Amongst a month of other events, there will be a bilingual flash-mob performance of “Un Violador en Tu Camino” (“A Rapist on Your Path”) in front of the Ulster County Courthouse. This choreographed protest chant originated in Chile and has gone viral.
Saturday, Feb. 29: Big Black: Stand at Attica by Frank “Big Black” Smith, Jared Reinmuth and art by Améziane, is the memoir of Frank Smith, a prisoner-negotiator during the Attica prison revolt.
Saturday, Feb. 22: This year’s Sojourner Truth Life Walk goes from Port Ewen to Kingston, and you can catch the bus from Dietz Stadium. The Hudson Valley heroine’s image is being added to a 15-foot-tall bronze statue planned for Central Park that includes Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. A statue of Truth by herself is soon to be erected near the Highland entrance to Walkway over the Hudson. The sculptors creating both – Meredith Bergmann and Vinnie Bagwell, respectively – will give a joint slide presentation and talk.
For the first 20 years, she remained the only black female judge in the country – a fact that she said “embarrassed” her.
Back in December, 1905, when Kingston still got its water from the Zena reservoirs and Cooper Lake was twinkling in the city’s eye, Oscar Harrison was murdered near the water supply. An African American man, Cornell Van Gaasbeek, in whose house the body was found, was charged with the crime and tried in Ulster County Court. He was defended by a local reformer, part politician Augustus H. Van Buren, as the trial unfolded amid the charged racial climate of the early 20th Century.
The ‘‘Our town’’ column is compiled each month for the New Paltz Times by Carol Johnson, coordinator of the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection. The entries have been copied from the February issues of the New Paltz Independent.
Opening Saturday, Feb. 8: She accompanied a convoy of ships carrying nearly a thousand Holocaust refugees from Naples to New York, where they would live until the end of the war at an Army camp in Oswego.
For her senior research project, Jaimie Kaefer, a December 2019 graduate of the SUNY New Paltz Environmental Geochemical Science program, used wood samples from a recently demolished house adjacent to the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail between Rosendale and Kingston to determine the age of the structure.
When it opened in 1932, inmates at Wallkill Correctional Facility lived in four housing wings, each containing 42 cells, with bathrooms and recreation rooms on each wing, much like a college dormitory. They were allowed to keep the keys to their own rooms.
Millipedelike creatures called myriapods likely shared this forest ecosystem, but dinosaurs would not begin to evolve for another 140 million years.