Born: 16 June 1896, United States
Died: 16 December 1978
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Melnea Jones
The following is republished with permission from the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail. Bonnie Hurd Smith.
Melnea Cass Boulevard in Lower Roxbury is named for one of Boston’s most beloved and effective advocates for African Americans in Boston. She was relentless in her pursuit of educational and economic opportunities and racial justice for her community.
Known as the “First Lady of Roxbury,” Melnea Cass’s activities ranged from volunteering on committees, serving on boards, and accepting city-appointed commissions, to giving money to students who graduated from school.
Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1896, Melnea Agnes Jones’s father worked as a janitor, her mother as a domestic worker. Melnea’s father wanted a better life for his children, including a proper education, so he moved the family to Boston’s South End when Melnea was five years old. She attended the Boston Public Schools. Three years later, her mother died and the children’s “Aunt Ella” stepped in to take care of them. She soon moved the girls to Newburyport, Massachusetts, under the care of Amy Smith where Melnea attended grammar school. Melnea returned to Boston to attend Girls’ High School for one year when Aunt Ella, recognizing her niece’s striking intelligence, found the money to send Melnea to St. Frances de Sales Convent School in Rock Castle, Virginia, a Catholic school for African American and Native American girls. Melnea Jones graduated in 1914 as the valedictorian of her class.
Returning to Boston, Melnea looked for work as a salesgirl. Denied opportunities because she was African American, she took a position as a domestic worker until her marriage in 1917 to Marshall Cass, a soldier in the Army during World War I. Their first child, Marshall, was born while Marshall Sr. was away on duty; when Melnea’s husband returned from the war, the Casses had two more children, Marianne and Melanie.
At about this time, Melnea Cass became involved in her community as an activist. With her mother-in-law’s encouragement, when women achieved the right to vote in 1920 Melnea helped organize African American women to register and cast their first vote. At the same time, she encountered William Monroe Trotter, one of Boston’s most militant civil rights activists. Melnea Cass was deeply influenced by his lectures, protest meetings, and his newspaper, The Guardian. She joined the NAACP and volunteered what time she could while raising her children.
By the 1930s, Melnea Cass was a force for positive change in Roxbury. She volunteered her services for the Robert Gould Shaw House, a local settlement house and community center named after the commanding officer of the all-Black Civil War regiment. She founded the Kindergarten Mothers to encourage early education. She contributed her time and talent to the Pansy Embroidery Club, the Harriet Tubman Mothers’ Club, and the Sojourner Truth Club. She worked in the Northeastern Region of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs as a secretary and helped form the Boston chapter of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a national organization that developed and sustained African American communities all over the country.
Melnea Cass served as the president of the Women’s Service Club for more than fifteen years, during which time she initiated the Homemakers Training Program to assure domestic workers of social security and other benefits. She worked to expand employment opportunities for African Americans in stores and hospitals—drawing, of course, on her own experience—often attending protests against racist hiring practices. With Muriel and Otto Snowden, she helped to found Freedom House, a nonprofit, community-based organization dedicated to human rights and advocacy for African American rights in Boston. Freedom House programs also addressed urban renewal, minority employment, education equality, and interracial cooperation within the City of Boston.
In 1950 Boston Mayor John Hynes appointed Melnea Cass as the only woman charter member of the anti-poverty agency Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD), which assisted people who lost their homes to urban renewal efforts. From 1962 to 1964, she served as president of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and organized demonstrations against the Boston School Committee’s policy of segregation. In 1966, Governor John Volpe declared May 22 Melnea Cass Day in honor of her 70th birthday and years of volunteerism. More than 2,000 people joined the celebration.
In 1968, the Governor dedicated the Melnea Cass Metropolitan District Commission Swimming and Skating Rink in Roxbury to improve the lives of inner city youth. From 1975 to1976, Melnea Cass was chair of the Massachusetts Advisory Committee for the Elderly. During her lifetime, she received honorary degrees from Northeastern University (1969), Simmons College (1971), and Boston College (1975) prompting friends to call her “Dr. Cass.” She was also named “Massachusetts Mother of the Year” and a “Grand Bostonian.”
Three years after her death in 1981, the City of Boston opened Melnea Cass Boulevard. The YWCA in Boston’s Back Bay is also named for Melnea Cass to acknowledge her tireless work for children, families, and career development.
Melnea Cass’s motto in life: “If we cannot do great things, we can do small things in a great way.”
The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
“Melnea Cass Boulevard” winds through the heart of the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston as a tribute to one of the city’s most cherished leaders: Melnea Cass.
A reader of the Boston Globe wrote to the newspaper in December 2003 with a pressing query about this distinguished roadway: “I drive over her boulevard every day on my way to work, but have no idea as to who Melnea Cass is or was. Please advise.”[1] As a suffragist, clubwoman, and activist, Cass advocated for Boston’s most disadvantaged inhabitants. She received many awards and well-deserved recognition for her tireless community service, though details about her life appear forgotten. In her activism, Cass collaborated across lines of race and class, gender and religion. She adamantly believed that everyday people could make a positive difference in others’ lives.[2] Melnea Cass never ran for political office, but wielded power that expanded far beyond the realm of electoral politics and proved the potency of Black women’s activism.
Domestic work and migration played a central role in Melnea Cass’s early life and acquainted her with the hardships of the people she later served. Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1896, Cass and her family experienced racial oppression. Her mother labored as a domestic worker and her father as a janitor, limited to menial employment because of their race. Slavery intimately harmed their family, too. Cass’ grandmother, Lizzie, had been enslaved from a young age in rural Virginia prior to the Civil War.
At age five, her parents decided to move their family to the North for better educational and employment opportunities. They joined the early wave of Black individuals and families who embarked on uncertain journeys, sparking what historians call the Great Migration. The family settled in Boston where their Aunt Ella Drew – also a domestic worker – lived.[3]
Cass undertook other migrations following the death of her mother around 1906. She and her sister moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts to attend grammar school and live under the care of their aunt’s employer. Later, Cass returned to Virginia to complete her secondary education at St. Francis de Sales Convent School. Besides taking general studies, Melnea Cass recalled, “…we did domestic work, when we learned to keep the house and all that, because mostly colored [sic] girls at that time were hired out as domestics.” Like many other young Black girls, racism circumscribed Cass’ education and employment opportunities. Nevertheless, she excelled, graduating as valedictorian of her class in 1914.[4]
Cass’ experiences of racial and gender discrimination in Boston also determined her priorities as an activist. After returning to Boston, Melnea Cass discovered that many employers excluded women and people of color from certain jobs. To support herself, she used her training in household management and became a domestic worker on Cape Cod and in Boston for several years. Soon after her marriage to Marshall Cass in 1917, she ceased working outside the home and raised her three children. As the Great Depression unfolded in the 1930s, however, she had to return to domestic work to support her family.[5]
Melnea Cass connected her limited employment options to race and gender prejudice. As she recalled in an interview:
Well, in those days, of course, being Black, dear, affected every Black person getting any kind of job. Of course, you could get domestic work, because they always felt that Black people should do domestic work. But it was getting other kinds of jobs where the discrimination came in….Women could get all the work they wanted, domestic work….You could always make a living. But it wasn’t always what you wanted to do.[6]
Participation in civic and social organizations provided an avenue for Black women such as Cass to interact beyond work and serve their communities.[7] Her mother-in-law, Rosa Brown, introduced Cass to several organizations, including two Melnea Cass later led: the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Boston NAACP) and the Women’s Service Club (WSC). With Brown’s encouragement, Cass also became a proponent of women’s suffrage. After casting her first vote, Cass organized other Black women to do so as well.[8]
Cass’ commitment to the disadvantaged did not end there. From the 1920s through the 1970s, Cass participated in a multitude of organizations at the local, state, and national levels.[9] For instance, she engaged in street protests against employment discrimination in Boston as part of William Monroe Trotter’s National Equal Rights Association.[10] She also further advanced the cause of workers’ rights by co-founding a local chapter of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.[11]
Cass later became the only female and community charter member of the anti-poverty community organization Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD). As a member of the Robert Gould Shaw House, a community center and settlement house, she co-created “Kindergarten Mothers” to provide day-care services for working women, the first of its kind in Boston’s Black community. Cass adopted the group’s motto as her maxim: “If we cannot do great things, we can do small things in a great way.”[12] By the time she served as president of both the Boston NAACP (1961-1963) and the WSC (1962-1978), Cass was a bona fide community organizer.
Melnea Cass knew that voting rights meant little if women did not have access to fundamentals such as adequate wages and a safe workplace. In response, she organized on behalf of perhaps the most vulnerable workers in Boston: domestic employees. Unlike most other laborers in America, the federal government excluded domestic workers from protective legislation such as a guaranteed minimum wage wage and an eight-hour workday.[13] During the 1960s and 1970s, young migrant women of color from the South and Caribbean islands comprised a significant portion of Boston’s household employees. Manipulative employment agencies offered empty promises of a better life in the North with high wages and educational opportunities. Workers often fell victim to wage theft, overwork, and other abuses, yet lacked recourse.
The Boston NAACP and WSC first learned of this exploitation under Cass’ leadership and validated the gravity of domestic workers’ plight. Official investigations by the Boston NAACP continued after Cass’ tenure as president ended in 1963 and resulted in the closure of rogue employment agencies. The Boston NAACP also earned the support of prominent clergy and politicians to pass state legislation in 1964 that mandated agency licensure and transparent interactions with domestic workers.[14]
Federally-funded programs initiated by the WSC during the 1960s in collaboration with the National Committee on Household Employment helped domestic workers of multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds even more directly. By offering social services, professional training, and education about labor rights, these programs empowered workers to demand respect and fair treatment from their employers. Public conferences and a legislative campaign anchored by the WSC attracted inter-racial, cross-class, and bipartisan support. This work resulted in another concrete victory in 1970: Massachusetts’ passage of the nation’s first state-level minimum wage protections for domestic workers since the Great Depression. Over the following decade, the WSC’s advocacy became a celebrated national model for other activists.[15]
Melnea Cass looked back on her life’s work in 1977 and described the WSC’s advocacy for domestic workers as “the best achievement yet that I have taken part in because it is helping so many people…”[16] This declaration is especially remarkable in light of her wide-ranging community service that attracted greater recognition: challenging discriminatory housing practices, combatting de facto segregation in Boston Public Schools, and championing the concerns of senior citizens. In time, Cass’ efforts earned her honorary doctorates from prestigious universities and the affectionate title of “First Lady of Roxbury.” Yet she remained a humble servant of the city’s most vulnerable residents. Her efforts to prioritize their needs throughout the twentieth century extended women’s political activity beyond the electoral sphere. Melnea Cass’ legacy is not forgotten and continues to inspire domestic workers and activists in Boston and beyond.