Cheesy Grits: Granddad Ralston--Not Just a Job, a Career

The Settlement movement was a progressive social movement begun in England and the United States during the latter part of the XIXth century. The movement was aimed at poor folks in cities, with the thesis being that the nation as a whole would be enriched if all its citizens were able to contribute as fully as possible without being bound by class. The aim was to provide programs and places were the more-privileged were able to share their skills, resources, and abilities with the less-privileged. The locations where these activities were centralized were called "Settlement Houses," with the most famous Settlement House in the U.S. being Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago.

In New York City, the Settlement movement almost immediately focused on the thousands of immigrants arriving New York City through Ellis Island. The Henry Street Settlement was established by Lillian Wald on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the early 1890s and served many of these new arrivals, helping them to learn English, to care for themselves and each other, and to navigate this new society in which they found themselves.

Cheesy Grits: Granddad Ralston's Amateur Years: St. Christopher

St. Philip's Episcopal, 210 W. 134th St.
New York NY
By Americasroof - Own work, CC
Wikimedia Commons

The St. Christopher Club, or "St. C's" as they were called, was one of the better-established African American athletic clubs in New York City. It was "better-established" because it had the backing of one of Harlem's most prestigious churches, St. Philip's Episcopal, on W. 134th St.

St. Philip's Episcopal is the oldest African American Episcopal congregation in New York City. Formed in 1809 by Free Episcopals of Color* from Trinity Church downtown, their first edifice, built around 1818, was located on Centre Street. In 1886, the church and congregation moved uptown to W. 26th St., where they stayed until 1909, when St. Philip's was one of the leaders of the African American migration to Harlem on the north side of Central Park. (As I noted in an earlier post, even as late as 1910, Harlem was still about 90% white.)

Cheesy Grits: Granddad Ralston's Amateur Years: The Smart Set AC

Brooklyn's Smart Set Athletic Club was founded sometime around 1904, largely to promote a new game that was rapidly gaining ground among urban African Americans: basketball. According to the New York Age, Smart Set fielded its first basketball team in 1905, with their home court being the 14th Regiment Armory in South Slope. (The sport of basketball was introduced to African Americans in 1904 by Washington DC's Edwin Henderson, a physical education instructor who had learned the game as a student at Harvard.)

Smart Set AC was soon joined by other black athletic clubs, including Harlem's St. Christopher Club and Brooklyn's Marathon AC, to form New York's first black basketball league, the Olympian Athletic League,  in 1907. The first recorded game was played on 13 November 1907 between St. Christopher and Marathon at the Knickerbocker Court on Gates Avenue just off Knickerbocker.

Cheesy Grits: Granddad Ralston's Amateur Years: The Beginning

I first thought I would use "Granddad Ralston in Harlem" as a running title for this series, but alert readers, which of course includes all of you, will have already noted that his first documented residence wasn't in Harlem at all: it was on W. 59th Street, a section of Manhattan known as "San Juan Hill." (Harlem itself was still largely white.)

Why "San Juan Hill" was so named remains unclear; what is clear is that it was sort of "Harlem-before-Harlem" insofar as it was a dense cluster of African Americans that also included a great number of recently-arrived-and-arriving Caribbean immigrants. Social conditions were terrible and jobs were few; everybody was scrabbling to make ends meet. And it was here that Granddad Ralston began his career, first as an amateur athlete and then as a professional in the field of physical education.

Cheesy Grits:Granddad Ralston Arrives

Although he was born in 1892 in South Carolina—Charleston, we presume—at some point during the first decade of the XXth century, Granddad George, his mother Valeria/"Valley", and his sister, Myrtle Christina, moved from their home in Savannah (GA) to New York City.

Why did they move? The memoirs of Walter White, the first executive secretary of the NAACP, may provide a clue. The White family lived in Atlanta (GA) just up the road from Savannah. There was a horrible white-instigated riot against African Americans in Atlanta in 1906, during which some 25+ African Americans were killed, and the White family home itself came under threat. Walter White's father gave him a gun and posted him at the front of the house:

"In a very few minutes the vanguard of the mob, some of them bearing torches, appeared. A voice which we recognized as that of the son of the grocer with whom we had traded for many years yelled, “That’s where that nigger mail carrier lives! Let’s burn it down! It’s too nice for a nigger to live in!” In the eerie light Father turned his drawn face toward me. In a voice as quiet as though he were asking me to pass him the sugar at the breakfast table, he said, “Son, don’t shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn and then—don’t you miss!”

Cheesy Grits: Granddad George Ralston in Harlem

Greetings once again. I've been wanting for a long time to do a biography of Jane's maternal grandfather, George R. Ralston, because he lived in an interesting place during interesting times and through his work touched so many lives. Most of his professional life was spent in New York City's Harlem. His life was lived not only in geographical Harlem but in cultural Harlem, coming of age professionally as he did during what is called the "Harlem Renaissance."

Cheesy Grits: John S. Thorne of Edisto and the Art of the Deal

Botany Bay Road
Edisto Island, SC
Photo by Jane Godfrey Jan. 2018

Jane and I recently took another family history trip to Charleston. Well, they do have great restaurants down there, plus, the winters are warmer than they are here. All good reasons to go.

The central part of the family history agenda was to spend time on Edisto Island, which we've come to love. But it wasn't just for the drive down Edisto's Botany Bay Road; no, no. In recent years, Edisto has come alive with efforts to preserve its singular history, including the African American history, and we were there to help spread the story of John S. Thorne, one of the two "Black Kings of Edisto."

Thorne's story is important because within two decades after the end of the Civil War, he had helped make landowners of perhaps as many as 60 formerly enslaved Edistonians. These were folks who came out of the War owning little more than pockets filled with dreams—dreams that included making livings for themselves and their families from their own land. It's part of the American Dream.