The Fifteenth Annual Clara Lemlich Awards
May 6 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Free In-Person and Online!
Join LaborArts and Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition at The New York Society for Ethical Culture for the fifteenth annual Clara Lemlich Awards, honoring unsung activists–women who have been working for the larger good all their lives, in the tradition of those who sparked so many reforms in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Their many decades of brilliant activism have made real and lasting change in the world.
This Year’s Honorees:
Historian Blanche Wiesen Cook and playwright Clare Coss, musician Bev Grant, poet Rashidah Ismaili, and author Rudean Leinaeng
FREE – RSVP
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About the Honorees
Blanche Wiesen Cook is Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s Studies at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her definitive three volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt was called “monumental and inspirational…[a] grand biography” by the New York Times Book Review. Her 1978 book Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution, reprinted in 2020, was declared by Joseph Lash “a book that should stay in print forever.”
An extraordinary scholar who is also a feminist, peace and civil rights activist, she played key roles in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and Peace Action, New York State. For more than twenty years, she produced and hosted her own program for Radio Pacifica, originally called “Activists and Agitators” (later called “Women and the World”). She appears frequently on such programs as The Today Show, Good Morning America, C-Span’s Booknotes, and MacNeil/Lehrer, where she participated in the joint PBS-NBC coverage of the 1992 Democratic National Convention. She met Clare Coss at a WILPF meeting in 1966 and they have been together ever since.
Clare Coss is a playwright, psychotherapist and activist, convinced that we have it in our power to create a just and safe world. “As a playwright my tools are character and dialogue, conflict and story. “My imagination often leads to women characters who go where the silence is. They are drawn to confront inaction and/or tyranny; face the challenge to speak and act for justice and dignity.” ln 1971 the Berkshire Theatre Festival gave Coss her first full production – The Star Strangled Banner (the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1848). Her plays include Growing Up Gothic (Theatre for the New City), The Blessing (American Place Theatre), Our Place in Time (Women’s Project), Lillian Wald: At Home on Henry Street(New Federal Theatre), Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington (New Federal Theatre), and Emmett, Down in My Heart (TADA!; Castillo).
Coss’ anthology of lesbian love poems, The Arc of Love (Scribner), was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. She is a member The League of Professional Theatre Women, PEN, The Dramatists Guild, and the Columbia University Seminar on Women and Society.
Bev Grant is a musician, photographer, filmmaker, single parent, grandmother and activist. Winner of the 2017 ASCAP Foundation Jay Gorney award, the 2017 Labor Heritage Foundation Joe Hill Award and the 2022 Brooklyn For Peace PathMaker to Peace award, Bev Grant grew up singing and playing in Portland, Oregon in a band with two of her sisters.
She moved to New York City in 1962 and worked full time as a clerical worker until 2007 while devoting herself to topical songwriting and social activism. She joined New York Radical Women and NY Newsreel (now Third World Newsreel) in 1967. A book of her black and white photographs, called Bev Grant Photography: 1968-1972 was published in 2018 and includes documentation of the 1968 Miss America Beauty Pageant protest, the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast for children programs, the Moratorium Against the Viet Nam war and multiple struggles taking place at the time.
She formed her band The Human Condition in 1971, which is featured on the Grammy-nominated Best of Broadside collection, and recorded two record albums, The Working People Gonna Rise, on Paredon Records, now available through Smithsonian/Folkways and a self-produced album, Kulonyaka, which is no longer in print.
She was founder and director of the Brooklyn Women’s Chorus from 1997 until she retired in 2022, producing two cd recordings of their work, and she joined the staff of the UALE Summer School for Working Women in 1991 developing a multi-media women’s labor history show called “We Were There,” which she continues to perform at the summer school and for various union women’s conferences. The title song “We Were There” has become an anthem of women in the labor movement, and many other of her award-winning songs can be found on her numerous recordings and as videos on her YouTube channel. Her most recent album, entitled It’s Personal was released in 2017. She is currently working on a film documenting her journey as a cultural worker. www.bevgrant.com
Rashidah Ismaili, poet, playwright and community activist, was born in Benin in 1940 and came to New York in 1955. She has taught or presented about African and African American literature and culture at Rutgers University, Hunter College, Pratt Institute and Wilkes University. She retired from formal academic life in 1999 after 15 years as a director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program at Pratt Institute.
Supporting African and African American arts and artists, Ismaili was active in the African Literature Association, African Heritage Studies Association, and Caribbean Studies Association, a board member of WBAI, and a member of Freedom to Write, an advocacy committee of PEN. She is a leader in Pen & Brush, an all women’s artists organization, and served for years as chair of the New York W.E.B DuBois Foundation. She organized annual celebrations of Dr. DuBois’ birthday and worked closely under the guidance of her mentor, the late Esther Cooper Jackson.
She continues a decades long tradition of conducting Salon d’Afrique from her Harlem apartment, gathering African and African diasporic artists and writers. Her book Autobiography of the Lower East Side is the first of a projected trilogy An African Woman in New York.
Rudean Leinaeng is chemist, an educator and an anti-apartheid activist who has spent long stretches of her life in Africa. She began her distinguished 30-year teaching career at Bronx Community College in 1967, and on sabbatical leave in 1974 she and her two sons moved to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where she taught chemistry and physics to high school students, and become active in the Pan -African movement. Returning to New York in 1976, Rudean married Pule Leinaeng, a South African refugee from Bloemfontein and an African National Congress (ANC) activist. Together they worked in the anti-apartheid movement, and their Bronx home served as a home-away-from-home for many young South African refugees and students and a meeting place for the ANC in exile.
In the1980’s and 1990s, Rudean also became active with Women for Racial and Economic Equality (WREE), a national, multi -racial working class women’s organization. WREE’s program and its Women’s Bill of Rights served as a legislative agenda for women’s rights and racial and economic justice. She helped to organize WREE’s local boycott of companies that did business in South Africa, US voter registration and education drives, tabling for passage of 1990-91 US civil rights legislation, and the publication of WREE’s Women’s Services booklet which was distributed free to women.
In 1997 Rudean resigned her teaching position at Bronx Community College to follow her husband Lee to Bloemfontein, where they lived together until Lee’s death in 2000, and she returns to Bloemfontein every year for several months to spend time with relatives and friends there, and to support the local community library. She is currently an advisor to the Bethel AME Church emergency food pantry in Harlem, where she had served as assistant director for many years.
About Clara Lemlich
“I’ve got something to say!” shouted the 23-year old Clara Lemlich in her native Yiddish during a tense, crowded meeting of garment workers in Cooper Union’s Great Hall in 1909. Rising from the audience, she interrupted Samuel Gompers and the other union leaders on stage. Her speech inspired the crowd, leading to an unexpected vote to strike, and to what would become known as the Uprising of 20,000.
Born to a Jewish family in the Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire), Lemlich migrated to the U.S. in 1903, found work in the garment industry, and soon became active in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. The 1909 strike led to reforms, but the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a hold-out, and refused to implement safety improvements.
The fire that took 146 lives on March 25, 1911 was seen across the country as a tragedy that could have been avoided, and it sparked a movement that pushed politicians to accept a new notion about the responsibilities of government. Lemlich continued to be active in the labor movement until she was pushed out for her leftist politics. She continued to work for women’s suffrage, led a boycott of butcher shops to protest meat prices, campaigned for unemployment relief, and fought for tenants’ rights.
One hundred and twelve years later we are proud to honor her legacy and to honor those who follow proudly in her footsteps.
About LaborArts
LaborArts presents powerful images to further understanding of the past and present lives of working people. We gather, identify and display images of these cultural artifacts in order to encourage more people in this country and around the world to appreciate the history of work and working people. The labor movement is a critical part of the story – although not the whole story.
About the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition
The Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition educates the public about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire through its on-going arts projects, educational outreach, and social media sites. The Coalition works with Workers United, the New York City Central Labor Council, the FDNY, New York University, and various community groups to plan and implement the annual remembrance activities on the anniversary of the fire each March 25. Throughout the year, the Coalition offers programming to raise public awareness about the fire and explore its continuing relevance for worker rights and workplace safety.
About The New York Society for Ethical Culture
The New York Society for Ethical Culture is a Humanist community dedicated to ethical relationships, social justice, and democracy since 1876. The Society’s members put deed before creed and ethics into action to educate, advocate, and organize to end racism, poverty, and war; abolish the death penalty and mass incarceration; welcome refugees and immigrants; fight climate change and pollution; and more.
