Author: WOAmemphis17

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Shera Bie

Women of Achievement
1994

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

Shera Bie

Shera Bie was an elementary school teacher in 1968 when her eight-year-old daughter was diagnosed with learning disabilities. She soon joined the fledgling Memphis Association for Children with Learning Disorders — and began 24 years of passionate, skillful advocacy for handicapped children and adults in Tennessee.

In 1968, the MACLD was largely a support group for parents of children with learning disabilities. In her first of four terms as president in 1974, she organized groups in Tennessee into a state affiliate of the national ACLD, Inc. and was elected the first state president.

When Shera discovered that Tennessee’s Mandatory Special Education Law, passed in 1972, was not being implemented, she organized 85 related Memphis groups to support implementation and full funding. More than 300 parents and children came to a Nashville rally to hear 13 parents address the state House of Representatives. Two days later, Shera and some of the speakers met for 90 minutes with Gov. Winfield Dunn and the state finance chairman. As a result, $1.5 million was added to the governor’s special education budget.

In 1978, the national ACLD recognized the need for families to have assistance in order to use the 1975 federal law to gain access to appropriate special education services. After attending national training sessions, Shera and six others began what is now Effective Advocacy for Citizens with Handicaps (EACH), the state protection and advocacy agency with three offices across the state.

Through the 1970s and into the 1980s Shera devoted hours to both the local and state organizations. She had a business telephone in the name of ACLD installed in her home. She took care of newsletters, educational meetings, parent coffees and dispensing of information. She presented programs for schools and civic groups. She appeared on radio and TV programs. She arranged with the Memphis City Schools Mental Health Center to join MACLD in publishing the first Learning Disorders Source Book, a free listing of all agencies in Shelby County, with services for individuals and their families.

As volunteer involvement declined and active chapters faded, she worked with a small group to reactivate the state organization and find for it a funding base that would permit a paid staff. In 1984, Shera was hired at token pay as the first executive director and she developed a strategy to secure United Way funding by bringing to Memphis from Minnesota a parent support and education program base on building self-image.

When she stepped down in 1992, Shera left in place a vigorous organization with two employees, a committed volunteer base and a budget of $66,236. The program benefits enjoyed today by many exceptional children are the direct result of Shera Bie’s untiring determination.

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Ola Mae Ransom

Women of Achievement
1993

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

Ola Mae Ransom

In 1986, Ola Mae Ransom’s son, a Vietnam vet who had been sprayed with Agent Orange, developed arthritis in the spine and an inoperable disk problem. He became unable to work. In search of services, she accompanied him to the Vietnam Veterans Center.

There she observed groups of men sitting around for hours on end. When she asked a counselor about the situation he explained that the vets were homeless. With nowhere to go, they came to the center in the morning for coffee and doughnuts and then slept on the streets at night.

Appalled at the public indifference to the plight of many Vietnam vets, Ola Mae mortgaged her own home, invested her savings and solicited donations to buy two duplexes and set up the Alpha Omega Faith Homes.

On February 14, 1988, Alpha Omega Faith Homes opened the doors to veterans in need of a home environment and assistance in getting back on their feet. Since then hundreds of vets have passed through the doors and back into useful lives in the community.

When asked about her motivation, Ola Mae says that she’s “done this work all my life.” Raised in Mississippi by her mother, who helped women deliver their babies in the fields, and her father and father and grandfather, who themselves worked with the homeless, she moved to Memphis and continued her family’s tradition of helping solve community problems.

Ola Mae Ransom’s determination to address the plight of the Vietnam War veteran resulted in the founding of Alpha Omega, an organization that continues to serve veterans’ needs. And, she continues to invest her energy in improving our community.

 

Ola Mae Ransom passed away December 20, 1999 aged 74.

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Dorothy “Happy” Jones

Women of Achievement
1992

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

Dorothy “Happy” Jones

Dorothy Snowden “Happy” Jones was a Memphis homemaker with three daughters and a full slate of volunteer work centered around the Republican Party and the Junior League in the mid-1960s. She was a daughter of a wealthy, conservative family which considered civil rights an idea that should be stopped because black people did not deserve equal rights or equal respect.

From that upbringing Happy stepped into the confusion and turmoil of 1960s Memphis with personal conviction and strength. Since then she has been an active participant and leader in the civil rights and women’s rights movements.

As a coordinator of the Concerned Women of Memphis, Happy led a march to Mayor Henry Loeb’s office to protest poverty, racism and the city’s failure to negotiate in good faith with the city’s sanitation workers even after the death of Dr. King. As a charter member of the Memphis Panel of American Women, she began to speak to groups in the area about racism. She became a member of the Memphis and Shelby County Human Relations Commission, but when she learned it had no real power to change government she drafted legislation creating the Memphis Community Relations Commission and served as its first chairperson from 1972 to 1974. The Commission began addressing practical ways to change the systems that had led to the discrimination and institutional racism that kept most black Memphians poor and powerless. Along with the 22-member Commission board and executive director Rev. James Netters, Happy organized a Police-Community Relations Board to address police harassment of blacks.

Happy’s long-standing commitment to the Panel of American Women led her to serve as the project director for a grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1975. She organized a conference demonstrating how optional schools could improve the quality of education in Memphis and be a desirable and functional alternative in the desegregation process. Because of her effort, there now are exceptional optional schools in the Memphis City Schools system.

The Commercial Appeal named Happy one of the 20 most influential political leaders in Memphis in 1968. Ever since then she has continued her work. She was a founder and first president of Network, served on the Urban League board, the Governor’s Jobs Conference, National Conference of Christians and Jews, and the YWCA nominating committee and advisory board. She developed her skills and became a professional family therapist.

Happy’s life is a story of pure determination to improve her city and the lives of her fellow citizens.

Happy died in 2018.

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Virginia Dunaway

Women of Achievement
1990

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

Virginia Dunaway

In 1981, Memphis had thousands of hungry people — and no way to feed them. Thanks to the diligence of Virginia Dunaway, the Memphis Food Bank now distributes more than three million pounds of donated, wholesome food to 226 charitable programs and food pantries that feed the needy across the Mid-South.

Virginia Dunaway was active in Balmoral Presbyterian Church in Christian education. She had raised two sons and worked in her husband’s dermatology office when she became a VISTA volunteer on a neighborhood history project. With a year of her five-year VISTA term left, the Metropolitan Interfaith Association sent her to a training session on food banks. When she returned and said it sounded like something MIFA could do, MIFA leaders replied, “Go do it.”

Do it, she did. She designed systems for efficient food distribution, identified sources of food from individuals and industry, and worked with volunteers who solicited donations and community support. For two years, she wore blue jeans to work and kept a suit in the trunk of her car. In the jeans, she drove a truck for food runs, unloaded the truck, sorted food or scrubbed floors. In the suit, she met with business and community leaders to build awareness for fighting hunger.

In 1985, Virginia was named director of MIFA food programs and project director of MIFA MEALS. In 1988, the Food Bank became an independent agency and Virginia became its executive director as it moved to a larger warehouse at 239 Dudley. She meanwhile has helped the Second Harvest National Food Bank Network establish food banks in Jackson, Tennessee; Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Jackson, Mississippi.

The Memphis Food Bank provides food for 284,000 meals and snacks each month to the ill, the needy and to infants. Gid Smith, former MIFA executive director and a co-worker, summed up Virginia’s personal determination this way: “To my knowledge, she has done more to overcome hunger in Memphis than any other private citizen.”

 

Virginia retired from the Food Bank in September 1991. She received the DAR Medal of Honor in 1993. She travels as a consultant for Second Harvest National Food Bank Network.

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Joyce North

Women of Achievement
1989

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

Joyce North

“It is an American characteristic not to confront any problem until it becomes insoluble, and then confront it by turning it over to the schools.”

Joyce North came to that conclusion through the direct personal experience of sending nine children in her combined family to the turbulent public schools of the 1970s.

When she married Dr. William North in 1971, the two had children ranging in age from seven to 19. Busing was just beginning, and in the next few years of changing ages and changing school boundaries, the children were in a total of seven schools. Joyce quickly observed that the quality of public schools varied greatly. Believing that public education is the backbone of a democratic society, and being determined that her children and all children receive the best education possible, she quit her paying job and began the unpaid work of improving the quality of education in our public schools.

By 1980, this former president of White Station PTA was chairperson of the Memphis Better Schools Committee. In 1984, she was appointed chair of the local Commission of Excellence, a group charged with studying city public schools and making recommendations to the Board of Education. The recommendations emphasized that education is a community prowess, a point Joyce North always has taken to heart. Cutting through miles of red tape, she succeeded in getting the funds remaining from the study released to set up a Model School Program at Georgia Avenue Elementary School.

Joyce visited every agency in Memphis that deals with children, and organized an informal committee that met for breakfasts and after work to discuss how to best meet children’s needs. Health was identified as a priority and — fighting opposition — the group worked with the Health Department to establish a clinic at Booker T. Washington High School. She currently works to keep pregnant and parenting teens in school.

Initially concerned that her own children receive an excellent public education, Joyce North’s unyielding determination led her to do everything in her power to see that all children get the same opportunity.

Joyce retired in 1993 with a $650,000 Kellogg grant and three day-care sites in place to support pregnant and parenting teens with the schools’ mental health department. She and her husband are involved in national wildlife volunteering.

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Edith Kelly-Green

Women of Achievement
1993

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

Edith Kelly-Green

Edith Kelly grew from her grandmother’s house in Oxford, Mississippi to a position in senior management at Federal Express. Along the way, she is paving the road into corporate America for future generations of women.

Born into a poor family, Edith was raised by her grandmother, who worked as a maid at then all-white Ole Miss. She attended segregated high school until her senior year when the school system was integrated. Always an outstanding student, her interest in math led her into an accounting degree at the University of Mississippi.

With no professional role models in her family, she struggled to adjust in her first job in an accounting firm where she was the first black person and one of only three females on a professional staff of 60. She was once asked by a senior partner not to return to an audit because one of the firm’s clients did not want a black person working in his office.

In 1974 Edith sat for her CPA and became the youngest black person — and one of the first black women — to pass the exam in Tennessee. She became a leader in accountants’ professional organizations where she encouraged women to enter accounting and informed the public and the profession about the skills and achievements of women in accounting.

She joined Federal Express in 1977 as a senior accountant in the general accounting area, and moved to manager and then director. When she made a lateral move to manage Publishing Services, employees took bets that she wouldn’t last six months. She stayed 14 months, developing operational experience, and was promoted to vice president of internal audit and quality assurance.

Edith has been recognized by Dollars and Sense and Ebony magazines as an up-and-coming woman in corporate America. She remains the first and only black vice president at Federal Express. She speaks frequently to groups of working women and students to tell her story of success and to urge them on.

“I started from scratch, and many of them are,” she says. “At any point, on any day, or sometimes within any minute, discouragement can be such that it’s easier to give up … but the real importance of this to me will be an easier road for my children and other children to walk in Corporate America.”

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Peri Motamedi

Women of Achievement
1992

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

Peri Motamedi

Parvenah “Peri” Motamedi was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1944 during the reign of the Shah. After graduation from high school she worked for the Shah, collecting and illustrating press clippings. But her picture of a woman’s future was very different from what Iran’s Muslim society dictated, and that is where her long struggle started.

After being humiliated by some family members and friends because of her ideas about life and the arts, she left her home country to come to the United States to build her dream. She could speak no English.

In 1965, she began three years of study at Monticello Junior College in Illinois, followed by a year at Washington University in St. Louis. After a marriage, a brief return to Iran and the birth of a daughter, she came to Memphis. In 1975, at age 31, she entered the Memphis College of Art, earning a B.F.A. in panting in 1977. She has not slowed down since.

Rather than be a “starving artist” and waiting for a gallery-goer to buy her work, Peri purposely identified a marketable craft that people would buy, freeing her to pursue her real love — fine art. Her commercial stained glass firm, Motamedi’s GlasArt, is now 15 years old and employs four other women. Her stained and leaded glass designs are found in homes, businesses and churches. But, she says, “I never tried to get big in business. My heart and effort was in fine art and teaching.” Her love for sculpture sends her out in her pickup truck to rescue junkyard metals for skillful transformation under her welding torch.

Yet Peri gives much more than her art to our community. She has taught art to children at the Jewish Community Center and YWCA, to adult mentally ill in a rehab program at Lowenstein House, to Girl Scout leaders, and students at Shelby State Community College and Memphis State University. Peri regularly contributes art for causes, such as WKNO, Playhouse On The Square, and the Orpheum. She also volunteers time with 12- and 13-year-old students at Rozelle Elementary School to encourage them to draw or paint their feelings to music.

In 1990 she conceived and funded a very special art project. The Memphis Arts Council administers the $3,000 Visualization of Music commission, which selects an artist or artists to create work based on a piece of music selected by the Memphis Symphony conductor. The art then is unveiled at a symphony art-and-music performance featuring the selected music.

Peri Motamedi travelled thousands of miles and across cultures to build her dream of a free life and artistic expression. The success of that dream is a tribute to her initiative and talent.

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Franketta Guinn

Women of Achievement
1991

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

Franketta Guinn

In January 1984, at age 37, Franketta Guinn left her secure job with Shelby County Health Care Center to start Metro Home Health Care. Originally employing three people, the business now employs 58 and has in the past year doubled both patient visits and revenue.

One of nine children, Franketta has always “leaned toward non-traditional fields.” In the ‘60s she was active in the local civil rights movement. She graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit, with a Bachelor’s degree in health, recreation and physical education. She coached high school basketball, taught elementary physical education, and was a swimming instructor.

In the late ‘70s, Franketta returned to school to become certified to teach health and discovered the growing need for health care administrators. She entered a Master’s program in that field and in 1977 joined the Shelby County Health Care Center. There Franketta met many older people and their families. She saw that when the elderly are taken from their homes they can become confused and that hospital environments are less conducive to healing than are familiar surroundings. She realized that staying in the home surrounded by family and friends could greatly improve the quality of life for a growing population of aging Americans.

Since Franketta always wanted to own her own business and continue her work with geriatrics, she put these ideas together and came up with Metro Home Health Care. After involved licensing procedures, the company was set up and Franketta obtained her first patient — her father. That first year, Metro Home Health Care made 1,200 visits. This past year, that number had grown to 15,000.

Franketta Guinn defines success as “being all you can be at any one point in life — every time there is an opportunity to do better, you should.” Her initiative to redirect her talents has meant more peace and freedom for hundreds of senior Memphians.

Franketta later was named the Small Business Person of the Year for Tennessee and the Southeast region by the Small Business Administration. She won the Black Business of the Year award from the Black Business Association in 1991 and Supplier of the Year Award from the Mid-South Minority Purchasing Council in 1992. In 1993 she was appointed to the board of MLGW, the Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Beale Street Advisory Board.

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Elaine Lee Turner and Joan Lee Nelson

Joan Lee-Nelson
Elaine Lee-Turner
Women of Achievement
1990

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

Elaine Lee Turner and Joan Lee Nelson

Late one night in 1983, Elaine Lee Turner and Joan Lee-Nelson sat up discussing the fact that African-American children in Memphis did not know their own history. For these two women, who were intensely aware of their own family’s trail five generations from the slave ship, that problem demanded a solution. They decided they could show children their roots. Within a matter of months, Heritage Tours was a reality.

First they took their idea to various local funding sources, all of which turned them down. Not to be defeated, the women invested their own savings. Joan resigned her position as a job counselor with the City of Memphis; Elaine, a former teacher, reentered the professional world. With a little money and a lot of energy, the two women started the first African-American-owned tour company in the state. Their mission: to discover, chronicle and share the past of the Mid-South’s African-American community.

The sisters grew up in North Memphis hearing their mother, the family historian, tell of her father who was a boy when the slaves were freed. In 1965, Jet magazine named the 14-member Lee clan “the most arrested civil rights family in America.” “We participated because our heritage had been instilled in us,” Elaine said. Said Joan, “We are letting young people know what had to be done to get them where they are now.”

Taking the initiative is not new to these sisters. Elaine and Joan took the lead in organizing the Ida B. Wells Society and helped rally national recognition of Wells’ struggle for racial justice. Their work has won them awards, including the Shelby County Historical Commission’s Robert R. Church Award in 1989 for outstanding contribution in researching and presenting black historical heritage to national and international travelers. Indeed, much of their work involves collecting information through original research that otherwise would have been lost. Their interviews have turned up so much information that they plan a book.

“You have nothing to hold onto without your history,” said Joan, explaining the initiative they took. “You don’t know who you are. You don’t know where you are. You can’t envision the future … We see children’s eyes light up, knowing, ‘I’ve got a future.’”

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Carol Coletta

Women of Achievement
1989

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

Carol Coletta

From writing assistant in the Sports Information Office at Memphis State University to president of Coletta Brewer & Company, Inc., Carol Coletta has successfully made a journey through the business world that many envy. Along the way, she used her contacts and position to benefit the community — especially downtown redevelopment, tourism, and the arts.

After experience in entry-level corporate and government positions, Carol went to work in 1975 as marketing director for the Mid-America Mall project. She conceived and produced public events to bring people back downtown, including Octoberfest, the Memphis Heritage Festival and celebrations in Tom Lee Park. At the same time she was co-developer of the Timpani condominiums, downtown’s first residential renovation project, and owned and operated Magazine, the first new boutique downtown.

Starting as a public relations staff person at First Tennessee Bank in 1977, she rose in less than eight years to senior vice president for marketing and public affairs. Carol initiated the bank’s First Bravo Award, which provided $300,000 in grants to local artists; founded the First Tennessee Heritage Collection, a traveling exhibit of Tennessee art, and she organized and coordinated hundreds of citizen participants in the 1980 and 1981 Memphis Jobs Conference programs that won a $20 million capital grant from the State of Tennessee. She also was instrumental in the establishment of the public-private “superfund” which targeted promotion of tourism and the Uniport to boost Memphis’ growth.

Carol is a summa cum laude graduate of Memphis State University, pursuing her degree over a 10-year period while building a career and parenting her young daughter. Her personal civic involvement includes service as president of Memphis Planned Parenthood; chairperson of Mayor William Morris’ Economics of Amenity Task Force, and member of the Tennessee Committee for the Humanities and the Memphis Arts Council board.

All the while, Carol Coletta’s energetic leadership and dedication to both her career and her community built a model of initiative that inspires us all.

Carol, principal of Coletta & Co., is coordinator of The Community Compact, appointed by Mayor W.W. Herenton and Mayor Bill Morris to plan for the 21st Century.