by Bill Batson
Last Thursday, June 3rd, I was honored to be inducted into the Rockland County Civil Rights Hall of Fame. Congratulations to the other honorees, Gail Golden, Michael Greco, Martin Langer and Rabia and Dr. Paul Nagin.
I accepted the credit on behalf of my grandmother and the local community leader, Frances Lillian Avery Batson. Here are my comments. I also republished a column I wrote about my grandmother called Grandmother’s Chair.
In 1959, my grandmother, Frances Lillian Avery Batson, spoke out against Urban Renewal.
Her words are recorded in Carl Nordstrom’s book Nyack in Black and White.
At a public event on Nyack’s Urban Renewal project, she pointed out a problem with the resettlement plan for displaced black families.
“If people with houses for sale in different parts of the county and the community are unwilling to open their hearts and minds, what will people do? Will you build a couple of tents on the hill and go back to nomadic life? “
“Rockland County is prejudiced,” she concluded.
Frances Lillian Avery Batson as a child on Jackson Avenue. Standing, second from the left.
Her blunt remarks were made just four years after the horrific murder of Emmitt Till and a year before the student sit-in movement started in Greensboro, North Carolina. America and Rockland County were at a crossroads.
My grandmother was born in 1888 and was 33 when the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa was burned down. I’m sure the removal of black families in Nyack felt in some ways like a bureaucratic form of the same extra-legal violence.
When my grandmother made her point about Rockland County, the reward for fighting for civil rights was dismissal, incarceration, intimidation, or worse – not a Hall of Fame. But she had the courage to risk everything and speak out at a public meeting.
Today I accept that honor on her behalf and wonder how she sees what she sees when she looks down from heaven on her county and country.
My grandmother and her siblings. It’s the first on the right.
She would see a country that still has outrage like the murder of Emmit Till, followed by moves similar to the sit-ins.
She would see the video of an unarmed black man in Minneapolis being nonchalantly pulled from his body by a blank policeman.
She would welcome the same black man’s daughter to the White House exactly one year later, the door held open by a marine under the command of the President.
She would see an insurgent mob storm the United States Capitol and rally behind the Confederate flag.
Then, a week later, in the same Capitol, she saw a young black female poet reciting to an audience that included the first black and Asian female vice president of the United States.
She read racial slur hurled casually and without shame on Facebook groups here in Rockland County.
She would also see a community of all races come together at Mount Moor to restore a burial ground that was separated, neglected, and nearly wiped out in her lifetime.
Basement of the AME Zion Church of St. Philip. My grandmother sits second from the right.
She would see a country that is always at a crossroads. In one direction the moral wreckage of racist violence, in the other direction multiracial cooperation and justice.
If my grandmother were here today, she would say that while prejudice is still alive and well in Rockland County and America, but so is the spirit that inspires people of goodwill to speak up and protest.
I am so proud and deeply grateful that Batson has been added to the names on the wall in our state assembly, joining names like Holland, Pratt, Blount, Cooke, Easter and Frank.
I am equally honored to be included with this year’s names Golden, Greco, Langer and Nagin. I use family names because you cannot be involved in civil rights work without the support of your family.
Each generation has to decide in which direction our district is moving – away from the abyss of intolerance or towards it.
My grandmother’s example set me on the path to peace and justice. A path that brought me here today and that I will continue tomorrow.
Many Thanks.
My grandmother’s chair
October 25, 2017
I live in a house in the country where my grandmother worked as a maid. Frances Lillian Avery Batson spent decades housewife for the Jewett family in Upper Nyack. A few years ago my fiancée and I moved to a cottage on the Jewett’s property. We placed my grandmother’s favorite chair in a place of honor overlooking the Hudson River with the view that I’m sure her work ethic never allowed her to enjoy.
Like many valuable possessions belonging to families with little money, this chair was almost lost forever. Few can 
afford to preserve or store furniture from previous generations. These items can be given away or sold. Most of the time, they are literally thrown on the trash heap of history.
In the constant confusion of growing and moving families, Grandma’s chair was sent to be re-purchased and left in the antique shop. I owe his salvation to Muhamad Mahmoud from Antique Masters. With a broken arm sagging under the weight of the threadbare fabric, the weakened chair was no longer suitable for sitting. So I brought it to Mohamad. I was attracted by his sign “Bring me your broken chair, your old lamp and your broken table, and I’ll fix it and save you money”.
I paid for the service but didn’t come back when the job was done. We were in a very cramped apartment and couldn’t find space for the precious piece of furniture.
Grandma is first from the left in the back row
In desperation, I tried to donate the chair to a local conservationist’s collection. I argued that the chair represented the middle-class black community in the center of town along Jackson Avenue that had been destroyed by urban renewal. That this chair was the last thing that stood. But unfortunately they didn’t have the space for furnishings.
Although I was unable to retrieve the chair (which I had left behind for two years at the time), it was not discarded or sold to cover storage costs, but Muhamad held it for me. He understood the meaning of the chair. One day as I was walking down Main Street on the opposite side of his shop in a not-so-subtle attempt to avoid Muhammad’s gaze, this serious and honorable man caught me and said, “It’s your chair, come and take it back. ”
Objects from the ancient masters of Mohamad Mahmoud
Marisol and I happened to have just moved into the cottage on the Jewett Estate. And suddenly, in a flash of recognition, I realized that the stars were aligned for my grandmother to return to work. (Thank you, Mohamad. My family is eternally grateful).
Chairs were very important in our household or in any busy homestead. Elders were given special chairs that no one else could sit on. If you were cheeky enough to rest on a promised chair, you had to get out of your secret crouch quickly when the rightful chair heir arrived.
The chair would face the window with the most idyllic view, or be closest to the fireplace or television, depending on the centerpiece around which the families would gather. In later years, with the advancement in chair technology, the honor chair became the one to sit back and relax.
As you got older you got closer to the legacy of the chair. The music of a funeral song would lift you to this place. I took my father’s chair when he died.
My father loved his chair. As a worker, he rested his Schlitz beer on the TV tray and watched the news. During his slow decline he leaned back and bobbed his feet as we played the music of his youth. He looked so safe in his seat. He was there for two meals a day and probably too much television and many naps. His chair might as well have been at the wheel of a ship that was sailing 
Seas or flew through space. There he was master and commander.
As sublime as my family may have felt at home, outside the home in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s it wasn’t as optimistic for darker skinned people. American mores and cultures of racial hierarchy dictated lesser roles. Although my aunt ran her own business, Batson Secretariat, and my grandmother was a civic leader and deacon, with as much power as any man or pastor in her church, in the workplace, they were given submissive roles.
But even within the confines of the repressive order that banishes one gender and any non-white person to bondage or second-class citizenship (a state of affairs that is shockingly still in place), the Batson family has never bowed its knees .
My aunt rose to the top of the civil service as assistant village clerk for Nyack village, and my grandmother was certainly a competing matriarch in the houses she visited disguised as housekeeper. For example, in addition to her domestic duties, she also worked as a Latin teacher. When I was a child, she let me know Cicero’s speech before the Roman Senate of 63 BC. Recite: Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra!
My grandmother, my aunt Adeline, and my father Prime Batson around 1930
During the holidays, in the 1970s, my grandmother helped their families with large meals for as long as she had the strength. As a teenager, I found the arrangement totally unacceptable. She stayed up all night before Thanksgiving cooked for us, but then left the family table on the holiday mornings to help others find solace at their stove.
There must have been an intense compassion that drove her to leave those she loved so much to work so hard for others. She must have found that the money she received paid more than bills, but allowed her to share her love by deepening the safety of her offspring. Her house was hers, but I’m sure she succumbed to the reality that houses always need to be repaired.
And the families she visited must have treated her in a way that prevented her from taking off her white maid uniform. I had a classmate at a public school in Teaneck, David Geller, who had a family from Nyack. They were lucky enough to have my grandmother look after their holiday table. When we made the connection that my grandmother worked for his mother’s family, I discovered only awe for that fact and no superiority in his tone.
My grandmother’s chair came back to the Jewett estate on a trip she bought and paid for with no bitterness or contempt.
Her chair now faces the river, which she has never watched while scrubbing and churning up other people’s belongings so her grandson can watch the water.
The artist and writer Bill Batson lives in Nyack, NY. Nyack Sketch Log: “Grandmother’s Chair” ?? © 2021 Bill Batson. Visit billbatsonarts.com to see more.
The Nyack Sketch Log is sponsored each week by Weld Realty.
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