Mabel Fuller
Mabel Wright was born in 1902 at Kingston, NY to Charles Wright and Maggie Sampson. Most of her extended family still lived in the storied community of Lapala on Hurley Mountain. Through oral tradition and modern genealogy, Mabel’s story has revealed a wealth of information about this unique, tri-racial community in Ulster County. Her father Charles and his sister were orphaned young, too young to remember their biological family or original surname. In the early 1870’s, Charles was indentured to a cruel landowner named Kortwright, his sister to a Hasbrouck family. When he was 21, around 1891, Charles left the Kortwright farm and found his way up the mountain. He and Maggy met at a dance in Lapala. Maggie’s family were part of the fully integrated community: the descendants of the Ulster County enslaved, free blacks, Native Americans, English, Dutch, and Irish immigrant families dating back to the 1650’s. Her parents, the one-armed John Sampson and Henrietta Brodhead had bought a lot with three houses for $250 around 1850. While official census options forced enumerators to choose between white, black or mulatto only – many of the families in Lapala have a tradition of interracial marriage and native heritage. White woman married to men of color were usually listed as black, and there was no option to denote indigenous, making tracing many of the families difficult but not impossible. Maggie Sampson often told her daughter about her grandmother, Henrietta’s mother Phoebe, and her blue eyes and straight hair. Maggie had her hair. Phoebe was said to be the daughter of a white man and a native woman. Her entire family, husband William Brodhead and many children, are listed as mulatto on the 1850 census of High Falls, 3 of her sons worked on the D&H Canal.
Mabel spent much of her early childhood with her grandmother in Lapala, as her father worked on building the nearby Ashokan Reservoir. She remembered vividly the summer kitchen behind the homestead, the “real Indians” that came every Wednesday and Saturday for some of her grandmother’s bread, but never spoke. Every summer the neighborhood would gather for a corn husking bee; animal feed was set to dry, the best ears were canned for winter, and the rest milled at Stoney Creek for cornmeal. Then they would have a dance. Cash was scarce, men earned wages quarrying blue stone on the mountain, homes were built with the rock they could not sell. Everything was done as a community, the people came together to build houses, harvest crops and slaughter livestock. The elders still spoke the local Low Dutch dialect when they didn’t want the children to understand their conversations. Henrietta Brodhead Sampson was educated, she read the bible and newspaper every day, and stressed the importance of education to her family.
Mabel’s father Charles Wright passed away in 1912, leaving Maggie and her five children in a desperate situation. A woman’s only opportunity for good wages in those days was live-in domestic service. Maggie chose to keep her family together and moved down to Yonkers near her cousin Samuel West, his mother was a Sampson. She found work and soon met and married William Duke. Duke was born in Virginia and knew about farming. Once the children finished school, the family moved back to Lapala and bought a home on Lapla Road. But Mabel was stuck, her opportunities for employment remained as limited as they were for her mother 15 years before. At 20, she moved down to New York City and sought work as seamstress. “A black person had a very hard time getting a job on a machine in NYC at that time” she told Peter. Her first jobs were sewing potato sacks and curtains for $6.75 a week. Eventually she would find work with Mr. Rubino making undergarments at $18 a week, she stayed for 10 years. Rubino’s shop grew to over 80 women, mostly Italian immigrants and a handful of blacks. When the union came in, they looked to Mabel as the only one who would speak up to the boss. When he refused to meet her terms, the women went on strike and joined the union, they elected Mabel as chair. She became a veteran of the picket line. Her record includes five arrests and four nights in jail. “We strikers used to keep a dollar tucked in our shoes, so that in case we were put in jail we’d be able to buy food”.
In 1937 Mabel was elected chairlady of her local and she came to the attention of the nearby International. She was still working in the shop but made time to attend weekend seminars, lectures on economics and the trade union movement, and women’s rights at Unity House in the Poconos. She was appointed to the executive board and made it her mission to ensure women received the same pay as men. She went to the Women’s Trade Union League seminars and formed friendships with Eleanor Roosevelt, Rose Schneiderman, and Mary Lord. For three summers she spent her vacations attending seminars on social justice at Wellesley College.
In early 1943 Mabel joined the Women’s Army Corp (WACS) and served as a chaplain’s assistant at Goldman Field, Kentucky. “We had a Women’s Service Brigade during the war. We visited hospitals and ran canteens. I was elected chairlady two or three times. Mrs. Roosevelt came to address us, and we got to talking. She got interested in me.” After the war Mrs. Roosevelt invited Mabel twice for Private lunches where the spoke about women’s rights. “She wanted to know the story of how I got interested in the union. I was so proud of her. She was very interested. That was her life really. I always say that he (FDR) was one of the best presidents we ever had but I think she had a great deal of influence on him. When she married him, she was already indoctrinated in the suffrage movement and Rose Schneiderman and brought her into the trade union movement.”
In 1944 she attended Harvard University for one year as a trade union fellow. She studied economics, labor law, and collective bargaining. It was a broadening experience for the union fellows, as well as their classmates – whose fathers were titans of industry. One of her professors once asked her why blacks in America took things so calmly and didn’t rise up. She recalled telling him “Oh give them time. We’re getting someplace. I’m here, am I not?”
In 1946 Mabel was asked to join the union staff. They placed her in the educational department, and she soon became its director. She was most interested in improving the lives of the workers and in raising their political awareness and getting them to vote. Mabel brought literacy and literature to the workers; she even established a workers’ school. Many Brooklyn workers had never been out of their neighborhoods, just like her childhood friends on the mountain – Mabel took them on trips to Manhattan and across the country. In 1947 she married James Fuller, a social worker and journalist.
Her interest in Women’s Rights naturally led to work in the Civil Rights Movement. At the 1963 March on Washington she was delighted to meet Fanny Hammer, who had trained protesters in boycotting during the voter registration fight down south. In 1964 the ILGWU was at it’s peak and Mabel was chosen by the US Department of State and Labor to represent American Labor in an exchange program with Japan. The Japanese were surprised her husband let her travel alone, she hoped their unions could play an important roll in gaining rights for Japanese women as they had in the US.
Mabel moved back to Kingston when she retired and was once again among her old family and friends. She rejoined the St. Mark’s African Methodist Episcopal Church where she had been baptized. Her community service continued through their charitable missionary society, which helped all the people of Kingston, not just members. Her advice for making the world a better place “I think your best bet is to be politically minded, the right way, and have a big mouth about things. I think that’s the way to do it. You have to make those friends and good acquaintances. I think that’s what I did. I always made friends. You can’t go out there hating people.” Brava Mabel, thank you for your dedication to equal rights across the board, for your toughness and your kind heart. May your legacy live forever.
Erin von Holdt-Gilbert 2023