The Delany Sisters'

In Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters, First 100 Years, siblings Sarah Louise ("Sadie") Delany and her sister Annie Elizabeth ("Bessie") Delany share poignant and humorous details about their lives during the post-Reconstruction 19th century, Jim Crow, two World Wars, the exhilarating days of the Jazz Age of Harlem and how they managed to survive it all (Moore, 34). Co-author Amy Hill Hearth opens the narrative of the lives of Sarah Louise ("Sadie") Delany and her sister Annie Elizabeth ("Bessie") Delany by noting that they are among the oldest living witnesses to American history (Delany, Delany & Hearth, 3). Sadie was born on September 19, 1889. Bessie followed almost exactly two years later on September 3, 1891 (Delany, Delany & Hearth, 10-11). At the time of Having Our Say's publication in 1993, Sadie was 104 years old; Bessie was 102.

Co-author Amy Hill Hearth was a white Columbia, South Carolina native and the Westchester, New York correspondent for the New York Times whose article about the history-making women would eventually be turned into a best-selling book that offered an oral history from a race and age group that is rarely heard. Having Our Say offers historical accounts of life for blacks in the United States during the last 100 years, as well as engaging and candid reminiscences by two very learned and genteel African-American centenarians (Steele, 217). Sadie and Bessie's recollectio

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em to send me someplace else (Delany, Delany & Hearth, 170). Bessie, on the other hand, entered Columbia's School of Dental and Oral Surgery. After graduating in 1923, she became only the second black woman licensed to practice dentistry in New York City (Hearth, 144). Still, Bessie states that "[a]s a woman dentist, I faced sexual harassment. But to me, racism was always a bigger problem" (Delany, Delany & Hearth, 14). She also points out the tension many black women felt between standing up for women's rights as well as blacks' civil rights. She notes that many black women felt unwelcome in the fight for civil rights: "Sometimes, colored women were not welcome in the movement" (Delany, Delany & Hearth, 202). But she always believed that "no matter how much I had put up with as a woman, the bigger problem was being colored. People looked at me and the first thing they saw was Negro, not woman" (Delany, Delany & Hearth, 202). One subject the sisters explore is what Amy Hill Hearth calls a "taboo" even among blacks: the treatment of light-skinned blacks by both the black and white communities. For example, Bessie states that "[t]here was an attitude among some Negroes that to be lighter-skinned was more desirable" (Dela
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Approximate Word count = 2036
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)