Sarah Louise Delany

Description

Sarah Louise "Sadie" Delany was an American educator and civil rights pioneer. Delany was born in Lynch's Station, Virginia, the second eldest of ten children born to the Rev. Henry Beard Delany (who was born into slavery), the first black person elected Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, and Nanny Logan Delany, an educator. Delany was raised on the campus of St. Augustine's School (now University) in Raleigh, North Carolina, where her father was the vice principal and her mother, a teacher and administrator. Delany was a 1910 graduate of the school. In 1916, she moved to New York City, where she attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, then transferred to Columbia University where she earned a bachelor's degree in education in 1920 and a master's of education in 1925. As a New York City schoolteacher, Delany was the first African American permitted to teach domestic science on the high school level. In 1991, Delany and her sister Bessie were interviewed by journalist Amy Hill Hearth, who wrote a feature story about them for The New York Times titled Two 'Maiden Ladies' With Century-Old Stories to Tell. A New York book publisher read Hearth's newspaper story and asked her to write a full-length book on the sisters. Hearth and the sisters worked closely for two years to create the book, an oral history called Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years, which dealt with the trials and tribulations the sisters had faced during their life. The book spawned a Broadway play in 1995 and a television film in 1999. In 1994, the sisters and Hearth published The Delany Sisters' Book of Everyday Wisdom, a follow-up to Having Our Say. After Bessie's death in 1995 at age 104, Sadie and Hearth created a third book, On My Own At 107: Reflections on Life Without Bessie. Source: [Wikipedia](