Author: WOAmemphis17

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Rita Underhill

Women of Achievement
1991

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

Rita Underhill

In 1985, at a time when few people understood or even knew about the disease, Rita Underhill learned that her younger brother Max had AIDS.

He called from New York to tell her and to ask that she not yet tell their family. Rita was stunned. For over a year and a half she kept the sadness and concern to herself. Rather than turn her back on him, as so many have done, Rita provided her brother with the support he desperately needed. As his health declined Max at last decided to tell the rest of his family.

Rita, although a nurse, could find little information on AIDS: only a few paragraphs in a textbook and only one book in all the Memphis bookstores. She learned through underground channels that the drug AZT, an antiretroviral medication, could help AIDS patients. But in 1985 AZT wasn’t legal in the United States. So she flew to Mexico and brought back a supply for her brother.

Rita also helped him enter the first experimental clinical study in this country. At great expense Rita made countless trips from Memphis to New York City to be with Max. And in 1988 she faced his death with all the courage she could find.

But Rita didn’t stop caring about people with AIDS when Max died. Less than a year later, she took a job with the Aid to End AIDS Committee (ATEAC). Rita has spent recent years educating people about the disease. Initially, many people assumed that Rita had AIDS and refused to be near her. When some friends were hostile and couldn’t accept her work, she had the courage to give them up. Rita has conducted outreach programs to the gay, the African-American and the Asian communities, and to IV drug abusers. She speaks wherever and whenever she is asked, and last year reached 4,000 people.

With great courage, Rita Underhill daily faces the lives and deaths of people who have contracted AIDS. She brings to these interactions the same strength, love and warmth that helped her cope with her brothers’ disease and death.

Rita Underhill passed away on July 3, 2022.

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Jocelyn Wurzburg

Women of Achievement
1990

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

Jocelyn Wurzburg

In 1968, Memphis was a focus of the nation’s turmoil following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Jocelyn Dan Wurzburg stepped forward to take constructive, courageous action in our city.

Jocie became familiar with an organization in other cities called the Panel of American Women, and she single-handedly brought its services to Memphis. The Panel’s purpose was to eliminate racial and religious prejudice by going before groups to tell personal stories, answer questions and share outlooks. In 1990 this might seem tame, but in 1968 and the years thereafter, it was a tough assignment. Many groups took personal issue with the message and the messengers.

Jocie Wurzburg headed a group of about 40 women — black, white, Catholic, Jew, Protestant — who labored to learn new skills and educate each other on issues. Some of the Panel went with Jocie to the mayor’s office to lobby for reason in the volatile atmosphere. This effort made Time magazine, albeit derisively. The story reported on “housewives in white gloves …”

The Panel led her into other human rights work, including project director for the Memphis Martin Luther King Memorial 1976-77 and service on the Social Action Commission, Family Life Committee and Consultation on Conscience biennial sessions of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. She was appointed to the National Commission for the Observance of International Women’s Year and to the State Advisory Committee of the Civil Rights Commission.

Although the Panel of American Women ended service in 1980, Jocie Wurzburg’s work as a lecturer on equal employment and human relations continued and her career as a lawyer and divorce mediator began. Never one to stop organizing, she directed her love of music to the founding of the Jazz Society of Memphis.

It was not easy for this one-time East Memphis homemaker to become an activist — but an activist she was. The Panel of American Women was a courageous force in our city during those years. It was quoted, called upon, cited as a positive force. As her nominator said, “Jocie made all of that happen. She never got discouraged. She never let her energy flag.”

 

Jocelyn Wurzburg received the Shelby County Diversity Award in 2008. She also won the NAACP Life Time Achievement award in 2017. Later that year, Planned Parenthood awarded her the Judy Scharff Award for the Panel of American Women. The Tennessee Human Rights Commission established the Jocelyn Dan Wurzburg Civil Rights Award in her name. Today, she offers Mediation Services as a saner way of dealing with conflicts.

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Josephine Burson

Women of Achievement
1989

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

Josephine Burson

Josephine W. Burson, the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants was taught by her parents that America is the land of freedom and opportunity and that there is an open door for everyone.

Josie’s involvement with the Democratic Party began in the traditional way — she did her share of telephoning and mailings. She went on to head the Democratic Women’s Committee to elect Senator Estes Kefauver. Despite opposition by the newspapers and with her hard work, Kefauver won the election, ending a long hold on politics in Memphis by the Crump forces. She also headed the Women’s Division of the Tennessee campaign for the national Kennedy-Johnson ticket.

Prior to 1960, political campaigns in Memphis had been just as segregated as water fountains and restaurants. The Kennedy-Johnson campaign signaled an end to that division. The campaign was being conducted by an integrated group, but when it was announced that Lady Bird Johnson would appear in Memphis, it was assumed that there would be two meetings as there had always been — one white, one black. Josie, however, refused to participate in a segregated event. At that time the only place that would accommodate an integrated meeting was the MWCA, which was too small. Challenged to find a larger location, she succeeded in signing the first contract for the newly-renovated Ellis Auditorium. Thus began a new, more open era in Memphis.

Josie was the first cabinet appointment announced by Gov. Buford Ellington and she served as Commissioner of Employment Security from 1967 to 1971. As a volunteer in Hadassah, Burson rose from chapter president to national vice-president. In these positions she has worked for the welfare of the State of Israel. Since 1981 she has been an employee of Senior Citizen Services, where she has worked with the deinstitutionalized elderly.

In 1975, Josie was selected National Mother of the Year by American Mothers. The 50th mother to make a presentation, she spoke movingly of being a first generation American. Her parents came to America seeking the American dream and their children achieved it. Taught by her family the history of persecution of European Jews, Josie Burson has worked with courage to live in a land where persecution of any segment of the population should never occur.

 

Josephine Burson passed away June 9, 2009.

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Sarah Clayborne

Women of Achievement
1994

HEROISM
for a woman whose heroic spirit was tested and
shown as a model to all in Shelby County and beyond:

Sarah Clayborne

Sarah Clayborne may be the 1990s quintessential mom and apple pie woman. Known as “The Pie Lady” in Memphis, hers is a story of personal commitment and initiative that has caught the hearts of the readers of People magazine, actor Tom Cruise, talk show audiences and just about everybody who knows her story of struggle.

“Sometimes I wonder what all this attention’s about,” she said. “All I did was try to make a living for myself and my daughter and grandbabies.”

Sarah, 44, is a cook who has worked for several well-known restaurants in the city. She no doubt would have continued working in relative obscurity had it not been for a robber’s bullet which struck her daughter in the head in 1987, leaving her paralyzed and helpless. Eugenia Binkins was 18 at the time, had one young son and was six weeks pregnant. She spent her entire pregnancy in a coma, later giving birth to Ahab, who now is five.

To raise money to meet the family’s mounting medical and living expenses, Sarah began baking pies on the side. In 1989, when she lost her job as head chef at a restaurant and nightclub in a dispute over work hours, Sarah decided to launch a full-time business making the pies she learned to bake as an eight-year-old child at her grandmother’s side. Early success led her to open a restaurant in an old house in a rundown South Memphis neighborhood, not far from the Mississippi River. Although she was gaining a steady reputation as “The Pie Lady,” these weren’t easy times. Her home had burned in 1987 and needed repairs. Then her restaurant, including supplies and equipment, burned before she opened the doors for business. She had to make repairs. Then in 1991, her home was burglarized. Even her daughter’s wheelchair was stolen.

Despite the setbacks, she opened her business on Florida Street in January 1991 on little more than a prayer. The menu included soul food and, of course, pies. “I didn’t have any money but I could see my little building and I did have a vision,” she said.

She raised her price on her pies from $10 to $12. A lot of people told her she wouldn’t sell them at that price, that people wouldn’t go to her restaurant in the decrepit neighborhood. Both warnings proved wrong. Sarah’s reputation soared when production crew members filming The Firm learned about her restaurant and began frequenting the place to eat chicken pot pie, smothered chicken and dressing, mixed greens, candied yams and — of course — those pies. Tom Cruise came by one day and ordered a piece of Cherry Royale. He bought a whole pie to go. Director Sydney Pollack one day tasted Sarah’s Glory Hallelujah pie. He left a $100 tip.

Sarah says sometimes she can’t believe how far she has come. She credits her grandmothers and many African-American cooks for her baking talents, and untold numbers of Memphians who have supported her business endeavor. “I couldn’t have kept going,” she says, “without the help of a lot of wonderful people.”

Sarah now employs several people and has a new dream: to use some of her pie proceeds to open a center for indigents.

Clayborne has baked her pies for charities such as Youth Villages’ Soup Sunday and Phineas Newborn Family Foundation. In addition, she has worked for the Center for Independent Living and created the Saveahoe Foundation to provide job training to prostitutes.

Sarah passed away in Jackson, Tennessee, in June 2020.

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Anne White Kenworthy

Women of Achievement
1993

HEROISM
for a woman whose heroic spirit was tested and
shown as a model to all in Shelby County and beyond:

Anne White Kenworthy

Anne White is a rape victim who heroically fought back and spoke up.

In 1991, at the age of 26, Anne was a Memphis City Schools teacher and past director of the Memphis Urban Mathematics Collaborative. Her love of math, statistics and teaching kept her busy on the public speaking and grant-writing circuits.

Early one October morning her world was suddenly changed when she was brutally assaulted at gunpoint in her East Memphis home by a man who had stalked her for several weeks. After a two-hour assault, he tied her with telephone cords, gagged her with pantyhose and shut her in a closet. Her 17-year-old rapist said he would be coming back to return her car, which he said he was borrowing.

Left in the closet, Anne tried to calm herself with mundane thoughts as, inch by inch, she pulled on a loose end of the cord. After four hours she was able to free herself and half roll, half hop out her front door and to the street to seek help. A passing neighbor stopped to help. Before Anne got in the car, she had the presence of mind to close her front door and pick up the telephone cords so the rapist wouldn’t know she had escaped.

That was just the beginning of Anne’s battle to regain control of her life and to fight back against the man who assaulted her. Her attacker did return in her car. With the help of alert neighbors, the young Arkansas parolee was caught the same day. Anne’s description and evidence helped police make the arrest. Then she painstakingly helped authorities make their case against the young man.

After the trauma of the rape and an aftermath of nightmares, Anne had to deal with many trips to court. But she was determined to see it through. The prosecutors gave her veto power over plea bargaining negotiations. Finally, her attacker pleaded guilty and got a 20-year prison sentence.

The need to act heroically didn’t stop there. Anne White has stepped out of the secret, silent world of rape victims to speak publicly about her experience. In a front-page story in The Commercial Appeal, she talked frankly about what was done to her, how it injured her life and how far she must go to reclaim her life.

“I kind of want my little moment of acknowledgement that I survived this,” she said. “This happened and it was horrible. Let’s just put it out on the table, learn from it, and move on.” Anne has a new job and is slowly working her way back into a normal life. And she is working on ways to teach people about rape and rape survival.

Anne White heroically stepped out of society’s shadows to shine light on the crime of rape and its effects on victims’ lives. All of us are indebted to her.

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Viola Harris McFerren

Women of Achievement
1992

HEROISM
for a woman whose heroic spirit was tested and
shown as a model to all in Shelby County and beyond:

Viola Harris McFerren

When Viola Harris came to Fayette County to attend high school in 1947 she saw that education for blacks was separate and unequal. Materials were outdated, facilities inadequate, and there were not enough teachers per students to ensure quality education. Black children attended on staggered terms in order to pick cotton, returning after the harvest, having forgotten much of what they learned prior to the interruption.

Viola saw that blacks were discouraged from registering to vote, too. She knew in her heart these things were wrong.

After she married in 1950, she was determined to create a community in which her children and people of all races and backgrounds could realize their full potentials. In the 1960s, she labored fearlessly for black voter registration. She helped desegregate lunch counters and public schools, helped bring Head Start to Fayette County, and worked for the appointment of black citizens to the county Board of Education. Her actions were unpopular with many in the racially divided county. More than once she had to pull her children to the floor to protect them from gunfire.

Denied gasoline and other necessities, and under the threat of violent consequences, Viola frequently had to drive to Memphis to acquire supplies for Fayette County residents. Seeing that many families lived in shacks with no plumbing, she worked to ease barriers to the poor in obtaining loans from the Farmers Home Administration. She worked with others to build a much-needed community center. Through her persistent efforts, TVA and Memphis State University began providing leadership and entrepreneurial development programs for the county. In 1987 she was the first woman and black to run for a position on the Board of the Chickasaw Electric Cooperative. Although she lost the election, her campaign turned out the largest vote ever for the contest and has resulted in the cooperative becoming more sensitive to the needs of the community.

Viola is a member of the original Fayette County Civic and Welfare League and serves as president. She also is executive director of the Fayette County Commission on Aging. This allows her to set up survival networks for isolated older residents who often have limited incomes and no transportation. Her work has been recorded in two histories of the Civil Rights era: “Our Portion of Hell” and “Blacks in Tennessee: 1791-1970.”

She has paid a tremendous price for striving to achieve justice and equal rights for all. In her heroism, Viola McFerren has retained what a nominator called a “remarkable reconciliatory spirit.” She has worked quietly but tenaciously to get work done.

 

Viola McFerren passed away on April 22, 2013 at the age of 81.

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Shirley Baliss

Women of Achievement
1991

HEROISM
for a woman whose heroic spirit was tested and
shown as a model to all in Shelby County and beyond:

Shirley Baliss

Shirley Baliss came to Memphis in 1987, after her first episode of manic depressive illness. She was 15. She came to live with a friend and to make a new beginning. A few months later Shirley was homeless, estranged from family and friends who did not understand her illness.

She found temporary shelter at missions and churches, attempted suicide and — for a while — even lived in the woods in Bartlett. Her access to the mental health system was sporadic and her records in January 1989 showed her prognosis as “very poor.”

But in April 1989 Shirley was referred to the homeless program at the Midtown Mental Health Center, where she quickly responded to group support, medication, a group home and a compassionate case manager, Janice Ballard. Shirley began to manage her illness and to take more control of her life, while never forgetting the lost people she had met and the frightening feeling of homelessness. She began to speak out about the plight of homeless people wherever she could.

She participated in the October 1989 “Housing Now” march on Washington, volunteered at the Vietnam Vet Center and made an emotional appeal before Tennessee’s joint House-Senate Committee on the Homeless. She allowed her story to be told in a video about homelessness in Memphis, spoke publicly about her experiences and served as a panelist at last year’s citywide Symposium on Homelessness. In March 1990 she found her own apartment. Now she is celebrating living in one place for a whole year.

Earlier this year, Shirley’s new-found stability took on added meaning when she was hired as a human resources development coordinator for the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation — in a position that makes her an advocate for mental health consumers.

Asked about her own heroic journey from being homeless to being an advocate for those who are homeless, Shirley credits the people who befriended her when she desperately needed it. “I am not ashamed of my illness,” she said. “If I can help one person, that’s all I want.”

Shirley was still living in an apartment of her own in 1994, and getting actively involved in her church.

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Dinia Cruz

Women of Achievement
1990

HEROISM
for a woman whose heroic spirit was tested and
shown as a model to all in Shelby County and beyond:

Dinia Cruz

More than five years ago, Dr. Dinia Cruz, a pediatrician educated in her native Philippines and in New York, left the Memphis and Shelby County Health Department and opened her medical practice in Southwest Memphis.

In 1986 she took her practice “on the streets” to address health care needs of people who were going without proper medical attention — often because they had no transportation or did not know they needed care. Dinia knew that her primary area, Memphis’ 38109 zip code, had 66,200 people but only two practicing physicians. She’s one of them and she’s the only pediatrician. Her objective was to go to patients who could not come to her.

At first, Dinia’s 36-foot mobile clinic visited 19 public housing developments six days a week, serving primarily children. Her patients included those who fall between the cracks — people who are not eligible for Medicaid and have no money for doctors. She gives such people free treatment, including medicine and lab work. Her motivation? “I used to see families who never had a shot … I took care of that. So the reward is there,” she said.

But the rising load proved too heavy even for this energetic physician. She now focuses on the five housing projects that are the most isolated from medical care. She takes the mobile clinic out two days a week, with vaccine in the freezer, throat culture gear in the fridge, blood-testing and urine-testing apparatus on the kitchen counter, and a built-in couch doubling as an examination table.

Dinia has received local and national attention for her work in the housing projects. She was recognized by Newsweek magazine in 1986 as “One of America’s 100 Heroes” and again in Newsweek in 1989 in Amway Corporation’s salute to “A Nation of Good Neighbors.” In 1987 Dinia, who immigrated to this country just 10 years earlier, received the Filipino-American Society’s Community Service Award.

“The service has to be rendered,” she humbly says of her heroism. “I find more peace, more fulfillment taking care of the needy ones. If I don’t care for them, who will?”

Faced with turmoil and financial uncertainty due to health care reform, Dinia closed her clinic in 1993. She is working full-time at a Baptist Minor Medical Clinic as a general practitioner and in pediatrics part-time at the Naval Hospital in Millington. She hopes to donate the mobile clinic to a community hospital.

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Elizabeth Phillips

Women of Achievement
1994

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Elizabeth Phillips

Although the life of Elizabeth Phillips would qualify her as a Woman of Achievement in almost all categories, her outstanding trait was her courage — a quality recognized by her friends and foes alike.

Born in 1906 in Athens, Tennessee, she taught high school in a small town for 20 years while earning her doctorate in English literature. Widowed early, and divorced after an unhappy second marriage, she moved to Memphis in 1953 to join the faculty at Memphis State College (it wasn’t yet a university). Soon thereafter, she signed a petition with a group of like-minded Memphis State professors urging that the Memphis Public Library be opened freely to blacks — instead of only once a week on so-called “black Thursdays.” President Jack Smith demanded a withdrawal of the endorsement from each signatory, under threat of dismissal from the faculty. Though Dr. Phillips, as sole caretaker for her ill and aging mother, dreaded such loss, she adamantly refused to recant, earning the respect of her colleagues and, not incidentally, security in her profession.

Following her mother’s death in the late 1950s, Elizabeth resolved to dedicate her personal energies to, as she put it, “working for the enrichment of all lives that touch mine.” This decision led her to ever-greater involvement in the Civil Rights movement, just getting under way at that time. She worked tirelessly for the NAACP, the ACLU, and was a member of the Tennessee Council on Human Relations.

But her participation became most visible at the time of the 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike in Memphis when she was one of the few whites who marched with the strikers. Immediately following Dr. King’s assassination, at a meeting of the group “Save Our City,” called to discuss what needed to be done now, Elizabeth chose as her personal assignment to visit the police station nightly and monitor arrest tactics — this, after numerous reports of police brutality by black citizens arrested during the curfews.

After the strike was settled, and dismayed that her own Presbyterian congregation was not racially integrated, she joined the predominantly black Parkway Gardens Church, one of only nine white members at the time. She then turned her attention to her main interest — education — working with Memphis State’s Black Students Association to bring needed curriculum reforms.

In 1969, Elizabeth chaired a committee that set up a Black Studies course at the college and became the first professor to teach the first course, English 4371, American Negro Literature. Later, on a professional level, she published a series of study guides to the works of such authors as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry and Alex Haley. Haley called her guide to Autobiography of Malcolm X the best he had seen.

Honors came her way in later years. In 1975, she was the first recipient of MSU’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Human Rights award. That same year the Memphis Newspaper Guild named her Citizen of the Year for her service as “a humanitarian who sought to further ideals of racial quality and human dignity.” In 1980, just a few months before her death, Parkway Gardens Church awarded her the denomination’s highest honor for laity, naming her Ruling Elder Emeritus. By then, she was the church’s only white member.

In her will, Dr. Elizabeth Phillips left her entire estate to establish a scholarship fund to aid MSU’s black students. Thus her heritage lives on.

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Cora Price Taylor

Women of Achievement
1993

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Cora Price Taylor

When Cora Price Taylor was appointed principal of the Manassas School in 1909, the facility provided education only through the eighth grade and was housed in inadequate, overcrowded facilities. When her tenure ended some 20 years later, the school had been through two major building projects and had expanded to offer high school diplomas.

Concerned about conditions at the school, Cora worked with leaders in the community to purchase land across the street from the school. In 1918 a sixteen-room stucco building was erected. Determined that students in the community would have the programs and facilities they required to obtain an excellent education, Cora once more went to friends and patrons for financial solicitations. Using student labor and help from men in the neighborhood, a two-story frame building was built to serve the industrial departments. In 1924, the first high school class graduated.

Cora obtained support from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Money from this foundation was used to secure equipment, hire more teachers and staff, develop a library, chemistry and physics laboratories, and purchase machines for home economics. Manassas was the largest school supported by the Julius Rosenwald Fund in the nation.

In 1927, Cora began a new campaign to build a school auditorium. So determined was she that this project be a success that she personally hauled bricks from Millington. The 1,200-seat auditorium still bears her name.

Cora died in 1932. Addie D. Jones, in Portrait of a Ghetto School, wrote that Cora’s administration was marked by initiative, profound planning, and an indomitable will to make her educational program succeed. In 1941, National Education Association Field Director Charl Williams described Cora as one of the truly great teachers, an inspiration to students and teachers both at Manassas and throughout the country.

Cora Taylor’s life represents years of devotion to the educational needs of African American youth. She worked tirelessly with the members of the black community and through foundations to realize her dream — that students would have access to an excellent education in their own community.