Author: WOAmemphis17

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Shelia Williams

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2015

DETERMINATION
for a woman who solved a glaring problem despite
widespread inertia, apathy or ignorance around her:

Shelia Williams

Have you ever had to rely on a Memphis bus to get to work, to get to the store, or to get to a doctor’s appointment? Have you ever wanted to go to an event outside your neighborhood but knew you couldn’t because you wouldn’t be able to get home because your bus route shuts down at 6:00 pm or, if it’s Sunday, doesn’t run at all?

Shelia Williams has and she is determined to do something about that.

In 2000, Shelia Williams, a working mother who then had four children, started looking at a way to make ends meet. She had a car that was constantly in need of repair and decided to just ride the bus. At the time she lived in the Raleigh-Frayser area and worked at a spa miles and neighborhoods away near Park and Primacy Parkway. Taking the bus meant a 2 ½ hour trip on three buses.

But this is more than one woman’s story.

Shelia found that those who ride the bus become a part of your family. You check in on their health and families, worry about them when they’re not there, and you cry with them because they lose their jobs because of the bus being late one time too many.

In Memphis and Shelby County, 90% of bus riders are African-American. A majority of those on the bus are women, and 60% have incomes of $18,000 or less. Those who depend on bus service include people with disabilities, students, workers and seniors. Cuts to bus service combined with inequitable economic development and residential segregation disproportionately affect low-income residents and communities of color. All these facts mean that the funding, planning and function of mass transit is a civil rights issue.

In late 2011, frustrations including inconsistent schedules, route cuts, safety concerns and customer service issues led Shelia to call the number from a flyer she found on the bus. This took her to an early meeting of what was then the Transportation Task Force. There she met community activist and dynamo Mother Georgia King who is also a Woman of Achievement for Courage 1994.

In February 2012, Shelia, along with Mother King, co-founded the Memphis Bus Riders Union. The grassroots organization fights for better bus service in our city, speaking up about MATA practices and policies with key decision-makers, including the MATA board and administration and city government.

The riders union fights racism and oppression based on socioeconomic status as it is reflected in our city’s grossly inadequate public transportation system – advocating for improved services.

In June 2014, Mayor A C Wharton nominated Shelia to serve on the MATA Board which governs the transit agency. This group votes on MATA’s budget, routes, schedules and fare. Many board members come from big business and Shelia admits that at first she was nervous about her reception, but she has been completely welcomed and her voice is heard.

Now the board is welcoming to members of the public and a change in process means that the public is heard before votes are taken on MATA issues.

Routes are still limited and some buses do still run late, but progress has been made. Customer service and signage have improved.

But there’s still plenty to change – expanded routes, schedules, better safety and nicer relationship between bus riders and employees.

And Shelia’s vision is bigger than that. She wants to do away with the stigma associated with riding the bus in Memphis. She seeks a cultural change that results in everyone riding the bus together, going to work or to play by bus. For this to happen, bus service has to become consistently dependable, with better routes, longer hours and a new image.

Shelia Williams is determined to see this happen and for that we salute her.

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Amerah Shabazz-Bridges

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2015

COURAGE
for a woman who, facing active opposition,
backed an unpopular cause in which she deeply believed:

Amerah Shabazz-Bridges

As a child, Amerah Shabazz-Bridges lived in the dark shadows of incestuous rape, suffering at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend, a man who rightfully should have been her protector. Now, years later, she courageously tells her story and uses her experience to help others recover from the trauma of abuse.

Beginning at the age of 8 and continuing until she left home at age 15, Amerah was repeatedly abused. Powerless, she did not know how to express her pain and fear. Her mother was also abused while Amerah lay listening in the next room. When she was finally able to tell other adults that she trusted and loved, including her mother, they refused to believe her.

In order to survive, she learned to mask her pain. As a 13-year old she needed validations and wanted to hear someone say, “I believe you,” and “It wasn’t your fault.” Instead she was told “He said he didn’t do it.”

She became a people-pleaser, a manipulator, and was promiscuous. She had learned to survive the best she could.

She finally left home when her abuser cursed and said, in her mother’s presence, that she couldn’t stay if she wouldn’t do what he wanted. She started packing her belongings into empty beer boxes immediately.

As a teenager and young adult she sought peace in the church and at the mosque. Well-meaning people told her to just pray about it; to forgive and forget. She didn’t understand why God had allowed this to happen.

But she continued to search for answers. Amerah says, “My Higher Power heard my moaning and I hesitantly started down the road to recovery.”

She started that journey at the age of 32 when she and her 7 children moved to Chicago.

She moved her family to Washington, DC, in the mid-90s and it was there that Amerah really started telling her story. She found Co-Dependents Anonymous, which led her to Survivors of Incest Anonymous. She volunteered for the Rape Crisis Hotline, consoling women who called the hot line, meeting victims at the hospital, giving speeches aimed at young women, helping them have the courage to face their pain and to heal. Amerah also formed two support groups for women who were victims of incest.

Amerah would read newspaper articles, contact shelters and say, “This is who I am; this is what I do. If I share my story, they may know they can change. We have questions and answers and then healing starts.”

In 1996, Amerah had found enough acceptance to return to Jackson, Mississippi, to care for her mother. She continued her mission of helping others heal and became a court-appointed advocate. She earned a degree at age 66, remarried her first husband the next day and moved to Memphis. Dedicated to the work of healing, she had contacted the Memphis Child Advocacy Center a year before the move. She phoned the center just as soon as she got to town and continued telling her story.

Her work has impacted the lives of countless persons who have been abused, giving them the power to transform their lives. She has won awards for her work in Washington, Jackson and Memphis. And she continues to grow.

She says, “I am like a big onion. I pull off one layer at a time. At first it’s hard and may break but I keep pulling until it becomes so easy that the next layer just slides right off.” That’s how healing works.

Amerah’s openness in telling her story has brought countless rewards to the Child Advocacy Center. She has inspired donors to contribute and has helped police recruits and officers understand family violence in a personal and powerful way. To quote her nominators, “Amerah’s words help us continue to do what we do, to see firsthand the beauty of healing, and to help us remember what is important.”

For her courageous voice – we honor Amerah Shabazz-Bridges.

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Emma Currin Barbee Wilburn

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2015

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Emma Currin Barbee Wilburn

Rising from poverty, Emma Wilburn became one of the most successful and wealthy African-American businesswomen in Memphis in the early part of the 20th century. Her life is doubly impressive because she did this as a widowed mother of four during the height of the system of segregation, when the Jim Crow laws worked to keep African-Americans poor and at the bottom of society.

Born in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, in 1876, she was one of 13 children of former slaves Hudson and Harriet Currin. Before she was 25, she was widowed twice and left to raise four children on her own. Through hard work, she opened a small hotel in Halls, Mississippi, in the late 1890’s. But she saw more opportunity in nearby Memphis and moved there, working for the Zion Cemetery Company, which ran the oldest African-American cemetery in the city. The funeral business was one of the few ways African-Americans could be successful under segregation, since it involved the African-American community apart from white Southerners.

In 1914, she bought an existing funeral home and renamed it the Emma Wilburn Funeral Home. She made her business a success by hard work and showmanship. In a riding habit, on a white horse, she led each funeral procession to the cemetery. She was so successful she opened another funeral parlor in Dyersburg, Tennessee. She leased her Memphis funeral home to the National Burial Association in the 1930’s and bought 75 acres of land she named New Park Cemetery in South Memphis. At the time cemeteries for African-Americans in the South were small and hidden. According to historian Miriam DeCosta Willis, New Park was one of the premiere cemeteries in the whole South. At New Park, Emma Wilburn continued her funeral escorts and made the cemetery a community center for African-Americans. Each year, she held a popular community-wide memorial celebration, as well as sponsoring other social activities regularly, which made her well-known and popular. She founded the Tennessee Burial Association for African-Americans.

She taught her children the funeral business. Her son, Hudson Barbee, opened the Barbee Casket Company; her youngest child, Cutie, opened the Cutie Thomas Funeral Home in Lauderdale, Tennessee; her daughter Minnie and son-in-law Johnson Rideout opened a funeral home in Los Angeles, California.

In order to attend the opening of the business, in 1935 Emma Wilburn bought an American Airlines ticket. At this time when segregation was in place and airlines did not have Jim Crow seating, local authorities told her that her ticket was not valid. But she got in touch with the airline headquarters in Chicago to protest and won, becoming the first African-American woman to fly from Memphis on American Airlines and desegregating the airlines for future black passengers.

She died two years later in 1937, a wealthy, successful woman. For her strength as a single mother running a business, for her exceptional business ability at a time of severe disadvantage for African-Americans, and for her courage, we honor her tonight as our 2015 Woman of Achievement for Heritage.

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Kamekio Lewis

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2017

INITIATIVE
for a woman who seized the
opportunity to use her talents and created her own future:

Kamekio Lewis

Intimate partner violence is a phrase social services and law enforcement use to talk about the abuse perpetrated in marriage or “romantic relationships.” More often it’s covered by the phrase domestic violence.

Yet most victims of that violence do not think of themselves as victims or as having anything to do with domestic or intimate partner violence. They are just coping with a volatile or difficult or chaotic boyfriend, husband, girlfriend or partner.

Kamekio Lewis survived a two-year abusive relationship, moved to Memphis and then realized as she saw news reports that she in fact was a survivor of domestic violence.

She says, “I never knew the word domestic violence before. I left a violent relationship and didn’t want to talk about it again. Here, I saw it on TV and happening in Memphis and I saw I needed to tell my story.”

Kamekio has published a book – “Looking4Love…In All the Wrong Places”– and written and produced a play based on her experience. And she is taking the initiative to develop services for women who have been damaged by vicious relationships and require housing, shelter, clothes and employment to recover and renew their lives.

Kamekio grew up in Camden, Ark., in a low income household where she became the first generation college student. She joined the Army because she wanted to do more, see more and be more.

She served for about 8 years and was based in Kansas when she experienced violence with a boyfriend. She moved to Memphis 12 years ago to be closer to family, intending to just not think or talk about the abuse.

But she seemed to hear about domestic violence all around Memphis. She says, “I saw the opportunity for me to share my story. There is a great need in the community. Women are broken. Many are dealing with depression and PTSD and I want to help them set goals for themselves. Once you set personal and professional goals and empower us as women, we are ready to leave. I want to empower women and give them the tools they need to transition out.”
Trained as a certified rehabilitation counselor, Kamekio launched A New Day Rehabilitation and Counseling Services, a non-profit agency. She volunteered with clients of Agape Child & Family Services in Hickory Hill Community Center and Autumn Ridge Complex – helping with homework, job readiness and financial aid information.

Her nominator, Bettye Boone, with the National Coalition of 100 Black Women Memphis Chapter, says, “Ms. Lewis has gone beyond simply providing referrals to other places for women in transition and/or trying to leave domestic violence relationships. She literally takes the next steps with them and gets others involved with her and her organization to help the women out.”

For example, a few years ago a couple with four school age children were living in their car. Someone directed them to Kamekio who paid for a hotel room for the family and then called on the Coalition and some other groups to assist as well. She helped the parents get work and to continue to live at the hotel for several months until they were back on their feet.

Knowing how crucial housing is to women and families in transition, Kamekio is striving to renovate and open a shelter in a house that was donated to her organization. Share Life Community Network is her program that is seeking partnerships and sponsors to repair the house, operate a clothes closet, offer resume coaching and career planning.

Kamekio is raising three sons and working full time providing job readiness training and job placement services at Case Management Inc., one of the largest mental health facilities in West Tennessee.

Yet her passion to help others succeed is demonstrated through her countless volunteer hours and outreach ministries. Kamekio Lewis’s initiative is bringing solace and encouragement to women beaten down by physical and emotional abuse, offering hope and a brighter future to them and their children.

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Mary Magdalene Solari

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2017

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Mary Magdalene Solari

Less than a year after her birth near Genoa, Italy, in 1849, Mary Magdalene Solari was brought to Memphis by her parents. She went on to leave a legacy of artistic, civic and philanthropic achievements that still enrich our lives here and abroad – more than 150 years later.

Mary’s first art teacher was Mrs. Morgan at the Memphis Female Institute. Mary studied with her until 1882 when she left for Florence, Italy, for her health and to study under Casioli. Traveling abroad as a young woman was extremely uncommon during this time, but Mary knew the importance of this transition. The opportunity to study under a well-known artist would prove to be of personal as well as historical significance.

After only a short period of study, Casioli took notice of Mary’s undeniable talent and encouraged her to enter her works to the Academia de Belle Arte. During this era, however, the Academy would never accept the work of a female artist. The Academy was worried that women in the program would be distracting to the males studying there. Casioli insisted that Mary’s work be shown, and he submitted a few pieces anonymously. One of her black-and-white drawings won first prize while a drawing of the heads of peasants also took a prize.

When the Academy learned of the artist’s true identity, they wanted to cancel the prize but the press took up the subject. Historian J. P. Young wrote: “It ended by the young girl receiving her fairly earned prizes and honor and opened the door of the academy to women.”

Solari was an American woman artist making Italian art history and changing art education for all women. As Young wrote: “(I)t was found that men and women stimulated one another to their best. So the Academy remained co-educational, made so by a young Memphis woman through the real merit of her work.”

In 1890, she received her Master of Arts degree and entered the Beatrice Exposition, which was open to women and had 1,000 entrants. Solari won the highest awards in watercolor. The diploma and letters of merit entitled her to teach art in the government schools – fulfilling another of her goals.

After receiving her Academy degree, Mary returned to Memphis in 1892 and she continued to be a face of change for gender equality. In 1893, she broke another barrier – she was the only woman and Southerner on the Chicago World Fair’s Board of Judges for the Fine Art Department.

In 1897, at the Tennessee Centennial Exhibition in Nashville, she was in charge of the art exhibit in the pyramid-shaped building Memphis built to exhibit its wares. She also won prizes for oil painting, watercolor, crayon, landscape and antique collection. Her pictures hung in both the Memphis pyramid and the Parthenon built by Nashville to house general arts exhibition.

Mary opened a school of fine arts in the Randolph Building where she taught oil, water color, pastel and tapestry painting.
She began a series of Lenten Art Salons “with a view to gather the different choice flowers in literature, music and art…in Memphis.”

She became an advocate for those without a voice. She lectured on prison reform, juvenile offenders and industrial training in schools. She became an outspoken critic of horrid conditions at the City Hospital, erected for steamboat transients. She lectured on “If Christ Should Come to Memphis and Visit the Hospital What Would He See?” She sparked the interest of city officials and the press – a new hospital building was the result.

During World War I she lectured to sell war bonds to Memphis’ Italian community.

In her last years, she spent much of her time on her 176-acre farm on the Wolf River on the Raleigh Road east of National Cemetery. She raised Berkshire and Poland China hogs, chickens and Kentucky horses. There she was surrounded by her collection of treasures: antique tapestries including one of Abraham sacrificing Isaac; 14th century gold candelabra, Florentine lace, Etruscan curiosities and a set of silver from India.

In 1928, a year before she died, Mary made yet another contribution to the future of Memphis. She donated her home, art collection, and land, valued around $150,000, to Christian Brothers College. To this day, the school houses her art collection, and the sale of her home and land provided funds to purchase the land upon which Christian Brothers University sits today on Central Avenue in Midtown Memphis. Tennessee Gov. Malcolm Patterson called her gesture “a permanent investment in the interest of good citizenship.”

Mary Magdalene Solari changed the narrative of women’s contributions to society. She paved the way for women in the world of art, and she was a voice for change in the Memphis community.

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Lil Hardin Armstrong and Alberta Hunter

Lil Hardin Armstrong
Alberta Hunter
WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2016

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Lil Hardin Armstrong and Alberta Hunter

The Heritage Award this year is being given to two Memphis women who became renowned in the world of popular music: jazz legend Lillian (known as Lil) Hardin Armstrong and Blues icon Alberta Hunter.

As a jazz pianist, singer, composer, and bandleader, Lil Hardin Armstrong became the leading woman in early jazz, and an outstanding pioneer in a field dominated by men.

Alberta Hunter, nationally and internationally known as a Blues singer and songwriter during her lifetime, was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2011.

Both were born in the 1890’s and grew up in Memphis in the early 20th century. But while Lil Hardin studied piano at Mrs. (Julia) Hook’s School of Music and spent a year at Fisk University, Alberta Hunter learned music at church and on the streets, and left high school without graduating. Both felt pulled to Chicago, Alberta in 1911, Lil in 1918, where a vibrant African-American musical culture was being shaped. Both struggled to begin their careers in the cabarets and nightclubs springing up there—Lil Hardin Armstrong as a jazz pianist and Alberta Hunter as a Blues singer. By the 1920’s Lil Hardin was a pianist with the well-known King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, playing the Dreamland, the premiere Chicago club for African-Americans. There she met and married a trumpeter in the band named Louis Armstrong. Though they would later divorce, she kept his last name.

Also by the 1920’s, Alberta Hunter was a top singer in the Chicago clubs and cabarets, including the Dreamland, where she and Lil Hardin met and became friends. That decade Alberta added recording to her career, becoming a sought after recording artist, and began writing songs for herself and others. One of the first was “Down Hearted Blues,” which became Bessie Smith’s first smash recording in 1923. She branched out to other places, playing clubs and doing musical theater in New York, Paris, and London, becoming a national and international star.

Lil Hardin Armstrong was also recording by the 1920’s. As a pianist she was sought after for recording sessions, and she recorded from 1925-1927 as the pianist on Louis Armstrong’s classic “Hot Five” Okeh Records recordings, a celebrated series of records in jazz. She also composed some of the Hot Five’s best-known songs, including “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue.” She branched out and became the leader of her first band, the Lil Hardin Armstrong Band. She would create at least eight bands throughout her career, one of them an all-women band.

By the 1930’s, both women were broadcasting nationally on the radio, as well as playing clubs and recording. Lil Hardin recorded for Decca Records as a swing vocalist and band leader, and accompanied many singers on the piano, including Alberta Hunter. Hunter was at the height of her fame, a celebrated international star. Hardin Armstrong was the most prominent woman in jazz.
In the 1940’s, Alberta Hunter toured with the USO, singing for the troops in North Africa and Europe, while Lil Hardin Armstrong and her band continued to play in Chicago. Recording contracts and opportunities dried up and both women looked to other careers. Lil Hardin Armstrong trained as a tailor but ultimately kept creating clothes only as a sideline for friends. She briefly owned a restaurant and taught piano and French. She never gave up music, performing both as a soloist and accompanist. A version of her song “Just for a Thrill,” became a major hit for Ray Charles, while Peggy Lee and other top singers recorded her songs. In 1971, she collapsed and died while playing on an NBC-TV tribute show for Louis Armstrong.

After the war, Alberta Hunter started volunteering at the Joint Diseases Hospital in Harlem. Her experiences there and her mother’s death in 1954 acted as the catalysts for her to begin a career in nursing. She got her high school GED, went to nursing school, and had a 20-year nursing career at New York’s Goldwater Hospital. But she never totally gave up the Blues. After retirement, at over 80 years old, she began singing at clubs in limited engagements, becoming a national figure again. The Tennessee governor in 1978 declared an “Alberta Hunter Day,” and the Memphis Mayor presented her with a key to the city. Speaking at the Orpheum in response, she shocked the audience as she openly spoke out against the racism she faced growing up in Memphis and that still existed in the 1970’s. She continued in the Blues until her death in 1984.

Both Lil Hardin Armstrong and Alberta Hunter were outstanding women. Both pioneered public musical careers for women and left a rich legacy of musical contributions in jazz and the Blues to the world. They richly deserve to be named Memphis Women of Achievement and honored with the Heritage Award for 2016.

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Claudia Haltom

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2016

DETERMINATION
for a woman who solved a glaring problem despite
widespread inertia, apathy or ignorance around her:

Claudia Haltom

Claudia Haltom grew up in rural East Tennessee where she witnessed the effects of poverty on local families. After graduating from UT-Knoxville, she studied law, following in the footsteps of her mother, Claude Swafford, and father, Howard Swafford. After clerking for a state court judge, Claudia joined the Shelby County Attorney’s Office. There, she handled cases for the county health department and the county schools. She gained insight into the devastating effects of poverty on children and teens, and she saw first-hand the limited reproductive health services available to poor women. She published “The Single Parent Referee Handbook” to assist women who find themselves raising children alone. The book provides practical legal and personal advice.

After 12 years in the Health Department, Claudia became a Magistrate in the Memphis and Shelby County Juvenile Court. Here, too, she saw the impact that unintended pregnancies had on women of limited means. Often the pregnant girls she saw in court were “on the pill,” but taking it faithfully every day was just not happening. With considerable family support, a teen might finish school with one baby. But with two or three, her chances were almost zero, and the unsafe living conditions produced by these circumstances sometimes required Haltom to remove children from their mothers. In addition, she often had to send young men to jail for failure to pay child support.

Young women’s lives, the babies’ lives, and those of their extended families were all impacted by unplanned pregnancies. These women did not have the choices that come with being able to plan for their futures.

Claudia was determined to do something to interrupt this cycle of “children having children.”

Retiring after 17 years in the juvenile court system, she founded A Step Ahead Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to provide safe, long-term, reversible contraceptives to women without the means to afford them. She sought private and corporate financing. Knowing full well the political, religious, and ethnic mine-field that has characterized discussions of birth control, Claudia consulted with medical professionals, clinic directors, and community activists. She built partnerships with multiple agencies including home nursing programs, the Shelby County Health Department, Porter Leath, the Exchange Club, and more.

A Step Ahead’s philosophy is, “Being abstinent is the best method (of birth control), unless you are not. Then we are here to help.” When she and the educators at the Foundation talk with young women, they advise them to “Plan your career, choose a father for your children who deserves you, and then plan your babies.” The Foundation’s staff and volunteers work through schools, neighborhood groups, word of mouth, and social media.

Claudia’s determination to meet known obstacles clearly paved the way for A Step Ahead’s success. Today the Foundation leases office space on the campus of the Junior League of Memphis at the corner of Central and Highland and maintains a call center 24/7. The Foundation partners with 16 community clinics that provide the long-term birth-control devices and services to women.

In addition, A Step Ahead Foundation now has affiliates in Chattanooga, Knoxville, Nashville, and Jackson-West Tennessee. Thousands of sexually active girls and women have learned to take charge of their reproductive lives and to plan their futures accordingly so that they remain — a step ahead.

This is one determined woman! Claudia Haltom, chief executive officer of A Step Ahead Foundation, is the 2016 Woman of Achievement for Determination.

 

On January 16, 2018, the Association for Women Attorneys (AWA) Memphis Chapter honored Claudia Haltom, CEO of A Step Ahead, with the Marion Griffin-Frances Loring Award for outstanding achievement in the legal profession.

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Bennetta Nelson West

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2016

INITIATIVE
for a woman who seized the
opportunity to use her talents and created her own future:

Bennetta Nelson West

In 1982, Bennetta Nelson West used her education in business management, her long-standing interest and participation in the arts, and her passion and understanding of the local African American art community to found the Memphis Black Arts Alliance, the city’s first regional arts and cultural organization which celebrates and nurtures artistic excellence and black heritage.

Born in the John Gaston Colored Wing Hospital in the 1940s, the only child of parents she describes as teachers, philosophers and entrepreneurs, Bennetta Nelson West knows a thing or two about racism and sexism. As a Girl Scout, Bennie, as she is known, and the rest of her troop were only able to enter through the front door of Girl Scout Headquarters, then located on Union Avenue, because the troop leader Mrs. Arvon Thigpen could pass for white. After graduation from mighty Melrose, she attended Tuskegee Institute. She wanted to own a hotel and restaurant but was told by a professor, “nobody’s going to let a colored woman do that. You should become a dietitian, work in a hospital and marry a doctor.” So she wasn’t admitted to that program her first year.

Determined to get in and against her mother’s wishes but with her father’s support, she came home and started as a “salad girl” at the old Chisca Plaza Hotel Restaurant downtown and ended up as its first Black waitress. With a letter from the Chisca’s owner, she was finally admitted to the program of her choice and graduated with a degree in Institutional Management & Foods & Nutrition. In her first professional job as a dietitian at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Memphis, she was only allowed to work with black patients.

She married and moved to California. Her husband didn’t want her to work. According to Bennie, he only wanted a “trophy wife,” but that didn’t stop her. She got a job anyway, in the Food Services Department of Disneyland. After orientation she was assigned a Mammy outfit to wear in a New Orleans style restaurant. Anyone who knows Bennie won’t be surprised at what happened next. She quit.

Unhappy in marriage and not satisfied with her career, she got a National Institutes of Health Fellowship and moved to New York City to attend Columbia University to pursue a Master’s Degree. She stayed a decade.
There, between 1968 and 1978, Bennie became active in the black arts movement. She studied and participated in the theatre, dance, and visual arts industry, settling on a part-time career as a potter. Seeking to merge her arts and business interests, she received additional training in Arts Management from the New School of Social Research in New York City and the Arts Management in Community Institute through the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund and the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts.

Upon return to Memphis in 1978, Bennie joined the Continuing Education Department of what was then Shelby State Community College. While there she organized the First National African American Crafts Conference & Jubilee. This conference became a precursor to the National Black Arts Festival.

In 1982, while continuing as a college administrator and with the support of fellow faculty members Yvonne Robinson Jones, Patty Lechman, and 2005 Woman of Achievement for Initiative Mahaffey White, Bennie organized artists and arts groups to found the Memphis Black Arts Alliance, Inc.

Her biggest challenges included resistance from major arts funders and other emerging arts groups, disputes between artistic egos and struggles across disciplines. As is the case with many women, balancing family and work was also an issue.

Since its beginning, the Memphis Black Arts Alliance has created a venue for the development and showcasing of local and nationally recognized black artists. MBAA has employed more than 300 local artists and provided over 3,000 youth, families and adults the opportunity to learn, master and showcase the rudiments of the arts with well-trained, dedicated and culturally inspired artists.

This year Memphis Black Arts Alliance, Inc. is entering its 34th year. And Bennetta Nelson West has just recently retired and passed the baton. Under new leadership, MBBA continues to grow and thrive, a very significant achievement in the life of an organization founded on one individual’s dream and drive.

For this, we applaud and honor Bennetta Nelson West for her initiative.

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Dorothy Orgill Kirsch

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2016

STEADFASTNESS
for a woman with a lifetime of achievement:

Dorothy Orgill Kirsch

Dorothy Orgill Kirsch has a simple rule about her wide-ranging volunteer work: it should be fun.

In more than 60 years of community service, Dorothy has become a model for how to fully engage in support of arts, animals, education, environment and youth to make our city better.

Docent, board member, patron, advocate – Dorothy puts her heart and her self where her money is. She could be found at the Memphis Zoo teaching school kids in the Reptile House, financing talented newcomers with Ballet Memphis or sponsoring shows at Playhouse on the Square while leading applause from the audience.

Caring, genuine, funny, energetic, loving, merry – Dorothy regularly brings groups of her close female friends to theater and ballet performances, arts fundraisers and other activities.

“You live in a place, you want it to be the best it can be,’ Dorothy says. “You can’t just sit and hope it will be the best it can be.”

Dorothy was born and raised in the city where she married and was widowed twice, raised two children and curries a bevy of friends and admirers. Kirsch’s father, Kenneth W. Orgill, was secretary in the family business, which opened in Memphis in 1847 and is still Memphis’ oldest running business.

As a girl, Dorothy remembers “knitting thingamajigs” for World War II soldiers and volunteered at Calvary Episcopal Church and as a member of a high school sorority during her term at the Hutchison School. She majored in political science and minored in economics at Randolph Macon Women’s College in Virginia.

Back in Memphis in 1955 after graduation, her second cousin Edmund Orgill (Memphis mayor 1956-1959) helped her get a job at what was then Southwestern at Memphis. She laughs now about being paid “$75 every two weeks or something” for helping the woman who produced an alumni newsletter and items about students for area newspapers.

She soon met Thomas White, resigned her job the spring of 1956 and got married. But, shortly, the first in a series of tragedies struck. Her only sibling, Kenneth Orgill Jr., 33, who had been under psychiatric care for more than a year, had lunch with his parents, then drove downtown and jumped from the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge. It was the afternoon of Jan. 31, 1960.

At about 8 p.m. 11 days later, his wife, Nancy Wilson Orgill, asked Dorothy and Tom White to babysit her young children. Later that night a 1955 Oldsmobile registered to Kenneth Orgill was found still running on the bridge. Nancy Orgill, 31, was missing. Her body was found in the Mississippi River near Scott, Miss in April; his was not recovered.

Kenneth W. Orgill III, 5, and Elizabeth Orgill, 3, came to live with the Whites.
Eight years later, Tom White was killed when the Piedmont airliner he was aboard collided with a small plane over North Carolina. He was 37.

Dorothy was in her 30s, widowed, a single mother of two children in the near-perfect world of Ozzie and Harriet and Donna Reed. Her parents helped her with the children until in 1972, she married William F. Kirsch Jr., a Harvard- and Yale-trained attorney, bachelor and friend of her brother. He had helped organize the Memphis Arts Council in 1961. He was president of the Memphis Opera and Memphis symphony boards and a generous supporter of the art museums, ballet, colleges, Theatre Memphis and Humane Society
Dorothy was active with the Junior League, Les Passees, Calvary and the mental health board. One day in December, Bill phoned her and asked was there anything they might send extra money to and she said, “The zoo. I’ve always loved animals.”

That launched a critical partnership between the Kirsches and the zoo. Bill Kirsch was zoo board president in 1987 and Dorothy joined the board and was the first board member to do weekly training classes to become a docent. Bill Kirsch died in 1989 after a brief illness. Dorothy’s “infectious enthusiasm” has continued to nourish the zoo and a long list of arts, schools and more.

“I’m lucky enough to do the things I love,” she says. We – and her FIVE rescued dogs – are all lucky to live where Dorothy Kirsch steadfastly shares her time, energy and resources to make our community stronger. Dorothy Orgill Kirsch is our 2016 Woman of Achievement for Steadfastness.

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Linda Sessoms

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2016

VISION
for a woman whose sensitivity to women’s needs
led her to tremendous achievements for women:

Linda Sessoms

Following a long career educating young children and raising her own three, Linda Sessoms wanted to do something significant with her life. Eager to stay healthy, she reignited her own long-time interest in running. In 2006, she recruited several like-minded enthusiasts and they were off!

The group became Sisters in Motion. Their mission: To encourage and support adult African American women of all ages to become physically active through regular exercise in a supportive and non-threatening environment.

The group size varies from year to year, ranging from 100 to over 200 participants. Before joining, members must have doctor’s approval and attend orientation. Linda provides a daily run schedule, weekly run routes with mileages and schedules and an annual major race for the group. On Saturday mornings, the group runs together in locations all over the Memphis area. One Saturday, it might be downtown on the river; another Saturday it could be Shelby Farms, but rain or shine, coldest winter or hottest days of summer, they run. They also participate in marathons, including St. Jude and one year in Jamaica.

The group initially grew by word of mouth. It now includes women from all walks of life; women who would otherwise have never met. Women in their 30s through their 60s participate. The group takes in new members every April and this year has women in their 70s waiting to join. Women come to the group in varying degrees of fitness and weight. Some run, some walk, but all are committed to staying in motion.

With obesity and diabetes on the rise, the importance of this group is enormous.

Women in Motion promotes a healthy lifestyle. In addition to exercise, the group provides information and schedules speakers on health-related topics such as nutrition. Concerned about mothers and children, the group has raised over $100,000 for Christ Community Health Center to go towards reducing the high infant mortality rate in Memphis.

Some women come for fellowship and fun; others come with specific goals, such as weight loss or preventing diabetes. Linda’s biggest challenge? Encouraging women to literally just get off the couch and want to do this. Linda says, “Women get a bad rap; women can come together and work hard and not be catty. We can be happy when something good happens and be supportive when support is needed.”

Linda’s vision is for women to be consistent, stay on the course, and believe that you can do whatever you set out to do. Whatever obstacle comes your way, push through it. Don’t worry what others are doing; just put one foot in front of the other and keep moving. And whatever you are doing, try to do it better.

In April, thanks to Linda’s vision and steady leadership, Sisters in Motion celebrates its tenth anniversary.