Born in Charleston, S.C., in 1883, Cecilia Cabaniss Saunders was a graduate of Fisk and Columbia Universities; she served as executive director of the Harlem Branch of the Young Women's Christian Association for more than thirty years. The...
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Born in Charleston, S.C., in 1883, Cecilia Cabaniss Saunders was a graduate of Fisk and Columbia Universities; she served as executive director of the Harlem Branch of the Young Women's Christian Association for more than thirty years. The daughter of Harriet Hampton and James Holloway, she married James Cabaniss, a medical doctor in 1912, and John Saunders, a real estate broker, in 1915. Cecila Cabaniss Saunders was a resident of Central Harlem. She died in 1966. Correspondence with attachments documenting Cecila Cabaniss Saunders's efforts, as executive director of the Harlem Branch of the Young Women's Christian Association, in opposing discrimination in employment in the armed forces during World War II. Correspondents include: Frieda S. Miller, Chairman of the Committee on Discrimination in Employment of the New York State Council of National Defense; Claude Barnett, director of the Associated Negro Press; and Emily L. Ehle, director of the American Leadership Panel, an African American lobby which surveyed the opinions of black leaders in the 1940s, and whose membership included Mary McLeod Bethune, Alain Locke, Walter White and Richard Wright, among others. The collection also includes a completed questionnaire submitted to Saunders for a special study conducted by the American Leadership Panel relating to the April 1945 United Nations Conference in San Francisco.
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