Sara Berenson Stone, New Orleans philanthropist and civic activist, dies at 102
Apr 27, 2018She was 102.Stone grew up in Bogalusa, the child of Russian immigrants. Her father had fled the city of Bialystok after a violent pogrom there in which mobs and czarist army troops went from house to house, killing Jews.“He had to fight his way out of the city and battle to help family and friends who were under assault,” said her son, Harvey Stone.Sara Stone’s community involvement stemmed from a lifetime of watching her parents help others, her son said: “Her father led every fund drive in Bogalusa and went out of his way to help poor people, whether black or white.”In an oral history conducted in 2008 for the Jewish Women’s Archive of the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, Sara Stone recalled her father helping some black women pay for their children’s college education. She also remembered how, even as a child, black people were taught to step off the sidewalk to let her pass because she was white. That “really bothered me a lot,” she said.After graduating from Duke University, she enrolled in the Tulane University School of Social Work for a semester. As a graduate student, she worked with poor families in the French Quarter, then a rundown part of town.During the oral-history interview, she recalled asking families to make a choice between receiving a blanket or coal to heat their apartment. “To this day, I wake up in the middle of the night wondering which one I would have taken if I had to choose,” she said.She left Tulane, against the advice of the dean, to take an apprenticeship with the Southern Women’s Educational Alliance in Richmond, Virginia. As part of that apprenticeship, she spent time in poverty-stricken Breathitt County, Kentucky, providing vocational guidance to high school students and working with teachers who had no college experience.Afterward, she moved back to New Orleans and in the mid-1930s met lawyer Saul Stone, who with John Minor Wisdom had founded Stone and Wisdom, the firm that would become today's Stone Pigman Walt... (The Advocate)
