A Lifetime of Doing the Rights Thing

The sweet little white-haired lady was wheeled to the front of the room. A curiosity of sorts at 101, she was being feted at the Los Angeles County League of Women Voters’ 75th birthday party.

Taking the mike, Adele Barnes said in her most disarming manner, “I can’t for the world understand why you wanted me . . . .”

And, while she was pleased to be at the party, she wondered why the league had chosen a nostalgic program, “Remembering the Years When American Women Got the Vote.”

“Why look backward?” she asked in an unwavering voice. “I’ve never really believed in looking backward.”

Still, she would be pleased to share a few reminiscences about the suffrage movement and the lessons learned at the side of her crusading mother, Adele Blauvelt, who with firebrand feminist Alice Paul helped organize New York state in the early 1900s.

But, Barnes warned her audience, don’t expect too many tales from the battlefield. By the time women won the vote in 1920, “we were all so tired of the darned thing. . . . We got so sick of having to justify ourselves as women.”

Barnes then proceeded to deliver a zinger: The suffragists “thought if the women got the vote, it would improve politics. I will just leave that there.”

A self-described relic “out of the dark ages,” Barnes was born in 1893 in Montana, where her father was with Anaconda Copper. Her mother was in labor for 24 hours, which she takes as a sign that the world “didn’t want to let me in.”

Barnes is one of the League of Women Voters’ own, having joined about 1940 after she and her late husband moved West. The national league was then 20 years old, having been formed to finish the fight begun in 1869 by the National American Woman Suffrage Assn.

Since 1939, Barnes has lived in the same Altadena house she now shares with her daughter and son-in-law. But she grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., where her parents’ home was often a gathering place for feminists planning the next skirmish.

“Oh, Lord, we marched and marched and marched,” she said. Often, “people threw things at us.” Things like burning cigar stubs and profane insults.

Her father would drive her and her mother to street rallies in the family’s 1909 Cadillac festooned with banners demanding the vote. He’d make the introductions, and “my mother then took charge.”

At the Blauvelts’ dinner table, guests who let their coasters drop from their glasses had to drop a dime in a bowl for the cause.

The Blauvelts provided shelter to some of the young suffragists released from a workhouse in Virginia after being jailed for several months for “subversive” activities--a rally outside President Woodrow Wilson’s White House.

Barnes laughed as she recalled being asked to sing for these guests one evening in the parlor. “What do you suppose I sang?” In all innocence, she’d chosen “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.”

Activism was in Barnes’ genes. Her mother’s father had deserted his wife and eight children and, to help out, her mother got a job. She soon became aware of sexism in the workplace. “You had to sit on the boss’s lap,” Barnes said. “It infuriated her.” She became a feminist. At the turn of the century, that meant being “looked upon with some suspicion.”

Barnes picked up political savvy early. Because Blauvelt was a hard name to remember, she’d tell school friends it’s “just like Roosevelt, only it’s Blauvelt.” Soon, “the word got out, ‘You know, Adele is a cousin to the Roosevelt family.’ I let it run. It always helped.”

Not surprisingly, she majored in government and history at Radcliffe College, graduating in 1916.

Over the years, she has worked on behalf of organized garment workers, migrant families, ecumenism and a host of civic causes: “I have spent my life trying to get all the various colors and sizes and shapes of people to stop hating each other.”

She was to have shared honors at the league’s birthday party with her friend Ruby McKnight Williams, 100, of Pasadena, a longtime fighter for civil rights, but Williams was ill.

Barnes’ remarks were a tonic for league members feeling low after a pounding at the polls in November. (The league endorsed Proposition 186 and opposed Proposition 187 and Three Strikes).

As county co-president Helen Coffey put it, “Our clout didn’t seem to have much clout.”

Keep fighting, said co-president Marilee Scaff: “Women of America worked for the right to vote for 50 years” after Wyoming led the way.

And, they have Adele Barnes, who still calls her local league president “and tells her what she ought to be doing,” Scaff said.

Celebrating the Beauty of Diversity

Latino dancers shared the auditorium stage with African American drummers. In the cafeteria, fried chicken and collard greens were dished up along with enchiladas and red beans and rice.

It was the first “multicultural faire” at Ascot Avenue Elementary School in Southeast Los Angeles, an event that was part history lesson and part celebration, with a big dose of preventive medicine.

Drummer Stephin Booth of the International Percussion Collective set the scene, telling the kids: “It’s kinda like comin’ home for me.” When this was a black neighborhood, he worked at a cleaners on the corner. Today, that’s a taco shop and Ascot’s student body of 1,300 is 98% Latino.

The school has not been immune to the racial tensions on the streets. “We have some students with some very, very serious stereotyped ideas,” said principal Charles Stewart: “ ‘I don’t want to sit beside you. You’re black. You’re dirty.’ Or, ‘You’re here and my mom and dad can’t get a job.’ ”

“Racism is learned,” said Ascot’s program coordinator, Charles Carr. “Kids don’t know black from white. They just know friends.”

The day’s theme: Everybody’s beautiful. Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez were both beautiful. Like three cheerleaders, the Watts Prophets poets had youngsters repeat, “I am beautiful . . . I have beautiful dreams of a beautiful world.”

Miguel Rivera of Community Youth Services Project, which sends ex-gang members to Ascot to talk to at-risk kids, said racial violence starts in junior high--”They see the adults and they run with it.”

School counselor Mary Lee said of the faire, which will be an annual event, “Children need to respect themselves first and then other cultures,” and see that there are people of all races “doing great and wonderful things.”

The Rev. Roderick L. Ewell, a black Baptist minister, told the kids about those who have gone before, fighting the good fight for equal rights for people of every color.

And then he asked, “Don’t let the dreams die.”