago, took a little risk to play a part in a glorious, heroic and
sweeping change in our national history.
It
was the spring of 1964. John F. Kennedy had been assassinated
and the tension of tumult in the deep South was slowly seeping
into the far reaches of the country. Here on Martha’s Vineyard,
people had reached their breaking point. On Nov. 22, 1963, the
day Kennedy was shot, a group of Vineyarders established a local
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP).
Membership did not know boundaries. Blacks joined
whites, men joined women, summer residents joined members of the
year-round community. Among the founders were three women from
West Tisbury: Nancy Hodgson Whiting, the West Tisbury librarian
and tax collector, her best friend, television writer Virginia
Mazar, and Polly Murphy, a housewife. “It’s almost
like a saturated solution,” Mrs. Whiting told oral historian
Linsey Lee in 1993. “You know that process in chemistry?
You use a vehicle of liquid and you begin to drop a substance
in drop by drop, and when it holds all it can, one more drop and
the whole thing crystallizes. It was like that . . . It was the
gathering sense that we could be of influence.”
Audria (Sissy) Tankard and Angie (Waldron) Madison. |
Among its early initiatives, the association
began a drive to collect food and clothing for the people of Williamston,
North Carolina. A few Vineyarders, including Rector Henry Bird of
the Grace Church, had established a connection to the town and its
community of black people. Come spring, the donations had to be
delivered to the South. The three West Tisbury ladies, joined by
Mrs. Murphy’s sister, Nancy Smith, a writer, and Margaret
(Peg) Lillienthal, volunteered to load up their cars and make the
drive. They traded in their up-Island jeans and donned white gloves
and skirts. They figured should they find themselves in trouble,
Southern men would have a harder time arresting ladies in gloves.
The women decided that while in the South,
they would register voters. “We knew it was dangerous,”
Mrs. Whiting told Ms. Lee. “We didn’t know if we would
come back alive. I thought it through very carefully before leaving.
But quietly — I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I
wound up thinking that I wouldn’t want my grandchildren
to know I’d had a chance to influence people in this way
and turned it down.”
Children and friends of the Vineyard Five welcome them home
after their night in a North Carolina jail. |
The women arrived in Williamston successfully,
but were unable to register a single voter. Blacks answering their
doors were wary of properly dressed white women with Northern accents.
Determined to show their opposition to segregation and racial inequality,
the women joined a protest outside of Sears, Roebuck. The protest
lasted five minutes before the ladies found themselves in handcuffs.
They spent one night in jail and, after
receiving bail from the Vineyard, drove home. They declared the
mission successful and so does Dr. Elaine Cawley Weintraub, a
history teacher at the high school and co-founder of the African
American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard, the organization
hosting Sunday’s event.
“They took this enormous risk that doesn’t
strike us as a big risk,” said Dr. Weintraub. “They
were putting their life behind the pursuit of justice.”
NAAP National President and Vineyarder Kivie Kaplan and Martin
Luther King Jr. |
Dr. Weintraub knows something about taking
a risk in pursuit of justice. In the early 1990s, she was a teacher
at the Oak Bluffs School. She was beginning a unit on local history
and wanted to include the history of African Americans on the Island.
But, when she went to the school’s library, there were no
books on the subject. She went to the local bookstores and town
libraries. Nothing. She knew the history was out there and so Dr.
Weintraub rolled up her sleeves and got to work conducting her own
research. Audria Tankard was founder
of Island NAACP.A few years in, someone steered her to Carrie
Tankard, vice president of the Martha’s Vineyard chapter
of the NAACP, who was actively, but somewhat unsuccessfully, trying
to incorporate local African American history into the schools.
Together, Dr. Weintraub and Mrs. Tankard established the heritage
trail, a physical, hands-on way to educate the community. In 1997,
the trail began when the first plaque was unveiled in Oak Bluffs
at the Shearer Cottage, the first African-American-owned guest
house on the Vineyard. From there, the two charted locations or
people throughout the Island that have had an impact on the Vineyard’s
African American history, and the trail grew. “The things
and people on the trail had a presence or made a contribution
that has made a huge difference on this Island,” Dr. Weintraub
said.
The two incorporated the trail into the school
curriculum, making work on the trail part of a local history unit
for sophomores at the high school. “For students, this really
means something,” said Dr. Weintraub. “This is their
Island, this is their home, this is their history.” Today,
the trail has 16 sites. As of this weekend, there will be 17.
Island NAACP has storied history which will be added to heritage
trail later in the fall. |
The celebration on Sunday marks the unveiling
of the latest plaque and commemorates the five West Tisbury women
who made the trip to Williamston. The plaque is situated outside
the old West Tisbury library on Music street, where Mrs. Whiting
worked for so many years. Its message is simple. “If you let
fear in,” it reads, “pretty soon, you’re all fear.”
The words were spoken to the women by Sarah Small, a black women
they met while in North Carolina. At 1 p.m. on Sunday, the plaque
will be unveiled, followed by a brief reception at the West Tisbury
Congregational Church. Dr. Weintraub said that she expected at least
two of the ladies, Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Murphy, to return for the
unveiling. A mobile display will be up at the West Tisbury library,
where it will stay for a few weeks before making its way to libraries
around the Island. Sometime this
fall, the trail will unveil its 18th plaque outside of St. Andrew’s
Episcopal Church. It will commemorate the local chapter of the
NAACP. The site was chosen deliberately. The chapter had its first
meeting in the church basement.
In her interviews with Ms. Lee, found in the
book Vineyard Voices, Mrs. Whiting’s tale provides a shining
example of how five little stones dropped into a pond can make
a ripple that extends for miles. “There we were,”
she said, “in this wild, larger-than-life kind of thing
— the feeling that a person or group of people can
have a real influence and effect on the course of events.” |
