‘They Continue to Fight!’ There is No Quit in Clara Lemlich Honorees At 80-Plus

Blanche Wiesen Cook (l) and Clare Coss (r) were among this year’s honorees. Photos courtesy of Judith Sokoloff

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By Steve Wishnia

Since 2011, the annual Clara Lemlich awards have celebrated the lives of “women whose many decades of sustained activism have made real and lasting change in the world.”

“The idea of the evening is to give us all hope. We have to act. We can never give up,” Esther Cohen of LaborArts, a cofounder of the event, told Work-Bites.

This year’s awards, given May 6 at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, went to historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, playwright Clare Coss, singer Bev Grant, poet Rashidah Ismaili, and author Rudean Leinaeng.

The selection leaned toward the arts. Rashidah Ismaili, born in Benin in 1940, is a poet, playwright, and author of the novel Autobiography of the Lower East Side, as well as a member of PEN’s advocacy committee Freedom to Write and the former chair of the New York W.E.B. DuBois Foundation. Bev Grant, a topical singer and songwriter since the 1960s, developed a multimedia women’s labor history show called We Were There in the 1990s that she still performs. Clare Coss is the author of several plays, including Love and Defiance: Ten Scenes from the Twentieth Century, and the libretto for Emmett Till: The Opera.

Blanche Wiesen Cook is a historian, author of a three-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, and has been Coss’s partner since they met at a Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom meeting almost 60 years ago. Rudean Leinaeng, a chemist, taught the science in the Bronx and Tanzania, and was an anti-apartheid activist for decades in both South Africa and New York.

The awards are named after Clara Lemlich, the diminutive 23-year-old immigrant who sparked the 1909-10 garment workers’ strike dubbed “the Uprising of the 20,000.” “Even in her eighties, she organized the nurses in her retirement home,” Lemlich’s great-grandson Michael Miller told the audience.

Poet, playwright and Autobiography of the Lower East Side author Rashidah Ismaili.

They grew out of the events that marked the centennial of the Triangle Fire in 2011. They’re run by LaborArts and the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, and funded largely by the Puffin Foundation and the 21st Century ILGWU Heritage Fund.

Women must be at least 70-years-old to be eligible for an award, but all of this year’s honorees were over 80, says Cohen.

“It’s amazing to know that there are people who keep going, who get to an older age and are still involved in the world,” Puffin executive director Gladys Rosenstein told Work-Bites.

The awards are also meant to honor “unsung heroes.” There are people who don’t have much recognition outside their own social circles, but have “done incredible things,” explains Cohen. For example, 2024 honoree Theodora Lacey was a science teacher in Montgomery, Alabama who was active in the 1955-56 bus boycott there, and after she and her husband moved north to Teaneck, N.J., worked to desegregate schools and housing there.

Other previous honorees include United Farm Workers cofounder Dolores Huerta (2022); Debbie King (2021), a former 1199SEIU vice-president who led the bargaining that won the first child-care fund in the country financed by employer contributions; Evelyn Jones Rich (2018), a nonagenarian civil-rights and education activist now ubiquitous at demonstrations to preserve Medicare; and the late Chelsea feminist and housing activist Gloria Sukenick (2015).

Bev Grant (guitar) with Carolanne Sorbello, both members of American Federation of Musicians Local 1000, the union‘s traveling-musicians local.

“No matter what’s wrong with them, no matter what’s happening in the world, they continue to fight,” says Cohen. “It’s even more important now.”

Leinaeng cited “the present-day attacks on science and scientists.” Xiomara Loarte, community outreach coordinator of the New York City Central Labor Council, spoke of the need for solidarity with “our immigrant siblings,” such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia, illegally deported to a Salvadoran prison, and the 14 Mexican and Guatemalan-born farmworkers seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents near Lake Ontario on their way to work May 2.

She added that “our spirit of activism has been reawakened” by having to resist the multitudinous assaults of the current regime.

Wiesen Cook closed her speech by quoting her mentor Annette Rubenstein, echoing the World War I-era German socialist Rosa Luxemburg: “We will have socialism, or we will have barbarism.”

She paused, and growled, “And here we are.” Click here to learn more about the Clara Lemlich Awards.