Hazel Ingram made headlines last year after working 60-plus years at New York’s Douglas Elliman offices on Madison Avenue as a cleaner. Ms. Ingram is back in the news again after she was named as part of New York’s Electoral College body in this year’s presidential election.
Ingram, 93, was named an elector earlier this year by the Working Families Party. She intends to cast one of the state’s 29 votes in favor of Hillary Clinton, stating in a New York Times profile that Republican opponent Donald Trump is not qualified nor classy enough to hold the Oval Office.
Ingram, a native of Georgia, was born in 1923 and is the granddaughter of a former slave. Her grandmother lived to be 108. After arriving in New York at the age of 20, she worked over 50 years in a Brooklyn shoe factory and worked the cleaning job in Manhattan at night. After marrying and having six children, Ingram ultimately raised her them alone after separating from her husband.
She remembers that her parents and grandparents couldn’t vote, thus the selection for the Electoral College vote is both poignant and bittersweet. Although she has always been active in politics, volunteering on campaigns from John F. Kennedy to the present, Ingram didn’t fully grasp the power of her vote and how it will determine this year’s presidential outcome, but she’s prepared to learn all she can about the process. She’s the group’s oldest dues-paying member of the SEIU’s Local 32BJ union chapter. Her hard work over the years has paid off as Ingram owns homes in the Poconos and Brooklyn.
Ingram credits her good health to eating fresh vegetables, cornbread and pork chops. She has no intentions of retiring from her cleaning post anytime soon.
PHOTO: Wall Street Journal Screenshot
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Little Known Black History Fact: Hazel Ingram was originally published on blackamericaweb.com
