Photo: Yael Malka/Copyrighted When we arrive at the Heights Casino, an old-school racquet club in Brooklyn, Grace Faison instructs me to carry her walker up the stairs. Small in stature, she is dressed in slacks and a gray cashmere sweater, her silver hair pulled back from her face in a barrette — her cute-little-old-lady appearance belies her steeliness. When I return, I take her black-leather-gloved hand in mine and help her up the stairs.
Faison only began sharing this secret history because of the looming Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, concerning a Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy — a direct challenge to the federal right to an abortion promised in Roe.
Photo: Yael Malka “I’ve lived being flat-ass broke, and it isn’t easy,” she says in a low voice that is, at turns, imperious and playful. In 1969, she got a chance to do something more to help women. By then, she’d struck up a close friendship with Plymouth’s minister, Harry Kruener. They were an unlikely pair. She had a closet full of St. John. He wore thrift-store clothes. Faison listened to classical music. Kruener listened to jazz. “He dressed like a bag man,” she tells me, “but he was one of the most interesting men you can imagine.” Every Wednesday, they went to see a matinee and go for a hamburger.
In a 1973 memoir about the creation of the CCS, Abortion Counseling and Social Change, Moody and Arlene Carmen explain that the clergy were comfortable with what they saw as a minor form of civil disobedience because they knew that doctors and law enforcement were already happy to bend the law for wealthy women.
For several months in late 1969 and into early 1970, after her daughter had left for college, Kruener called Faison each week to tell her how many women to expect — sometimes zero, sometimes two or three. He gave the women instructions. When they arrived, the doorman sent them up.
…mutual aid was the catalyst for social work…