And this is when you couldn’t afford a cupcake.” “Every birthday, she got a little cupcake for you with a candle in it. We all loved her,” recalled Eva Maesta, a volunteer at the former museum and one of Blue’s former students. “She’d say, ‘Janie, they’re so young and so far from home. Jane Darr, Blue’s daughter, said in a 2001 interview that her mother could relate to the immigrants as outsiders. Then she stayed after school to teach English to their parents. Many worked as stonemasons in a quarry nearby, or as gifted carvers for the ornate Lake View Cemetery bordering the neighborhood.īlue taught their children. An ornately painted donkey cart from Italy rolled out the door for many annual Feast of the Assumption parades.Īlso on the walls were images of people from Campobasso and Abruzzi in the central part of Italy, and Sicily in the south – people who escaped the economic limitations of their homeland. The same shrine housed a hand-cranked pasta machine from the old country and samples of lace tatted by many ancestors. Maybe, just maybe, they hope, it will help erase a multitude of old wounds.īlue’s photograph graced the wall of the one-room Little Italy Historical Museum, the neighborhood’s former showcase. Some of them, plus a new group of admirers, are dusting off the memory of this respectful interracial relationship and passing it to future generations.
You won’t find Blue in most of Cleveland’s history books, but more than a half- century after her retirement and death, the mention of her name still brought tender, childlike responses from older residents of Little Italy. Yes, in Little Italy, the tightly knit East Side Italian neighborhood of checkered tablecloth restaurants – and a checkered history dealing with outsiders.īut Blue used her determination, talent and heart to pierce this insulated community in such a way that it flooded her with love. From 1903 to 1947 – a total of 44 years – this granddaughter of a slave taught at Murray Hill Elementary School.
This snapshot in the rich and remarkable life of Bertha Josephine Blue, a member of Cleveland’s early black middle class, also reaches across many generations of race relations in Cleveland.īy today’s perceptions, Blue had quite the nerve.
The woman, their first-grade teacher, is African-American. The children, many of them sons and daughters of Sicilian immigrants, are walking to First Communion practice at Holy Rosary Church. She wears a crisp, blue dress and the scent of lavender soap. On a spring day in the early 1900s, a confident-looking woman ushers a group of schoolchildren along the hilly sidewalk in Cleveland’s Little Italy neighborhood.
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