I caught up the other day with Linda LeMura, who spoke to me by phone while she was visiting Manhattan. The president of Le Moyne College was in New York City for the annual “Le Moyne in New York” celebration, which honored college trustees Chris Curtis and Jeanette Epps. The timing of the g athering was particularly appropriate: Epps, a graduate of both Corcoran High and Le Moyne, recently retired from NASA, where she became the second Black woman astronaut in American history to take part in a long-duration International Space Station mission. The event fell within hours of the launch of Artemis II, the four-person space flight that will soon loop the moon — representing the first NASA journey since 1972 to send human beings into deep space. Epps, LeMura said, spoke of one overwhelming impression when you look down from space on the Earth — on its beauty, as well as its fragility. Globally and personally, our hope lies in being kind to one another. “I was in tears,” said LeMura, who became especially emotional when Epps displayed a photo of her late mother, Luberta Epps, and described that profound maternal influence. Luberta helped kindle a passion for aerospace engineering that carried Epps from a childhood on West Kennedy Street into a career as a history-making astronaut. As Epps paid that tribute to her mom, LeMura immediately thought of the similarities to her own mother, Maria Cannova LeMura, who died a year ago this month, at 97. That makes this Easter weekend, always Maria’s favorite time of the year, an especially difficult moment for LeMura — though Maria’s triumphant American story is exactly why I called, for reasons LeMura said she is feeling as well. Last week, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to uphold a 2025 executive order that contends the Constitutional right to birthright citizenship, offered in the 14th amendment, is not truly a sweeping and bedrock Constitutional right for almost any child born in this nation — but instead should exclude infants born here when, say, ”that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary.” Meaning, if you turned the core logic of that argument toward national history, that LeMura’s mother — who was as fierce a believer in the ideals of our national experiment as anyone her daughter ever met — was actually not even an American at all. “If you credit the government’s theory, the citizenship of millions of Americans past, present and future could be called into question,” ACLU lawyer Amy Wang contended before the court. D. John Sauer, the solicitor general who laid out the government’s case, argued: “We’re in a new world now,” meaning the presidential action was about the present and future, based on changing trends. Le Moyne College president Linda LeMura. Credit: Courtesy Le Moyne College To LeMura, the fundamental argument comes painfully close to questioning the American bonafides of her own family story, at least emotionally — not to mention the narratives of many other children born to immigrant families all around her as she was growing up, families that often made similar decisions involving great sacrifice. “I think it runs counter to the strength of this country,” LeMura said of the presidential attack on birthright citizenship, as it’s been understood for so many years. “I think it runs counter to everything we stand for.” I’ve known LeMura for a long time. In our conversation last week, we talked about how my own mother also came from a family of immigrants, in my case Scottish. My grandparents, too, had yet to become citizens when my mom was born in Buffalo, a detail verified for this piece by genealogist Megan Smolenyak. As Maria LeMura did for her children, my mother — raised by immigrant siblings and relatives who offered a burning appreciation for their new home — played a giant role in teaching all of her kids to love and revere the principles of equality and fraternity and opportunity upon which she believed this nation is built. Yet LeMura’s situation is particularly close to exactly what is being challenged in the wording of that executive order, before the court. LeMura first told told me her family story more than a decade ago, when I was working as a columnist for Syracuse.com and she had recently been named Le Moyne’s president. To me, then and now, it was a moving and keenly American tale. For the last five years, I’ve taught journalism and storytelling at Le Moyne, in addition to writing columns, and I remember that extraordinary family journey every time I see LeMura at events around campus. Her grandparents ran a grocery store in the Sicilian community of Linguaglossa, near Mount Etna. Many struggling people, she said, left that town to seek work in this country, with Syracuse as a particularly favorite local destination. LeMura’s grandmother, Giovanna Pavone Cannavo — yes, she was related to the Syracuse family renowned for its pizza — understood that pull, but did not want to permanently move away from her hometown. Instead, every time she became pregnant, she and her husband would cobble together the money so that Giovanna could travel to America to give birth here, while her husband would take whatever temporary work he could find in New York City. The couple had five children. They would make the trip for every birth, guaranteeing the kids were all born as American citizens, and then return to Sicily. Today, detractors call that “birth tourism.” LeMura describes it as something else, a difficult family odyssey built on the mystical and spiritual belief in the potential offered in this nation, the same ideal that has attracted millions upon millions of immigrants since the U.S. was born, 250 years ago. “There was no opportunity in Sicily,” LeMura said. The hope was that Giovanna’s children could — if they so chose — use their citizenship to eventually go to America to be educated, to learn and grow and find a skilled career, and then either carry those skills back to Linguaglossa or forge a new way on their own, in a new nation. Only one of the children actually decided, upon growing older, to settle in this country: Maria, who came to Syracuse as a young woman with her husband, Egidio LeMura, after their first two children were born in Sicily. The quest for opportunity brought them to Central New York, though Egidio, a gifted carpenter, always dreamed of returning to Linguaglossa. Maria, who fully embraced being American, had no intention of going back. She considered herself a full American by birth, and this city was her home. She gave birth to four more kids — including LeMura — in Syracuse, where the couple became stalwarts of neighborhood life on the heavily Italian-American North Side, doing whatever they could to assist their fellow immigrants. So yes: LeMura sees her own story in the many immigrant students you now find at Le Moyne, students whose extraordinary diligence and passion I’ve often experienced in my own classrooms. At commencement every May, seeing the joy of those students as they walk the stage, LeMura said she always thinks: That is us. Maria Cannavo LeMura prays by a statue of St. Egidio at Our Lady of Pompei. He is the patron saint of Linguaglossa, the home community of her parents. Her father was named for the saint. Credit: Courtesy Le Moyne College The campus welcome for immigrants “is no accident,” LeMura said. She has deep appreciation for their struggle, perspective and reverence for learning — qualities she described as a major factor in lifting up this nation. “Give people breathing room, and look what they do,” LeMura said, a belief built upon her family’s journey, and reinforced countless times. She knows — based on her own memories, as well as the stories she heard from her parents and grandparents — how the insults and sweeping suspicions often used against immigrants today were once routinely hurled against immigrants from Italy, at a time in American history “when they treated us like dogs,” LeMura said. Not so long ago, LeMura said, plenty of Americans would have been happy to see such newcomers as her parents pack up and go away. None of that abuse shook her mother’s faith in the highest ideals of this nation — and the unshakeable belief they were there for everyone. Her mom, she said, had an “unrelenting aspiration, a relentless aspiration, for education.” Sicilian was the first language in their home when LeMura was a small child, and she remembers her mother carrying her to receive English lessons from kind tutors at the CYO building on North Salina Street… The same building where Catholic Charities now provides similar services for 21st century immigrants. LeMura said her dad was hired at the old Marsellus Casket — Egidio LeMura was part of the crew that prepared a casket for President John F. Kennedy, after his assassination in 1963 — and later worked for years at Crucible Steel. Her mother, told at first that she should do backbreaking toil in Canastota onion fields, would instead settle with her husband in Syracuse — where she worked for decades for the county health department, while her house provided respite for other families, newly arrived from Sicily. Asked about the influence her mom had on her own career, LeMura offered a one-word response: “Everything,” she said. Her mother, she recalls, instilled in her — and all her siblings — the idea that an American education is a rare privilege, a gift. While Maria LeMura was born in 1927, an era when many women didn’t go to college, LeMura said every one of Maria’s kids grew up conscious of one constant theme inside their house: Higher education was the only option. Maria was tough as nails, LeMura said. She expected high achievement from her children, and she often told her daughters: “Don’t ever let yourself get depressed over a man.” The family image that Le Moyne President Linda LeMura keeps on her coffee table: l to r, siblings Linda, Joanne, Joe, Lena, Armand and Lisa. Their mom, Maria, is at center. Credit: Courtesy Linda LeMura To do so, Maria said bluntly, was “stupid.” Focus on learning, and all the other good things in life would come to you. This month — the one-year anniversary of Maria’s passing — is so hard “that I can barely catch my breath,” LeMura said. Easter, the light and warmth and revelation of it, was always her mother’s most beloved holiday, a time of year deeply intertwined with hope. LeMura has vivid memories of standing in her mom’s kitchen and helping roll out delicate Easter pastries, one by one, on the table. On Easter morning they’d go to church at Our Lady of Pompei, a short walk from the house on North Townsend Street that to her mother became the living center of a dream, a home in a nation that she saw as a place of no limits for her children… A door that opened in the instant she became a citizen, by birth. “Knowledge was holy and sacred and liberated you for the opportunities your parents didn’t get,” LeMura said. “That’s America. I eat, drink and sleep these emotions.” What is happening now — these jammed detention centers, families torn apart, this whole furious blowback against people who for the most part, LeMura contends, simply share the same aching belief that led her own grandparents to make five hard and distant journeys — represents a wave of “fear and hubris and myopic short-term thinking” that she sees as contrary to everything she was taught to love and believe about this country, and her conclusion is a simple one. If that thinking triumphs, LeMura said: “We’re lost.” The post Sean Kirst: ‘Birthright citizenship’ was family ignition that helped create a Le Moyne College president appeared first on Central Current. ...read more read less