We are so proud to have had Ellie Greenberg serve as Social Science Chair on The Academy’s Curriculum Committee. Ellie has brought us Academy classics like “All Rise! Our Courts” and Steve Bernard’s courses over the past three years.
A life of learning and social change
Ellie Greenberg in The Villager
Centennial’s Ellie Greenberg helped organize Martin Luther King’s visit to Littleton in 1964. Photos by Peter Jones
At 82, Centennial’s Ellie Greenberg isn’t done yet
BY PETER JONES
STAFF WRITER
Elinor Greenberg – known as Ellie to her friends – was a strange neighbor when her family built a house in what was then greater Littleton in the late 1950s.
Having received her master’s degree in speech pathology in 1954, she was on the faculties of the University of Colorado and Loretto Heights College at a time when many women were attending the June Cleaver school of stay-at-home moms.
Greenberg and her late husband Manny were also Democrats during a period when the south suburbs were strongly dominated by Republicans.
What’s more, the Greenbergs were outspoken civil-rights activists, even as segregation and white flight to the suburbs were playing out in Arapahoe County.
Last but not least, the family was Jewish.
“One of my motivations for moving out here is I wanted my children to grow up knowing what it is like to be a minority,” Greenberg said. “I felt that was a much better preparation for life.”
As the mother of three continued her career and education for decades, eventually receiving her doctorate in 1981, Greenberg found time to take a leadership role in Littleton’s small, but passionate, civil-rights movement, eventually welcoming an unlikely visit from Martin Luther King Jr.
“My career was in higher education, but it was about creating access to opportunity,” Greenberg said.
Decades later, the activist-educator would travel to Germany’s Dachau concentration camp as part of a high-profile delegation that would be the basis for a local television documentary called Journey for Justice.
Over the years, Greenberg would author nine books, including 2008’s critically popular A Time of Our Own: In Celebration of Women Over Sixty….
Full article here
Ellie Greenberg in The Villager