Pearl Lee

In this rich and memory‑filled episode of We Be Griots, host Esi Lewis — executive director of the Dr. Margaret Wade Lewis Center for Black History and Culture — sits down with Pearl Lee, a beloved elder, educator, and longtime member of the New Paltz community whose life story spans the rural South, the early years of school desegregation, and more than half a century of local history.

"Nana Pearl" traces her journey from her childhood in Georgia — a world of segregated schools, well water, wood‑fired stoves, and tight‑knit family Sundays — to the moment she answered a newspaper ad that brought her north in 1964, just as the Civil Rights Act was reshaping the country. She recounts arriving in New Paltz as the district’s first Black teacher, navigating a new landscape with openness and humor, and finding a community that accepted her "as an individual."

Across the conversation, she reflects on teaching health and physical education, coaching three sports every year, raising her children in the district, and witnessing the evolution of New Paltz from a small farm town to a more diverse — and sometimes more complicated — place. She shares vivid stories of early Main Street, apple pickers from the South, and the deep neighborliness that defined the town in the 1960s and ’70s.

Nana Pearl also reflects on the legacy of Dr. Margaret Wade Lewis, their years as neighbors and “sisters in everything,” and the intertwined lives of their families — from bowling leagues and gymnastics lessons to shared celebrations and shared exhaustion. The episode moves gently between personal history and collective memory, touching on military service, motherhood, community care, and the generational distance between those who lived segregation and those who can hardly imagine it.

What emerges is a portrait of a woman whose life bridges eras: from the segregated South to integrated classrooms, from potbelly stoves to modern New Paltz, from oral tradition to recorded history. Through her stories, Nana Pearl reminds us why preserving local Black history matters — and why these conversations must continue.