Knickerbocker News journalist, Bill Blando, remembers Olivia Rorie, matriarch of the neighborhood movement in Albany's South End.
July 31, 2007
A school named for her: That would have gotten to Olivia Rorie. Not much else did.
Not the politicians nor their strong-arm men, not the prostitutes who further humiliated her neighborhood, not the hot-water tanks that froze up in the winter nor the hot and sticky summer nights in an era without air-conditioning, not the hierarchy of the church when she thought it was blind to the light of truth; not even a fire that burned her and her family out of their home.
Had she known that someday a facility with a Head Start program would be housed in the Olivia Rorie Center at 7 Morton Avenue, deep in Albany’s South End, that, I think, would have taken her breath away. Sure she dedicated her work to her people, poor people, black people, white people, old people. But at the center were the kids. It was always the kids she fought hardest for. She was a mother, after all, with nine children.
But her love for the young embraced all children. And there was a special place in her heart for the youngest, and to lend her name to Head Start, which serves to put almost the youngest of the young on the learning track, would have humbled her. She would have seen it as the crowning achievement in her long struggle to advance the cause of civil rights.
If Mrs. Rorie were ever intimidated by anything, I never saw it in the three years I knew her. She always knew what she was fighting for: decent housing for those in the inner city, money so that the poor could have a chance to climb their way out of poverty and a school system that treated all students with respect while teaching them how to improve themselves.
That was the Olivia Rorie I knew from 1967-1970 while a reporter at the Knickerbocker News in Albany, N.Y.
If Olivia Rorie, a black woman whose dedication to fighting for poor people was matched only by her love for them, harbored any fear in going up against one of the most powerful mayors in the country -- the long-entrenched Erastus Corning -- and the controlling and corrupt O’Connell political machines, she never showed it. The police didn’t faze her despite their well-earned reputation for employing brutal methods as acceptable procedure.
Never let them see you sweat? Well, she did -- a lot -- but only on the outside, even in winter. Gee, she weighed more than 300 pounds and wasn’t all that tall -- 5-5, 5-6, maybe. On the inside she was cool and in full command.
In his book, “O Albany: an Urban Tapestry (1983),” Bill Kennedy calls her “the matriarch of Albany’s poor.” In introducing her to me in 1967, Knickerbocker News reporter Ed Swietnicki said she was “earth mother.” Both apt terms.
Behind her back, corrupt politicians, cops on the take, hacks and stooges beholden to the machine called her much worse. She did battle with the Roman Catholic diocese over the transfer of a priest whose only sin was trying to help. She fought the whores who displayed a lack of modesty even while children were around; and she battled the sleazy city, state and federal officials who did business with, at and in the whore houses in her neighborhood. But when she thought one of the prostitutes was getting a raw deal, she’d go to bat for her.
Who said you couldn’t fight city hall? Certainly not Mrs. Rorie.
Despite the giving and the taking away of funds, she eventually won the fight for a playground in the South End; it took three years. That and the battle for the prostitutes to clean up their act, the bitter defeat in trying to retain Rev. Bonaventure O’Brien and his good works in the inner city, and her leadership in helping to create and shape two grass-roots groups -- the Better Homes and Community Organization and the South End Neighborhood Community Action Program (SENCAP) -- took place several years before I arrived in Albany. But they already had reached legendary status, and so I heard about them.
As I remember her, Olivia Rorie’s crusades revolved around providing a decent place to live to every person who wanted it, making sure every child lived in a clean, safe neighborhood with schools that challenged young minds.
Her arsenal included a focused mind, determination, energy, fearlessness and, her most awesome weapon, her gift of oratory, Whether it was at a rally addressing hundreds and even thousands of people or at a PTA organization meeting with a handful of people or in a one-on-one conversation, she could move people to take action. As one of her admirers told me, “That lady sure could speak.”
In the three years I knew her, Olivia Rorie went from one side of 40 to the other.
“When people get angry, things get done.” she’d say at various rallies and protest demonstrations. She marched and stood at vigils. And if it sometimes appeared that anger was clouding the purpose of the rally, she’d keep order with a reminder of why we were there.
Boarding the bus with 30 others for a Memorial Day visit to Resurrection City which housed 3,000 participants in the 1969 Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., Mrs. Rorie’s rallying cry was: “They knocked us around long enough, and we’re going to change it….. you better believe it.”
On the way home, she told the Reverend Herman A. Rhodes, SENCAP’s project Supervisor and pastor at Israel AME Zion Church, “My body’s tired, but my soul’s rested.”
At a rambunctious, contentious, counter-demonstration to a rally for third part candidate George C. Wallace, running in New York State on the Courage Party ticket, in front of the Capitol, she told the “Human Dignity” crowd, “I promise you, there will be peace in the valley.” She then strode over to the Wallace side of the street with a sign bearing a caricature of Wallace and reading “Vote for Rosemary’s baby” and below it, “He’s a
b_ _ _ h.”
At a PTO meeting in Guilderland, one of many parent-teacher groups she addressed both in Albany and suburbia, she informed the gathering, “The school system in the South End smells,” and she urged teachers in that bedroom community to push their pupils to learn, “otherwise they are lost.” In Albany, she said, teachers “are interested only in controlling, not educating, their classes.” Her lesson was enlightening in another way: describing living conditions in the inner city. Asked if she’s conduct a tour of slum areas, she replied, “Only if you say decent housing will come of it,” adding, “I led too many tours that led to nothing.”
Those words reflected her most despondent, most pessimistic outlook, at least that I can recall. At that same meeting, Mrs. Rorie expressed the realistic view that “black people in the Albany ghettos can’t change things themselves because they don’t have the money, the political power and because they are afraid.”
“When the white man says you vote this way, they vote this way. They see it now. They see what it’s done to them, but they’re still scared.”
Her depression probably was a carry over from the assassination of Martin Luther King the previous month. Mrs. Rorie, addressing a Better Homes meeting shortly after the announcement of King’s death, was quoted as saying, “I’m so damned sick of meetings. It took three years to get a playground in the South End.” Then she lamented the failure to get a health center, promised in 1965, and a supermarket. “We have nothing open today.” A few weeks before that meeting, she reminded the group, city officials said that no new housing could be expected before the 1970s. “I’d like to have a hole to crawl in … It’s a lousy way to live.”
That PTO meeting came just two weeks before the Memorial Day visit to Resurrection City at which South End groups joined others to show their support in more tangible ways than just showing up. They brought baskets of food, tools, blankets and other supplies. And although that visit ended abruptly with a long, drenching thunderstorm, Mrs. Rorie and her colleagues went back to Washington 20 days later (on June 19) to join 100,000 other people from around the country for Solidarity Day in support of the Poor People’s Campaign now living in mud and squalid tents and huts.
But those two visits seemed to fire her up again. She participated in more rallies and protests -- rallies to support school kids, protests against welfare cuts. Then the political season came on with a rush with races for president, the U.S. Senate and a rash of lesser posts. Her batteries recharged, Mrs. Rorie was out there supporting the “good” candidates.
Apparently still riding that high, the explosion of her hot-water tank and the subsequent fire to her house at 99 Herkimer Street that not only severely damaged most of the structure and virtually all of the family’s belongings failed to knock the emotional pins from under her. Immediately, she was made aware of one thing: She had friends. There was little else, but she had friends who went out to raise funds for her, her husband and the eight children still living with her. Others sought to help in different ways, one sewing her a dress which brought the total number of outfits to two, including the dress she was wearing.
She also had a circumspect outlook, noting she was taking advantage of a coat sale and not home at the time of the explosion. “You know,” she said, “those coats (I bought) probably saved my life. If I were at home, I’d have tried to fight the fire.”
And she would have because she was among other things a fighter. Olivia Rorie died of cancer, according to Bill Kennedy, on Sept. 28, 1978. She was 50. Father Howard Hubbard, a beloved figure in the inner city who had taken over as bishop for the Albany Diocese 10 years later, gave testimony at Olivia Rorie's funeral. According to "O Albany," the Bishop said: "I consider her to be one of the foremost influences on my life and ministry. She displayed great love and compassion for others and tremendous courage in fighting injustice."
Amen