Sarah Delany; She, Sister Wrote Bestseller on Overcoming Racism

Sarah “Sadie” Delany, the surviving member of the legendary Delany sisters who died Monday at the age of 109, often maintained that she and her sister Anne Elizabeth “Bessie” Delany were “not anything special . . . we’re just two old maids.” Her sister would then correct her by saying, “Maiden ladies, not old maids.”

But to most observers, these sisters were special, for each had lived well beyond the age of 100 and had built a successful career at a time when most black women were denied opportunities.

Their wide public recognition came in the early 1990s when they wrote “Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First Hundred Years” with journalist Amy Hill Hearth. The book sold briskly and has become a high school and college text as well as a play, “Having Our Say,” which ran on Broadway in 1995 and was nominated for three Tony Awards. The play was also presented at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

At first the sisters were reluctant to cooperate with Hearth, who wanted to interview them for a newspaper story.

They thought they were not “important enough,” Hearth said.

The story, published in 1991, caught the eye of Minato Asakawa, senior vice president of Kodansha America, a New York-based book company. The company approached the sisters about doing a book and Hearth signed on as co-writer.

Sarah Louise “Sadie” Delany was born on Sept. 19, 1889, in Lynch’s Station, Virginia. She was the second of what would be a 10-child family. Bessie was the third. The sisters, who always said they were “best friends from Day 1,” and their brothers and sisters grew up on the campus of St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, N.C.

Her father, freed from slavery as a child, became a vice principal of the school and America’s first elected black Episcopal bishop. Their mother helped run the school while instilling self-discipline, compassion and confidence in her children.

Sarah and Bessie worked as teachers in the South before moving to New York to continue their educations. In their 20s they lived in Harlem and got advanced degrees from Columbia University. Sarah Delany became an elementary schoolteacher in the Bronx. Bessie became the second black woman in New York to practice dentistry.

Sarah Delany had a harder time in her goal of moving up to the high school ranks, which were considered more prestigious than elementary school.

At the time, high schools in New York boasted about their lack of black teachers. Sarah applied for an assignment at one and when, after three years, her name reached the top of the waiting list, she received a letter inviting her in for an interview.

“At the appointment, they would have seen that I was colored and found some excuse to bounce me down the list,” she wrote in “Having Our Say.” “So I skipped the appointment and sent them a letter, acting like there was a mix-up. Then I just showed up on the first day of classes. . . . Child, when I showed up that day--at Theodore Roosevelt High School, a white high school--they just about died when they saw me. A colored woman! But my name was on the list and it was too late for them to send me someplace else.”

She became the first black woman to teach domestic science, now known as home economics, in New York City.

In their writing and in person, the sisters’ contrasting personalities were plain--Bessie the sharp-tongued spitfire, Sarah the mild-mannered one.

But they were both unafraid to express their opinions. In “Having Our Say” they commented on unequal opportunities:

“Just look at [former Vice President] Dan Quayle. If that boy was colored, he’d be washing dishes somewhere.”

On self-respect:

“Doing quality work--that’s what brings you self-respect and that’s something folks seem mixed up about today,” Sarah wrote. “You hear all this talk about self-esteem (or self-respect, as if it were something other people could give you.) But what self-respect really means is knowing that you are a person of value rather than thinking ‘I am special’ in a self-congratulatory way.”

They lived in retirement in the New York suburb of Mt. Vernon.

“When people ask me how we’ve lived past 100,” Bessie once said, “I say, ‘Honey, we never married. We never had husbands to worry us to death.’ ”

“No drinking, no chewing, no smoking,” Sarah said. “And always clean your plate.”

Bessie died in her sleep in 1995.

Although Sarah said, “I give myself two weeks without Bessie,” she also said that “I’ll just do the best I can without her.”

Delany’s “On My Own at 107: Reflections on a Life Without Bessie,” appeared in 1997.

Of her life she once said: “I never let prejudice stop me from what I wanted to do.”