AMENIA — The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) last Saturday, March 30, did what it has always done well. Its Florida branch organized a protest. Marchers urged an arrest in the February killing of a 17-year-old by a neighborhood watch volunteer.That the NAACP, in its 103rd year, remains at the fore of the continuing struggle for equality and social justice in this country is no surprise. What may be a surprise to some is the role played by an Amenia resident, Joel Spingarn, who organized a critical conference attended by vibrant leaders and rising stars of the civil rights movement in 1933.Eben Miller, who teaches at Southern Maine Community College, has written a valuable and long-needed book that examines not only the conference itself, but singles out five of its participants for a closer look.The idea for “Born Along the Color Line” (Oxford University Press, 356 pages, $29.95), Miller said in an email, came from a photograph “of the conferees assembled in Amenia in August 1933. I was struck by this image. Here was a group of young African-American professionals and academics gathered during the depth of the Great Depression to discuss how best to pursue black equality.”Fluidity, change at TroutbeckThe gathering was at Spingarn’s Troutbeck estate.“I immediately had innumerable questions,” Miller went on. “I wanted to know all I could about who each of the figures were. I wanted to know what they discussed and debated. I wanted to know how and why they were chosen to represent their generation of young black leaders. I wanted to know why they met in Amenia. (After having visited Troutbeck during my research, I have a much better understanding of this.) Above all, I wanted to know how this event impacted the civil rights struggle.”Amenia wasn’t exactly unknown to the writer. His father, Garry Miller, grew up in Millerton and his grandfather, John C. Miller, still lives there.That the gathering was held at Troutbeck was due, certainly, to Spingarn’s participation. Additionally, W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the NAACP’s founders, long gravitated to conference locations near water. The first Niagara Conference in 1905 was held at Fort Erie Beach, Ontario, on Lake Erie but in Canada, for example, and the second was in Harper’s Ferry, W.Va., at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers.Du Bois saw water as a cleansing source, a source of fluidity, of change.The pond at Troutbeck, an old iron ore bed, fit the mold. Participants swam or boated there.The 30-some guests slept in seven large canvas tents installed on the lawn. Men and women came to the conference. Meals and informal gatherings were in the big house. Attendees came mostly by train. Du Bois drove, and brought two others with him.“Amid the gardens,” Miller writes, “stood the Spingarn home, a 28-room, slate-roofed, gray stone mansion. Through its heavy casement windows, opened invitingly onto the grounds, were exposed-beam ceilings and a library befitting the former Columbia University professor of comparative literature turned gentleman gardener [Spingarn]. Lining the shelves were volumes from the Italian Renaissance, works of the American transcendentalists, local histories tracing the origins of Troutbeck to the 1760s, botanical treatises and Joel Spingarn’s own published poetry.”‘Comes the revolution’Here assembled a handpicked group from what was considered the “Talented Ten,” the smartest, most determined, hardest working of the black race.The main agenda item was the relevancy, in those Great Depression years, of the NAACP’s original mission. As discussion ensued, it became clear a new generation — among them youth activist Juanita Jackson, diplomat Ralph Bunche, economics specialist Abram Harris, attorney Louis Redding and Harlem grass roots organizer Moran Weston — were hugely concerned with economic and hardship issues.Ever provocative, Du Bois, who in his book “The Souls of Black Folk” had decried the color line as prohibiting Negroes from the same opportunities as whites, now suggested segregation as a tool; blacks, for example, should patronize only black banks, or black merchants. The idea was not a popular one.President Franklin D. Roosevelt was hard at work launching his New Deal initiatives, which some considered socialistic. Marxism waved its ugly head, but held only modest attraction for wary African-Americans.Though one delegate, Miller relates, entered the Spingarn villa, stood in the library and blurted, “‘Comes the revolution, man.”As Miller notes, the remark made Du Bois and others wince, but brought out the irony that the civil rights movement had long relied “upon the largess of ennobled white benefactors, such as the Spingarns.” (Joel’s brother, Arthur, provided legal expertise to the NAACP.)A collective effortIt was a critical year for the NAACP. Du Bois, whose Crisis magazine was a major expense to publish, was increasingly at odds with the new executive director, Walter White. Within months of the conference, Du Bois resigned and returned to Atlanta University and Spingarn cut off his tenure as board chairman.The NAACP moved into new hands, embraced new ideas. Among the published findings, note was made that “the exploitation of black workers had become the most debilitating. The urge was to merge efforts with the white labor movement. “The key,” Miller said, “was to convince existing betterment organizations that ‘the welfare of white and black labor are one and inseparable.’”Miller in explaining this zeroes in on several participants.“I ended up writing mainly about five of the Amenia delegates,” the author said. “I chose to write a collective biography because I thought the form could best convey the collective effort involved in the civil rights struggle. “Writing about these five figures also allowed me to explore how the movement changed over the course of the early 20th century (including the development of an economic agenda), as well as to examine the crucial role local communities … played in the movement.“Significantly, the focus on the 1933 Amenia Conference also gave me the opportunity to emphasize the importance of the NAACP during this early era of the civil rights movement. In this way, the book is an institutional history, as well as a collective biography, and testifies to the critical involvement of civil rights organizations in the long movement for African American freedom.”Troutbeck notes on its website, “It was Spingarn who originally spoke the rallying words of a later charismatic African-American leader, ‘I have a dream … of a unified Negro population.’ ”
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Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton\u2019s Main Street in 1985.
Provided
For Hermans, the award has prompted some reflection about why he has spent so much of his life involved in community projects.
“I was thinking about it this morning: Why do I do what I do?” he said. “And I think no matter what I’ve done, whether it’s been school board or rail trail, I’m trying to be useful to the communities I’m associated with.”
Hermans is perhaps best known as the longtime co-founder and steward of Oblong Books in Millerton, a business that began almost by accident. He and his first wife, Holly Nelson, were living in Millerton and looking for something to do during the winter. They had been painting houses, including the Grange Hall in Millerton, a job Hermans got through his aunt, who belonged to the Grange.
At the time, Hermans was also working in insurance for his father, doing collections.
“It was fine except I was doing collections, and it really kind of left me cold,” he said.
He and Nelson began thinking about what they might do together. Nelson was an avid reader, while Hermans had studied journalism and had worked in a record store. They noticed a chain of book and record stores operating elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and decided to follow that model.
And so Oblong was born.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
“We really learned it by the seat of our pants,” Hermans said.
The business would eventually become a beloved and integral part of Millerton’s commercial life. But although Hermans may have learned the book business as he went, his affinity for retail — and for the connections that happen across a counter — had begun much earlier.
As a child, his second-grade teacher operated a little cardboard pencil shop in the classroom, and Hermans still remembers the satisfaction of selling a pencil for a nickel.
“I really liked selling somebody a pencil for a nickel,” he recalled. “I can remember that experience, and it was so pleasant.”
Later, while living in Arizona, he helped establish a food co-op and worked at the counter.
“I kind of knew that I liked doing that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a nice way to be pleasant with people, but without making too much commitment to them.”
His relationship with Millerton also predates Oblong. His grandparents lived in the village, and he first came to Millerton as a baby. Over the years, he has watched the town change through several generations.
He remembers a Millerton with a much broader array of businesses, when stores such as Delson’s, the Main Street department store that stood for nearly 40 years in what is now Millerton’s Antiques Center, seemed to carry almost everything a resident might need.
“You could find everything from a set of dishes to a shotgun,” he recalled.
The rise of shopping malls changed that kind of downtown retail, he said, but Millerton has remained a lively commercial village.
“For us, it’s been a great place to have business,” Hermans said. “It’s a busy village.”
For Hermans, running a store was never simply about selling books and records. It was a way of being part of a place.
Music has remained another constant. Hermans continues to sell music at Oblong and hosts the radio program “New Harmony” on WKZE. The business of selling music has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with the rise of streaming, but Hermans has adapted.
He was initially reluctant to bring vinyl records back into the store because of their expense. But about four or five years ago, he began stocking LPs again, and they have become the main form of music the store sells.
He finds that many of the customers buying them are reconnecting with music they loved years ago.
“I do best with classic albums that people may have had when they were young,” he said. “And now that they’re retired, they want to hear it again.”
Hermans still reviews between 700 and 1,200 new music releases each week through the store’s distributor, Alliance Entertainment, carefully deciding what belongs on Oblong’s shelves.
That same commitment to place has led Hermans into a wide range of community projects. His work with the Harlem Valley Rail Trail is among the efforts he mentions when reflecting on his years of civic involvement. He has also served on the school board and has been involved with the Millerton Business Alliance and the Irondale Schoolhouse. He is now involved with The New Pine Plains Herald, which he sees as complementary to the work of The Millerton News and The Lakeville Journal.
“I really think that the important thing about this award is that people understand what a newspaper does to connect them to their community,” he said. “And if that means anything to their lives, they gotta support it.”
Hermans knew Mary Lou and Robert Estabrook and remembers them as people who were deeply conscious of their responsibilities to the community.
“They were really nice folks,” he said. “They were very conscious of what their role in the community was.”
There is, in fact, still plenty on his plate. Hermans admits he needs to scale back because he has taken on more than his current abilities can comfortably accommodate.
“To be given this award is very special,” he added. “But I don’t feel like I’m done.”
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Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Janna Siller
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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