Always ‘outspoken’
Project spells out the story of activist Esther Lee’s political life
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 he stopped participating in school events after that. Then there was the time a teacher told her daughter, Jessica, that because she was Black, she was from Africa. The teacher gave Jessica C’s for the rest of the school year after she reported the incident, Lee recalled.
“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 was the only African American parent involved, she said of her decision to join 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 and local librarian M. Rayah Levy to archive materials from her political life and years as president of the Bethlehem NAACP.
Lee, 87, recently 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.
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 at Lehigh University.
“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.
From serving on Madison’s
PTA, Lee was then elected president of the school district-wide PTA. In 1971, she went on to become the first Black person to win a seat on 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, ‘87 and ‘89. 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.
It was yet another race that she lost.
“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 went on to become involved in the Bethlehem chapter of the NAACP, where she served as 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 which 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.
Levy, head of adult services at Bethlehem Area Public Library, started working with Lee after organizing The Black Bethlehem Project to collect oral histories, photographs and other mementos from Black people who grew up in Bethlehem. That project, which is separate from her latest work with Lee, was released in
August.
“I guess she has reached a certain point in her life where she would like people to know about her background and history and she trusts me,” Levy said. “After I did the Black Bethlehem Project, she got to know me and she entrusted me with her paperwork and knew I would not let it lapse.”
This latest project is made possible through a $7,000 grant from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium in partnership with Lehigh University’s Southside Initiative. The grant money will be used to buy archival-quality materials to help preserve the documents, including a scanner so everything can be digitized, Foltz said.
Through the Southside Initiative, Lehigh University faculty, students and staff work with the community to preserve its history, foster democracy and improve qualify of life in the city. Past projects include collecting the histories of LGBTQ residents of the Lehigh Valley and creating a digital archive of documents, video interviews and images of women who worked at Bethlehem Steel.
Foltz, Levy and Jasmine Woodson, a librarian at Lehigh University, will begin sorting the material and preparing it to be scanned next month.
Levy anticipates getting an $8,000 grant from the consortium to create a museum-quality display of Lee’s materials and host two public forums to present it. Eventually, Levy would like to create a heritage center in Bethlehem focusing on the city’s Black history. She pictures something similar to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, one of New York Public Library’s renowned research libraries.
“Bethlehem has a rich history. It dates back to the 1700s with the Moravians, and the Moravians had slaves. There were Black Moravians living here because
in order to live in Bethlehem you had to become a Moravian. It’s important that the community and the world know about these Black Moravians,” she said.
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.
But the story of the Black population in Bethlehem is a powerful one, Levy said, that should be preserved “before it disappears” in a city celebrated for its strong commitment to history.
“I’m hoping people are aware of the footprints Esther has left here in Bethlehem,” Levy said. “She’s just been a staple in the
community for such a long time and people have been after her to organize her papers and put them somewhere safe.”
‘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 too, 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 eventually 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.
In 1964, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Esther and William were able to get jobs in the corporate division of Bethlehem Steel, which employed a few Black workers before but was now forced to open its doors to more African Americans. It was around this time that Esther’s political life started to grow and she joined the PTA.
“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 an African American person has yet to be elected to Bethlehem City Council, though no Black candidate has run in any recent election.
Lee is hopeful that 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.
Those who are interested in assisting with the project can contact M. Rayah Levy at Rayeve410@gmail.com.