"Please hurry with some word"
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The stories of some of the residents at the New York State Training School for Girls during the 1920s as told by the letters they wrote and received.
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Searching for Ella
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New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein talks about discovering Ella Fitzgerald's hidden past at the Training School for Girls in Hudson, NY.
Read MoreBlack Child Savers Along the Hudson
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The story of how Jane Bolin and the NAACP fought in the 1940s to prohibit public funding of charitable institutions that practiced racial discrimination.
Read MoreTraining School: Punishment or Protection?
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A parole agent's presentation at a New York conference in 1905 stirs a debate about the Hudson Training School for Girls: Punishment or Protection?
Read MoreDelinquent Girls Need to Farm
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Superintendent Fannie French Morse wrote in 1924 that the girls at Hudson should be able to farm. The training school boys do it, she said—why not girls?
Read MoreThe "Ungovernable" Ella Fitzgerald
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On April 10, 1933, a fifteen-year-old “colored” girl named Ella Fitzgerald was sentenced to the New York State Training School for Girls in Hudson, NY.
Read MoreFirst Letter Home
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"Dear Mother," begins Gladys Case's "first letter home," postmarked from the Hudson Girls' Training School three days after Christmas, December 28, 1930.
Read MoreBearing Witness
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In May of 2011, a box of documents from the New York State Training School for Girls was discovered by Lisa Durfee at a garage sale in Hudson, NY.
Read MoreHouse of Refuge for Women Founder Inspires New York City's First Monument Dedicated to a Woman
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In 1912, a granite fountain designed by artist Charles Platt was dedicated in New York City’s Bryant Park to the memory of Josephine Shaw Lowell.
Read More"They Are All Ellas..."
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Jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald kept secret the cruelest chapter of her own history: her confinement for over a year in a reformatory as an orphaned teenager.
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