A Quote by James Gray
My grandparents, they came through Ellis Island in 1923, and you know, I'd heard all the stories.
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I know very little about my great grandparents, who came through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, settled in Baltimore, and spoke only Yiddish.
My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.
I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.
Your grandparents did not endure the indignities of a steerage journey to Ellis Island so that you could stand outside a discothèque and beg a wallpaper designer to take you in with him.
The Islamic community today is faced with a new version of an old struggle. My late mother used to say it doesn't matter whether you came to this country on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, through Ellis Island or the Rio Grande. We're all in the same boat now.
Our old stories happen to be your new stories. The stories that you're seeing as immigrant stories are your grandparents' stories, are your great-grandparents' stories. You just happen to be separated from them a little bit.
I always remember to go on the Staten Island Ferry because it's the most amazing view of New York. And it's free! You see Ellis Island, and it conjures up something of that great moment: you know, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It's staggering.
Whether our ancestors came here on the Mayflower, on slave ships, whether they came to Ellis Island or LAX in Los Angeles, whether they came yesterday or walked this land a thousand years ago our great challenge for the 21st century is to find a way to be One America. We can meet all the other challenges if we can go forward as One America.
I know from the stories of my grandparents and great-grandparents the real struggles and discrimination that Italian Americans faced when they first immigrated to America.
I am the byproduct of an Ellis Island orgy, basically. I'm everything. I've got quite a mixture in me. I know a lot of it and I don't know some of it. I'm pretty mixed up, but mostly Russian and Irish.
Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.
All of my grandparents came to the United States from Italy during the early years of the 20th century. I believe that my grandparents came here to take advantage of the opportunities furnished by a growing country with an open society.
No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island.
I love Topsail Island, which my grandparents helped settle in 1950, despite the racial tensions. I wanted to immortalize my deep connection to this special island forever.
When they got here, when they successfully emigrated - and not everybody that came through Ellis Island was accepted. If you were sick you were not allowed in. If you had any kind of a disease, we were in the process of trying to wipe out all these diseases. We did that by keeping people who had them out of the country. You might look at it today as, "Wow, that was really mean." No. It was putting America first. It was putting the American people first, and it was a realization that we can't take everybody.
We must not forget that these men and women who file through the narrow gates at Ellis Island, hopeful, confused, with bundles of misconceptions as heavy as the great sacks upon their backs these simple, rough-handed people are the ancestors of our descendants, the fathers and mothers of our children.
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