MEMORIES OF YESTERDAYS All of mich I Saw and Pent of mioh I Tas An Autobiography by Maritcha Remoria Lyons Asistent Fringighl retired Public School mod 83 Brooklyn N Y wide
3 Xs Preface blot out some words Information gaps and blanks bewilder Patches of faint typescript and streaky spotted pages microfilm printout strain the eye But I was too intrigued to stop reading Maritcha Remond Lyons's memoir Memories of Yesterdays All of which I Saw and Part of which I Was Maritcha saw her memoir as an expression of the very tender regard in which I hold my father Her father Albro Lyons had often urged I want you to write a book I tried to do this myself but never got further than the selection of a title The Gentleman in Black In honoring her father's wishes Maritcha rummaged through decades of memories and keepsakes She sorted through the vast output of fugitive scraps of family history that have been gathering for years After I finished Maritcha's memoir I dreamed of telling her story Doing so would require a fair amount of detective work dots to connect facts to ferret out because the memoir she never lived to revise and complete is the main source of information about her But the challenge seemed absolutely worth while because Maritcha merits remembrance Born free in a nation stained by slavery where free blacks had few rights and rare respect here was a girl determined to rise to amount to something determined to overcome Opposite page Cover page of Maritcha Remond Lyons's memoir dated 1928 the year before she died
5 Aim hioh Stand tall Be strono and do These ideals were sown in the soul of young Maritcha Rémond Lyons a child of New York City's striving class of blacks in the mid 1800s These people had ambitions for their offspring took ventures made sacrifices much after the fashion of other Americans Maritcha remembered Not all of them commonly called colored at the time had suffered enslavement Slavery never as thick in the North as in the South had ended in New York State in 1827 Above This photograph of Maritcha was taken around 1860
