Bertha Josephine Blue

On a spring day in the early 1900s, a confident looking woman ushers a group of schoolchildren along the hilly sidewalk in Cleveland’s Little Italy neighborhood. The children, many of them sons and daughters of Sicilian immigrants, are walking to First Communion practice at Holy Rosary Church. The woman, their first-grade teacher, is African-American.

Bertha Josephine Blue, was a member of Cleveland’s early black middle class. From 1903 to 1947 – this woman of enslaved grandparents taught at Murray Hill Elementary School. In Little Italy, the tightly knit East Side Italian neighborhood of checkered tablecloth restaurants and a checkered history dealing with outsiders.

But Blue used her determination, talent and heart to pierce this insulated community in such a way that it flooded her with love. It wasn’t a strategy, but a calling. You won’t find Blue in most of Cleveland’s history books, but more than a half- century after her retirement and death, the mention of her name still brought tender, responses from older residents of Little Italy.

Blue’s photograph graces the wall of the one room Little Italy Historical Museum.

“She was beautiful. We all loved her,” recalled Eva Maesta, a volunteer at the former museum and one of Blue’s former students. “Every birthday, she got a little cupcake for you with a candle in it. And this is when you couldn’t afford a cupcake.”

“She believed everybody should get a passing grade,” added Lauretta Nardolillo, another volunteer. “If you were a slow learner, she’d help you more. She never scolded you for getting things wrong.”

As a young woman, Blue couldn’t afford four years of college in a row. She did one year at Hiram College, 1899-1900, and took other classes at Miami University in Oxford. It was not until 1932 that she received a bachelor’s degree from Western Reserve University.

Blue’s life was full. There were high teas every afternoon at home, football games at Central High (starring her famous place kicking brother, Joe Blue), the Minerva Book Club, classes in calligraphy and folk-dancing. Blue once took her daughter to a party where bandleader Noble Sissle (best man at Joe Blue’s wedding) and pianist Eubie Blake played. There were annual trips to Oberlin to celebrate the end of slavery, and summer vacations at a black resort in Idlewild, Michigan.

Blue also helped her friend, activist Jane Edna Hunter, manage the Phillis Wheatley Association, a groundbreaking community house for black women. The house emerged to change minds and lives.

Blue adopted Jane Lee Darr, a 2 year old with pecan colored skin and blue eyes. When the adoption was finalized, the parental rights went to Blue’s mother. Then, when she died, the rights went to Blue, a rarity for a single working parent at the time. Darr remembers feeling immediately comfortable with Blue, how Blue touched her small head to calm her, how the house felt immediately like a home.

Schools were changing when Blue retired in 1947. At that time, Kusmer noted in his book, “A Ghetto Takes Shape,” there was a trend toward segregating black teachers with black students. The Civil Rights movement confronted that issue and many others in the 1960s. Blacks not only had the vote, they used it to right longstanding wrongs. In 1963, the year Blue died, city schools were overcrowded. Black students were sent to Murray Hill, but kept in classrooms apart from white Little Italy students.

Tension lingered for decades. Blacks complained of discrimination and other mistreatment in restaurants and on the street. In the 1990s, officials of Case Western Reserve University and Little Italy started meeting to deal with the problems. Reported racial incidents became scarce.

While some blacks were still not comfortable in the neighborhood, many more began using it.

Then the Little Italy Historical Museum published a history book. It was dedicated to three people: two of the neighborhood’s founding fathers and Bertha Josephine Blue.

“She was the first one we thought of,” said museum volunteer Nardolillo. “She was one of us. Everybody liked her so much and she was such a lovely, dedicated teacher, we felt she should get some recognition.”

Sandra Malek Vodanoff, a historical society volunteer and Lake View Cemetery docent, got a plaque installed at Blue’s gravesite, telling how much she was loved by the Italian-American community. Teachers of English as a second language also helped in the effort.

Source: teachingcleveland.org, Debbi Snook article "Bertha Josephine Blue" (Feb. 14, 2011)