Education Activist Lilian Popp Way (Staten Island)
Present name:None
Location: At the southeast corner of Wall Street and Belmont Place
Honoree: Lilian Popp influenced the lives of countless students in her teaching career. Born in Brooklyn, she later relocated to Port Richmond. She began teaching at McKee Vocational and Technical High School, where she was chair of academic studies, before going on to become principal of William Howard Taft High School in the Bronx. In 1970, she interviewed for a principal's position at Susan Wagner High School, but was turned down because, she was told, they didn't want a female principal. She later became Staten Island's Community School Board president, lobbying for more female principals in the 1980’s. She was president of the Committee for a Nuclear Free Island; vice president of Staten Islanders Against Nuclear Weapons; founder and president of the Coalition of Staten Island Women's Organizations; and sat on the board of directors of the Staten Island Mental Health Society. She organized protest marches along Bay Street, and took her anti-nuke campaign to Washington and Newark. She also launched a student-run escort service, where students accompanied seniors to grocery stores and doctors' offices, and an early teen pregnancy program at Taft. Ms. Popp compiled five anthologies of literature, and edited three books. However, her first published work was a letter to the editor of the Staten Island Advance at the height of World War II. In the 1945 letter, she took the minority view, protesting discrimination against a ''negro nurse.'' Ms. Popp died in 2017 at the age of 99. (Rose)
LL:2017/237