wfn.org | Denomination's Women's History Award goes to writer

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>]

July 24, 2001  News media contact: Joretta Purdue ·(202) 546-8722·Washington
10-23-31-71B{329}

By United Methodist News Service

A United Methodist agency has given its Women's History Award to a
73-year-old Californian who is researching and writing about a 1940s civil
rights group in Evanston, Ill.

Lila Frazier of Sacramento has received  $1,500 from the churchwide
Commission on Archives and History to support her work. The commission,
based in Madison, N.J., provides the award to cover research, travel, phone
calls and other costs.
 
Frazier, a white female, was one of the early members of the group, which
grew out of the original Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in
Chicago. In 1946, she was a freshman at the Evanston Collegiate Institute,
which was a Methodist junior college at the time and is now Kendall College.
She recalls going to hear speakers at the Chicago CORE, but she did not
become a member.

Three African-American high school students in Evanston, who were members of
the Chicago group, decided they should get a group going in their community.
They did the organizing, working mainly with students at the Methodist
Student Foundation. The foundation served all the college students in
Evanston. The original Evanston CORE included Frazier and some friends from
the junior college, as well as a couple of students from Garrett Biblical
Institute (now Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary), a Methodist
seminary on the Northwestern University campus.

The group protested the lack of integrated public eating places by
conducting sit-ins at local restaurants, including the Orrington Hotel's
coffee shop. Frazier has already written a play based on one of the sit-ins,
and she is planning a historically accurate book - perhaps for children or
youth - about young people who practiced nonviolence and stood up for their
beliefs, well before the better-known sit-ins of the 1960s.

Frazier will use the grant to go to Evanston and Chicago to consult
newspaper files and to go to Michigan where the CORE archives are housed.
She is also collecting first-person accounts from other early members of the
group.

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United Methodist News Service
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