Sue Harwig

Sue Harwig is along time member of Judson Church who agreed to be interviewed as part of the Judson Memorial Church oral history project. Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1926, she moved with her family to Wilkinsburgh, PA when she was still an infant. Ms. Harwig attended public school in Wilkinsburgh and then graduated from Swarthmore College in 1947. While at Swarthmore, Ms. Harwig became interested in "causes" and began a life-long pattern of service that continued when she moved to New York City to attend graduate school at the Columbia School of Social Work in 1950. Ms. Harwig has remained in New York ever since, a prominent member of Judson Church, the NAACP, the American Democratic Associaiton, the Village Independent Democrats and Civil Rights in Manhattan.

• Early Activism

Ms. Harwig's interest in activism began when she was a student at Swarthmore, a Quaker college. Hear Ms. Harwig talk about her experience at Swarthmore as she became involved in Quaker work camps and other "causes.




So while I was at college, it was during the war. Even though it was a Quaker college there was a Navy unit at the college called a V12 unit. And sailors were there and when they graduated I think they became ensigns and uh, and served in the Navy. And uh, and I met one or two people who had been conscientious objectors because it was a Quaker college and there was some influence with the Quakers. I went to Quaker uh, Quaker workcamps. There was a couple that ran weekend workcamps in the city, in Philadelphia, and they would work in people's houses sort of fixing things. (Adina: Do you remember what inspired you to do those workcamps?) Well, it was just kind of interesting, it was just kind of fun. I guess, I started getting interested in CAUSES. Ooh is that... I started getting interested in causes at that time.

• Coming to New York City

After graduating from Swarthmore, Sue Harwig began working as a social worker, first in Philadelphia and then in Peoria, Illinois. In Peoria, Ms. Harwig became dissatisfied with her perceived opportunities for personal growth. This dissatisfaction led her to come to New York City in 1950.



I spent the summer in what was called a Student and Industry Project which were kind of sponsored by the Quakers. And we lived in a place in Philadelphia that had been the Deutche Seamensheim, the German seamen's home. And we got jobs in industry and we would have meetings with Union people and we would talk with different people... And I remember talking to somebody in the Textile Workers Union and he said "you look very Wellsley," I think he thought I wouldn't really make it too well as a Union Worker, that I was a little too sheltered, that I would be a little too flumoxed by the men, both the Union staff members as well as other men that worked in... He encouraged me to go work for the Y, so I went to the Y and I worked for the YWCA in young adult work in Peoria, Illinois for three years. Then I came back to New York and I forget what I did next. (Adina: How did you come to New York?) Well my aunts lived there, so I had gone there, you know summers for... Well, I got tired. I got tired of being with the YWCA in Peoria, I got tired of getting alumni magazines that would say "so and so is studying at the Sorbonne, so and so is studying at the London school of economics, and Sue Harwig is still in Peoria!" So I thought, well I've got to come back east. At any rate, I lived with my aunt for a while, and I got a job at the YWCA. It was a sponsor of a community center in the Amsterdam houses. Well eventually I went to social work school in New York, Columbia University School of Social Work.

• Combating Housing Discrimination

In New York City, Sue Harwig became active in a variety of different organizations devoted to civil rights. Among those were the NAACP, Judson Church and CRIM, Civil Rights in Manhattan. Through these organizations, Ms. Harwig worked to combat housing discrimination in Manhattan.

But there was a heck of a lot of housing discrimination. One of the things we worked on in the N-double-A and also at Judson was the Sharkey-Brown-Isaacs bill. There had been various laws passed that outlawed discrimination in government-assisted housing as well as public housing, but the Sharkey-Brown-Isaacs law outlawed discrimination in housing PERIOD. When I started graduate school, there had been an organization called Civil Rights in Manhattan, CRIM, and it had fought restaurant discrimination. But restaurant discrimination had kind of ended by then, by the 50s, it had begun to be over. So it turned its attention to housing discrimination, and I think I joined that... Sometimes we would go, we would test places, we would go, we would answer an ad and uh white person would go on, black people would be told they didn't have anything. And we would do research on that. We would send people out in teams where we would make a point of having a white person check this place and a black person check it.