STEADFASTNESS
for a woman with a lifetime of achievement:
Mary Robinson
When she was 16 Mary Wright Sullivan Robinson graduated as Valedictorian from her high school. She was awarded an academic scholarship to college but World War II and family considerations prevented her from attending. After years of work in a male-dominated field, she was one of the first three women to become a registered stockbroker in the State of Tennessee. She retired in 1987 after 20 years as a pioneer in that profession.
Mary was in the forefront of women’s progress through her efforts for job banks, WAGES, the Chamber of Commerce, the YWCDA, the Girls Club, NOW, the Black White Social Group, and Republican Career Women. She was a founder and first president of the Women’s Resources Center, which in turn gave birth to two pivotal groups for Memphis women — the Spouse Abuse Center and the Rape Crisis Center. She also is a founding member of Network. In 1975 she received the National Conference of Christian and Jews first Women’s Rights Award.
Known as the “founding mother of women’s liberation in Memphis,” she has worked on behalf of the personal and professional advancement of women for so long that many are unaware that she paved the way to our acceptance. She has also been active in environmental issues and in the Civil Rights movement. Equally important as her public endeavors are her private ones. Countless women point to Mary as their role model, mentor, advisor, counselor, motivator, door opener and friend. She has shown others that they are special and capable of great accomplishment. Her example of commitment, hard work, generosity and courage inspired women to lives of public leadership and private independence and security.
From Mary Robinson’s steadfast example many have learned that respect and tolerance for all people, and the determination and courage to act on one’s beliefs, can enable us each to become a “woman of achievement.”
INITIATIVE
for a woman who seized the
opportunity to use her talents and created her own future:
Thom Thi Bach
In 1977 Thom Thi Bach left Vietnam in a boat. She fled her country with 10 children, one of whom was only 12 months old. After four days and nights in a boat, the family landed in Malaysia where they spent seven long months in a refugee camp. At the camp, U.S. Catholic Charities found her and helped her come to the United States in 1978. Her husband could not get out of Vietnam; he died there several years later.
In Saigon she had been a professional egg roll maker, a skill she was taught by her mother. As she searched for a way to support her family in Memphis, she seized upon those homemade Vietnamese egg rolls and proceeded to turn them out in her kitchen.
The Health Department twice declared the egg rolls illegal, however, on technical grounds. Thom Bach, still struggling to comprehend English, sat through hearings on her right to make egg rolls and said to a reporter at one point: “I ask you where you get license for Vietnamese egg rolls, but nobody can tell me.” Finally, Health officials ruled that she could make her egg rolls in any commercial kitchen, but not at home, and she began to make them in local restaurants.
In 1982 she opened the Indochina Care at 2146 Young Street, specializing in Vietnamese food, including the egg rolls. She operates the restaurant with the help of her children — the older ones waiting tables and doing homework between orders, and younger ones playing on the floor behind the counter.
Necessity — to flee Communism and to seek a better future — made her family into “boat people. Initiative — the determination to make a good life — made her a Memphis businesswoman, restaurant owner and, above all else, an independent woman.
Following a fire in 1990, Thom relocated and opened Minh Chau Asian Foods at 1324 Madison. She continues to work to help friends and relatives leave refugee camps to start new lives
HEROISM
for a woman whose heroic spirit was tested and
shown as a model to all in Shelby County and beyond:
Nancy Hastings-Sehested
Despite the repeated refusal of the 14.6 million-member Southern Baptist Convention to approve the elevation of female ministers to the pastorate, Rev. Nancy Hastings Sehested continued to seek just such a role.
When finally asked to serve as pastor of Prescott Memorial Baptist Church in Memphis, she defended her commitment before a conference of the all-male Shelby County Baptist Association. She was expelled from its “fellowship.”
The 36-year-old Southern Baptist minister — and daughter and granddaughter of Southern Baptist ministers — was told by the Association that only men could preach the gospel. Rev. Sehested said, “What the Association told the world is that God can do all things except call a woman to preach. In my mind, it was an issue of the freedom of the Holy Spirit. And what the Association said was, ‘No.’”
More than 450 Southern Baptist women are ordained for the ministry, but only 11 serve as pastors or co-pastors. Prescott became the largest Southern Baptist Church headed by a woman and the first in Tennessee. Supportive letters and telegrams poured in from all over the country.
Nancy’s became one of THE stories in the United States in 1987. Major newspapers published stories about the dispute. More recently, she was featured in Bill Moyers’ documentary examining the denomination’s policies and politics.
Through it all, Nancy Sehested stood firm in her calling, in her commitment, in her right to serve her God. As one nominator wrote, she is a heroic example for today’s youth — and their parents also.
By early 1994, Nancy said, about 900 Southern Baptist women were ordained and 25 were serving as pastors or co-pastors. Most of them were serving tiny churches.
Nancy Hastings Sehested is now co-pastor of Circle of Mercy Congregation in Asheville, North Carolina.
HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:
Julia B. Hooks
The life of Julia B. Hooks spanned 90 years and encompassed much of the history of the United States. Julia was born free in 1842, the daughter of a former slave. Her mother, Laura, was the daughter of Captain Thomas F. Marshall of Kentucky and his slave. Laura had been given her freedom when she married a man who was free.
Julia also was a musical prodigy, accompanying her mother in vocal concerts on the piano at the age of six.
It was the experience of traveling with her mother to perform that made Julia aware of the importance of color in the thinking of Americans. While her mother and older sister Mary were quite fair, she was copper-skinned like her father. Sometimes on trains heading to engagements Julia and her mother were mistaken for a mistress and little slave. The impression this made on the child never left her as an adult.
After the Civil War Julia’s family moved to Berea, Kentucky so that the children could receive an education at the integrated Berea College. After three years of college, during the last year of which Julia taught music to other students, black and white, she left to go to Mississippi. At that time in the history of the United States, Reconstruction brought new equality, and indeed in Mississippi, dominance by the numerically superior blacks. It offered exciting opportunities for the young teacher, including working in Blanche Bruce’s successful campaign for U.S. Senator. Reconstruction’s changes were short-lived, however, so Julia moved to Memphis in 1876.
Julia’s life in Memphis was centered on children, civil rights, and music. She taught in the public schools, but finding them to be inadequate, started her own private Hooks Cottage School. Jim Crow laws were steadily eroding the gains made by the Civil War, but Julia, educated beyond most women of her time, refused to accept the new restrictions on the rights of blacks. Time after time, she entered a theater only to be ejected because she was sitting in the “white folks” section.
Julia persisted in trying to achieve civil rights for all people. Her grandson, Benjamin Hooks, former president of the NAACP, is an example of the extent of her influence into the present day.
Among other civic activities, Julia and her husband Charles helped raise funds to establish a much-needed Colored Orphans and Old Folks Homes. Julia organized the Liszt Millard Club to provide a musical opportunity for blacks in a segregated world. She operated her own music school. She taught harmony to one student who would become famous, W.C. Handy. She was called “the angel of Beale Street” by Lt. George W. Lee because of her selfless work on behalf of the poor. Along with her husband, Julia administered the first juvenile detention home in the city for black youths. Even when Charles Hooks was shot and killed by one of the inmates, Julia’s work with the juveniles continued.
Julia B. Hooks’ legacy for the future is the determination to make this a more just world for all people, of all ages and races. Her courage inspires us to fight prejudice and to enhance the world around us.
DETERMINATION
for a woman who solved a glaring problem despite
widespread inertia, apathy or ignorance around her:
Lucille Ewing
Award-winning performers and ordinary kids alike grew like giant morning glories over the walls of Southern segregation because Lucille Ewing dared to teach life’s lessons through the medium of a theater for all children.
For more than 25 years Lucille was the driving force of Memphis Children’s Theater. She followed in the footsteps of her aunt, Martha Macan Byrnes, who initiated theater for children through the Memphis Park Commission. It evolved from Recreation Players, a program on WMPS radio in the late 1940s and ‘50s. In the early 1950s, Lucille launched plans for a full-blown theater that would be run by and for children. They would act, build sets and be totally responsible for each play they acted.
At that time, Memphis was even more racially divided than it is today. Yet Lucille made it clear that any interested young person would be welcome in the theater, regardless of race or economic background Productions were cast according to talent and availability — not type.
Despite active attempts to close the theater, funding shortages and strong sentiments in the community that children shouldn’t be so engaged, she persevered for nearly three decades. She broadened the children’s outlook by financing trips to theater productions in the region. On one such outing in Alabama, she and her children held a spontaneous sit-in when a black child with them was refused service in a restaurant.
Lucille’s efforts spanned creation of other children’s theaters throughout the region. Whether regular folks or award-winning performers, the hundreds of Memphis children Lucille Ewing touched grew — the better for her determination to give them a stage on which to stretch their talents.
Lucille Ewing passed away October 22, 2001, aged 86.
COURAGE
for a woman who, facing active opposition,
backed an unpopular cause in which she deeply believed:
Alzada Clark
In a 25-year career as a labor organizer, Alzada Clark has braved personal threats and racial epithets in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma. In 1965 she became the first black woman organizer of state employees in Tennessee and she is responsible for establishment of the local Service Employees International Union.
She was asked in 1967 to organize the women in a furniture plant in Canton, Mississippi. She went into that racially troubled state to help the employees. When the vote failed, she told the men in charge that she would lead the effort next time. Thanks to Alzada’s leadership and courage, at the end of a year of work the vote did pass and the union was organized.
When workers received their first salary increases, two came to Alzada to thank her. One, a black man, said, “Now I can eat a piece of steak more than once a year.” The other man, who was white, said, “Now my kids won’t have to wear tennis shoes in the winter.”
Later, Alzada organized the furniture workers in her native Memphis and in several other Mid-South towns. While president of the local Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, she became the first woman elected to the national position of Second Vice President. That organization also awarded her the Fannie Lou Hamer Award for her efforts on behalf of the people.
Alzada is a vocal civil rights activist and served on the NAACP board. When she sees a problem of injustice she speaks up, despite the possibility of being jailed or losing a job. Often in her career she has required the assistance of bodyguards.
In the words of one nominator, “She has the determination and the courage to seek what is right morally, what is good, and what is noble. She stands as a beacon of light amid the darkness.”
COURAGE
for a woman who, facing active opposition,
backed an unpopular cause in which she deeply believed:
Margery Rumbarger McSweeney
Despite active opposition, Margery Rumbarger fought for the cause of women to have the right to give birth to their children in their own homes, with the assistance of midwives.
Ninety percent of all births worldwide occur in the home. Currently, the majority of births in this country take place in hospitals. Yet in recent years a growing number of women have decided to give birth at home. Reasons for this include the wish for more participation in the process and more control of the decisions surrounding birth.
While home birth is not for all women, the birth process is a natural part of the life cycle. Margery believes that for women at low risk, home birth should remain an alternative. It is her strong belief in this philosophy that led Margery and a friend to found the Homebirth Midwifery Service in 1980. Since that time she has assisted more than 200 babies into the world.
But home birth remains controversial in our high-tech society. In March 1984, as a result of her lay midwifery practice, Margery was fired from her position as a pre-natal health care educator for the Shelby County Health Department. After the Civil Service Merit Board ruled the firing was improper, she was reinstated and offered a transfer to the Tuberculosis Clinic, which according to state guidelines is a “high health risk.” She refused the transfer and was offered another to the Immunization Clinic. She refused that as well.
Three years later she still is involved in a lawsuit against the Health Department. Margery believes that the turmoil is a result of “strong prejudice in the medical community” against law midwives. Yet Margery Rumbarger, an R.N. with the highest level of obstetrics training available, continues to courageously practice lay midwifery in order to provide women with an alternative in which she deeply believes.
Margery’s lawsuit against the Shelby County Health Department was settled in federal court in 1988. The Department wrote Margery a formal letter of apology and paid her a financial settlement for her time off work. She chose not to return to the Heath Department, and works part time as a supervising nurse with a home health agency while continuing her midwifery. She had assisted about 370 deliveries as of February 1994.
DETERMINATION
for a woman who solved a glaring problem despite
widespread inertia, apathy or ignorance around her:
Willie Pearl Butler
When she moved to Memphis as a young woman, Willie Pearl Butler worked hard to support herself and her family. She was employed successively by the Chisca Hotel, Loeb’s Laundry, the Old White Rose Laundry, Memphis Steam Cleaners and Kay’s Nursing Home. But in 1968 her young son was in a serious accident and required her constant attention. It was then that she was forced to seek help from the Welfare Department.
An assertive woman, she was well treated but she was shocked at the poor treatment of others that she witnessed. Willie Pearl Butler decided that something must be done. She questioned the welfare workers, researched the laws, and then made an appointment with the director of the Welfare Department. She and nine other women organized the local chapter of the Welfare Rights Organization. She went to a first meeting alone to state their grievances concerning the attitude of some social workers toward poor women.
While continuing her work on welfare rights, she helped organize the Resident Council Association of Public Housing and the LeMoyne Gardens Tenants Association. She also got involved in establishing Memphis Area Legal Services and became the first non-lawyer to chair that board. As time passed and her reputation grew, she found herself more often involved in meetings than in confrontations and demonstrations.
Through the years, when the rights of the poor in our community have been violated, Willie Pearl was on the front lines to see that justice was done.
With unfailing determination, she has struggled to achieve for poor people the respect that all people deserve.
Willie Pearl later worked for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department.
HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:
Ida B. Wells and Myra F. Dreifus
This year we honor posthumously two women who achievements still enrich our lives. Although the details of their lives appear dissimilar, they complement one another.
One was a Southerner who moved north to complete her life; the other was a Northerner who moved south. One was black, the other white. One was born in the 19th century, the other in the 20th. One was born a slave, the other free. One was Christian, the other Jewish. One had finished her work in Memphis before the other was even born — and although their lives overlapped for some 27 years in these United States, they never knew each other personally.
And yet they are strangely alike. One was repeatedly described as “militant,” “courageous,” “determined,” “impassioned,” and “aggressive” while the other was referred to as a “damn busybody,” a “fighter,” and as the “conscious of Memphis.” Each did what she could to address the problems of her day — and Memphis will never be the same again because of each of them.
Ida B. Wells was born in 1862, six months before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, to slave parents in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She was educated first at Rust College where her carpenter father was selected to the first Board of Trustees, and later at Fisk University. She was orphaned by Yellow Fever at 16, along with six younger brothers and sisters whom she raised.
Ida began her career as a teach in a one-room school in rural Mississippi; continued in the rural schools of Shelby County after she moved to Memphis in 1884; and was regarded as a competent and conscientious teach in the Memphis schools for seven more years.
When she was only 22 and traveling to her school at Woodstock in Shelby County, she took on the historic action of challenging discrimination against black passengers on railroad trains. Ida refused to comply when the conductor tried to remove her from the ladies’ car into a dingy smoking car with the rest of the black passengers. When he grabbed her arm she bit his hand! After the conductor and baggage man attempted to relocate her forcibly, she got off the train at the next stop, returned to Memphis, and sued the railroad for failing to provide the “equal” in “separate but equal” accommodations.
She prevailed in the local court and was awarded $500 in damages. But the railroad appealed the case and in 1887 the Supreme Court of Tennessee reversed the decision, charging the costs to a bitterly disappointed Ida.
That same year she discovered her journalistic abilities when she began to write at first for a church paper, and then for a small black Memphis newspaper, Free Speech and Headlight, later becoming editor and part owner. Articles criticizing the Memphis Board of Education for separate, inferior Negro schools led to her dismissal as a teacher in 1891. Unperturbed, she began to write under the pen name “Iola,” publishing details of unfair treatment of Negroes.
On March 9, 1892 when three young black businessmen were lynched in Memphis, Ida wrote in her newspaper that Negroes should leave the city. Many took her advice and she urged those that remained to boycott the street railway. For three months Ida’s scathing pen was turned on the white population of the city who allowed and condoned lynching and practiced racial hypocrisy. Her newspaper was blamed for paralyzing downtown business. Fury erupted one evening when an angry mob wrecked her press, destroyed her paper, and would have lynched her except that she happened to be in Philadelphia at the time covering a convention for her newspaper.
She never returned to Memphis. Instead she wrote and lectured in the cities of the North and East and throughout England, Scotland and Wales, becoming the most eloquent spokesperson in the international fight against lynching. She would continue her incredible crusade against black oppression in the pages of newspapers and on lecture platforms for the rest of her life.
Ida moved to Chicago after her marriage to Ferdinand Barnett, a prominent lawyer and journalist, and made that city her home until her death in 1931. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Ida B. Wells is not that she fought lynching and other forms of cruelty, inhumanity and injustice. It is rather that she fought a lonely and almost single-handed fight, with the dedication of a crusader, long before other men or women of any race entered that arena.
Born in Flint, Michigan in 1904, Myra Finsterwald Dreifus, a woman described as both serene and impulsive, moved to Memphis with her husband Fred in 1936. At first she “tried the social bit.” A friend had told her, “You’ve got to learn to play cards, or you’ll be a lonely old woman. “Well, I tried it,” Myra later reported, “and finally I told my friend I’d take my chance with old age and loneliness.”
While raising three children, she soon became involved in many volunteer projects, including the Memphis Junior Red Cross and the National Council of Jewish Women. In the early 1960s, while president of the Mental Health Association (which she had helped to found — “we were trying to do something for disturbed children,” she said — she discovered widespread hunger in the schools.
Despite federal economic surveys showing that at least 40,000 Memphis children could qualify for free or reduced-rate lunches, fewer than 700 children were getting them. Even more startling was the discovery that surpluses of both food and money were being turned back to the National School Lunch Program while in grade school lunchrooms children without food were required to remain seated, seeing and smelling the food of their more fortunate peers until the lunch period was over.
Haunted by this discovery, Myra confronted clubs, church groups, women’s groups — anybody who might listen and help — and gradually, steadily the movement known as the Fund for Needy School Children surfaced as an organization able to sway politicians, school officials and a large segment of the public.
Between 1946 and the early 1970s, her small band of volunteers grew to almost 400 working in 57 schools, and the number of children enrolled in the Free Lunch Program increased from 700 to 25,500 children.
In 1967 Myra and her volunteers maneuvered the organization into the Shelby United Neighbors (forerunner of the United Way of Greater Memphis) despite the objection of some that they did not meet all agency requirements: they had no office, no salaried staff, no expenses!
Her movement still has no headquarters, no salaried employees, no regular meetings and almost no structure. In Myra’s words, “It remains a creative movement in which each volunteer can bring something special to the program.”
With the free lunch program set up, she and her volunteers worked on providing clothes, eyeglasses, breakfasts, milk formula and layettes for the poor.
Myra helped found the Riverview-Kansas Day Care Center and worked hard to build constructive and harmonious relations between the various communities that make up our city She chided at least one mayor publicly for campaigning on the promise to represent all the people of Memphis and then admittedly speaking for only the majority during a time of racial strife.
In December 1968, while attending a White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health, she suddenly realized that the conference wasn’t going to deal with the problem of hunger. In the midst of the session, she fired off a registered letter (written on plain notebook paper) to President Nixon, challenging him to declare a national emergency on hunger and to expand the food stamp program “so everybody could be eating by Christmas.”
Most of Myra’ efforts were visibly successful; some were not. But having done what she could to resolve a problem she reflected the same equanimity regardless of the outcome.
Myra Dreifus, more than any other one person in the remote or recent past, personified the ability to transcend all the barriers that frequently fragment our community — racial, economic, educational, political, religious, social — in her effort to make Memphis a better place for all of us. Actually, she did not so much transcend (meaning to rise above) them; rather she moved through them with serene determination, probably because for her they did not exist.
In her activist years, Myra referred to herself as a “professional volunteer.” Later she enjoyed continuing education so much her husband referred to her as a “perennial freshman.” Others called her “the Children’s Crusader.” She deserves to have all Memphis call her “friend.”
Myra Dreifus took her chances with old age, dying at 82 in December 1986. She was not lonely.
Our Heritage Award for the year 1987 honors jointly Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Myra Finsterwald Dreifus, who in doing what they could, discovered what a difference they could make. All stand tall in Memphis because we stand successively on the shoulders of these rather frail women with strong wills. We celebrate their well-lived lies, treasure their respective examples, and cherish their memory as “women of achievement.”
HEROISM
for a woman whose heroic spirit was tested and
shown as a model to all in Shelby County and beyond:
Frances Coe
While others of her generation busied themselves with lady-like traditions of the South to which they were born, Frances Edgar Coe stepped into the public arena in the 1940s as president of the Planned Parenthood Association and vice president of the League of Women Voters. In 1948 she moved into elective politics and worked in Estes Kefauver’s campaign for the U.S. Senate.
In 1955 this Vassar graduate and former teacher was one of 16 candidates in the first election for the Memphis City School Board after political control of it ended. She won a seat and found her lifelong niche.
She served on the Memphis Board of Education for 24 years.
Through segregation, dismantling of a dual school system, integration, the draining of support into a private segregated system and the beginning of a resurgence of support for the public system, she always fought not only for equal education but for superior education for all children. She was president in 1972 when the board reorganized from five to nine members and instituted court-ordered busing.
We honor Frances for her refusal to be shaken from her vision of fairness, for the stubbornness that sustained her through the years of meetings and long arguments when the notion of a fine education could have been lost in the divisive atmosphere of prejudice and discrimination.
For her heroic efforts to cause change toward a better future for our children, we salute Frances Coe.
