Ella Griffith, Jennifer Scott

Description

Connection to Weeksville: Long-time Brooklyn resident and longtime member of Our Lady of Charity Catholic Church Ella Griffith was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1935. Her family lived on an island off the coast of Charleston called Sullivan’s Island. At 12, her family moved to the mainland and the city of Charleston. A few years later, Ella moved to Brooklyn, NY to join some of her older siblings who were already in the city attending high school. She recalls the island as being segregated with the ‘colored folk’, African Americans and Seminole Native Americans, living on rear side of the island, in an area known as the ‘back beach’. Despite the fact of discrimination from the island’s white residents, Ella reports that African Americans faired pretty well, because of the presence of a military base at the center of the island, which provided jobs for the African American residents. The family moved to the mainland to ensure better access to schools for their children. Despite her parents being raised in the AME church, Ella and her siblings converted to Catholicism so that they could attend the parochial schools in Charleston. She reports that her parents did not see this as a conflict to their Baptist faith. Shortly after arriving in New York, Ella and her family moved to Crown Heights in Brooklyn. They lived on St. John’s Place and Schenectady Avenue. Ella remembers her neighborhood as being diverse but “(subtly) racist”. Her neighbors were a mixture of Jewish and...

Record Contributed By

Weeksville Heritage Center