A year ago this past week, lifelong Southold resident Eleanor Lingo led up the first-ever Juneteenth parade through downtown Greenport as a Grand Marshal, along with her husband O.D. and numerous elders in the North Fork’s African American community.
Pictured Above: O.D. and Eleanor Lingo at the 2024 Juneteenth celebration in Greenport.
This year, Ms. Lingo, a longtime central figure on the Southold Anti-Bias Task Force, was deeply involved again with the planning of Greenport’s second annual Juneteenth celebration, to be held this Saturday.
She passed away on Sunday, June 22 at the age of 99, leaving a hole in the hearts of many who’ve long worked for social justice on the North Fork.
Members of the Southold Anti-Bias Task Force led a moment of silence honoring their friend and mentor at the Southold Town Board’s June 24 meeting.
“Eleanor Lingo served on the Southold Anti-Bias Task Force for over 15 years as a co-president and as a member,” said Current Co-Chair Sylvia Daley. “For over a decade and a half, Ellie, as she was lovingly called, was instrumental in planning and executing the ABTF annual picnic and other community activities. She worked tirelessly to keep a bias-free community. Eleanor Lingo will be sadly missed by her husband O.D., her family, her friends, her colleagues on the task force, and the Southold community. Sleep in power, Eleanor.”
“At all our events, Ellie sat at the door and welcomed people and handed out our program,” said ABTF Co-Chair Emily Geiger. “At our last event, which was Martin Luther King in January, she handed out the last program to a couple that came through. And the people just behind that couple came in and said, ‘Well, you’ve run out of programs. What are we supposed to do now?’ And she looked at them and said, ‘Well, what you do now is what we do, you’ll share.’ That was Ellie. We’re going to miss her very much.”
“She was my mentor,” said former ABTF Chair Valerie Shelby. “She would tell me all the things that I should do, and that I shouldn’t do. And she would hold me to task that I’d better do what she says. She was a very personable lady. I’m just gonna truly miss her — her grace, her elegance.”
“She was the one who told me about the Helen Prince journal and said that something has to be done,” said ABTF member Leroy Heyliger.
Mr. Heyliger has since worked for years on the annual Helen Wright Prince Award, honoring educators who uphold the spirit of Ms. Prince, who taught for years in the mid-20th Century in a school at a migrant labor camp in Cutchogue.
“She was the first person that I met on the board, and she encouraged me,” he said. “This has come as a shock to me, to all of us, for we loved her, and we sought her guidance, and we’re going to miss her.”
“Ellie was our elder. Imagine 100 years,” said ABTF member Sonia Spar. “She was the first person who really advocated to not leave any member of our community invisible. She began to really advocate to see the enslaved people and understand and recognize or history. She was a person that, despite everything that she’d seen in 100 years — all the infighting, all the hatred — she was very calm, because she knew that from fighting, from screaming at each other, from name calling, we get nothing. She knew that you need to be able to sit down at a table and have a conversation and work out disagreements.”
“We’re missing a huge leader, a trailblazer in our community, an advocate for justice for all, a person that we will continue to hold the torch for,” she added. “She was planning on the Juneteenth parade. She was planning on the Anti Bias Community Picnic.”
“She never let her age stop her from doing anything, unlike us,” added Ms. Shelby.
Ms. Lingo, whose family spanned generations back to the first African American residents of Southold, graduated from Southold High School in 1944, after which she had worked at F.W. Woolworth in Connecticut as the first woman of color on the company’s sales floor, according to the biography accompanying her 2017 award as Suffolk County Senior Citizen of the Year. She returned to Southold in 1954 and became the first woman of color working in the business office of Eastern Long Island Hospital.
In addition to her work with the Anti-Bias Task Force, she was a volunteer at CAST and was active with the town’s Senior Services program.
Since 1954, she had every year placed flowers at at a gravesite identified only with the words “Negro slave lady” at the cemetery of Southold’s First Presbyterian Church.
“My classmates got along lovely. We didn’t know color. We were kids. We got along and loved one another,” Ms. Lingo had reminisced about her childhood in Southold with The Beacon while waiting in the lineup at the start of last year’s Juneteenth celebration.
Her comments echoed the fundamentals of Dr. King’s dream and of the Civil Rights movement, which continue to hold true as new generations carry the torch for equality.
At this year’s Juneteenth celebration, with the theme of “Having Their Say: What Freedom, Equality and Justice Means to Them,” kids will lead the way.
Ms. Lingo’s family will receive friends at Friendship Baptist Church in Flanders on Friday, June 27 from 6 to 8 p.m. Services will follow at the church on Saturday, June 28 beginning at 10 a.m., followed by interment at Calverton National Cemetery.
This year’s Anti-Bias Task Force Community Picnic will be held on Saturday, Aug. 9 from noon to 4 p.m. at the Peconic Community Center at 1170 Peconic Lane.
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