Women’s History Month: Celebrating an Ethical Heroine (with RYSEC)

This week, we will be joining the Riverdale-Yonkers Society for Ethical Culture.

Featuring: live music by Dupree, accompanied by Barry Kornhauser

Come “meet” a fascinating, little-known figure of Black women’s history, the Harlem Renaissance, and for part of her life, New York City history and Ethical Culture history!

Born just a month before the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which outlawed enslavement except as punishment for a crime, Cora Calhoun Horne lived through times of both progress and regress on civil rights and Black flourishing. As her great-granddaughter Gayle Lumet Buckley chronicles in the book The Black Calhouns, Cora was from an extraordinary family, descended from a (white) nephew of the pro-enslavement vice president, John C. Calhoun. Her father was an enslaved house servant; she was an early supporter of the NAACP, the Urban League, and among the founders of the NACW, a national Black women’s activist organization. Cora took her granddaughter to meetings of those groups starting at age 2 and later enrolled her in the Ethical Culture School — which that granddaughter, Lena Horne, once credited with grounding her own resistance to racism.

To join, use the link below:
https://bit.ly/RYSECPlatform