Author: WOAmemphis17

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.

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.

Women of Achievement
1992

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Judith Schwarz Scharff

Judith Schwarz Scharff was a mother of four sons whose energy and dynamism established Memphis Planned Parenthood as a major reproductive health clinic in the Mid-South. Though she died of cancer at age 40, her impact lives on.

Born in New Orleans, Judith attended Connecticut College for Women briefly and married at age 17. Her first child was born two years later and by 1961 there were four. Her husband’s work brought her to Memphis in 1956 where she plunged into music and art groups, political campaigns and women’s causes with enthusiasm.

She was volunteering at a Memphis school when she encountered five teenage girls who were pregnant and first heard about an effort to establish a family planning clinic in Memphis. As she had done with other causes, she rapidly turned her concern into action and soon became the first board president of the newly revived Memphis Association for Planned Parenthood (MAPP) in 1966.

At that time family planning help for low-income groups was not available in Memphis except for a group of women voluntarily participating in a research project in City of Memphis hospitals. At the early meetings of the first board, Judith’s enthusiasm for the agency was unparalleled. Her faithful determination ensured Planned Parenthood’s success. She chaired many committees and often single-handedly accomplished their charges. She not only served on the board and committees, gave and raised money, but also worked clinics whenever asked.

She served on the national and southeast region information and education committees and served on the Memphis agency board for nine years. Judith was determined that every child would be a wanted child in this city. “The atmosphere of MAPP in this era was charged by Judith’s constant presence,” said former board president Ed Kaplan. “She was a magnet. She made us all brave because we were afraid to be less courageous than she.”

In 1975, after devoting many volunteer hours to Planned Parenthood, Judith took the job of director of information and education and continued until her death on May 10, 1976. The board established the Judith S. Scharff Memorial Education Fund and uses the proceeds to maintain a library for Planned Parenthood.

Judith had many interests beyond Planned Parenthood. She was administrative director of Transition Center, Inc., a board member of Citizens to Preserve Overton Park, a former member of the board of governors of United Way of Greater Memphis, and a member of United Way’s health and welfare planning council. She was secretary of the board of trustees of the Memphis Academy of Arts, a docent for Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and a board member of the Memphis Orchestral Society.

Those who can remember or even imagine a time when birth control was unavailable to most women in Memphis, and when reproductive health care was a luxury for the wealthy only, will agree that Judith Scharff has left a rich heritage — a heritage that continues to enrich our lives today.

Women of Achievement
1991

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Lena Angevine Warner

During one night’s ordeal in Cuba, she delivered a baby, performed a circumcision, a tonsillectomy and an amputation (all with the same kitchen knife), and passed her own kidney stones. She was Lena Angevine Warner, a woman whose story demands to be told.

Lena Angevine was born in Grenada, Mississippi, in 1869, the daughter of a prominent Mississippi couple. In 1877 a yellow fever epidemic swept through the area, killing everyone in the Angevine household except eight-year-old Lena. Her grandmother enrolled her in a boarding school in Memphis, where her interest in health care was nurtured by a teacher who had been a friend of Florence Nightingale.

Over her grandmother’s protests, Lena entered the first nursing school in Memphis in 1889. According to The New York Times and the American Journal of Nursing, she was the first graduate nurse in Tennessee and, probably, in the South. She took a post-graduate course at Cook County Hospital in Chicago and was married briefly to E.C. Warner. In 1897 she founded the Tennessee College of Medicine and Nursing.

When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, President McKinley called for volunteer nurses. Lena led a team of Memphis nurses to Cuba. “Every kind of epidemic — cholera, malaria, smallpox, yellow fever and bubonic plague — gripped Cuba,” she said later. Her outstanding nursing and organizational skills resulted in being named chief executive nurse of the island. That meant she became the first and the only woman officer in the U.S. Army.

Besides her nursing talents, Lena was the designer of the first official nurse’s uniform, a Zouave jacket in blue over a waistshirt of white linen and a long navy skirt.

Because she had been exposed to yellow fever as a child, she was considered to be (erroneously, as it turned out) immune to the disease. After the war was over she was invited back to Cuba to be the nurse in charge of yellow fever experiments. Working with Dr. Walter Reed and a distinguished medical staff, Lena was there when experiments proved that the female stegomyia mosquito carried the disease. Several of the medical team, including Lena, became ill with yellow fever during the experiments.

Returning to Memphis, she began a long career in public health and community service. She was a founder of the Tennessee Nurses Association and the Tennessee Health Association. She organized Red Cross chapters and served as the state chairperson for the Red Cross Nursing Department from 1910 to 1932.

Lena moved to Knoxville in 1916 and fought epidemics of cholera and influenza throughout Appalachia. She was a tireless fighter for better sanitation and public health. She published hundreds of books and pamphlets on health concerns as the director of rural health and sanitation for the University of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service from 1916 until her retirement in 1946 at age 79.

During this time, an incident occurred which characterizes Lena’s concern for all living creatures. While leaving a Home Demonstration Club meeting one day, Lena saw a man beating two horses that were struggling to pull a heavy load. She stationed herself in front of the animals until the cursing man removed part of the load.

Lena Angevine Warner died in 1948. She lived a life of “firsts” yet few people today know her name. Although she was profiled in The New York Times and was a colleague of Dr. Walter Reed, Lena was more concerned about being useful than being famous. At her death she was entitled to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, a place reserved for heroes. Following the custom of her life, she was brought home to Memphis to be buried at Elmwood Cemetery near her family.

Women of Achievement
1989

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Mary Treadwell, Georgia Harry and Patricia Walker Shaw

To the casual observer the similarities in the three women honored this year as recipients of the Heritage award may seem superficial. But Patricia Walker Shaw, Mary Harry Treadwell and Georgia Harry were alike in many different ways.

First, they were all three insurance businesswomen. Mary Harry Treadwell and Georgia Harry were the first women in the world to establish and successfully manage an insurance agency. Two generations later, insurance was still generally considered a man’s world when Pat Walker Shaw started at the bottom to learn the family business. In 1983, she became the first woman to head a major U.S. life insurance company.

As young women, Pat, Mary and Georgia expected their lives to follow very traditional patterns. All three married. Pat and Mary had children. Pat attended Oakwood School and went to Fisk, where she majored in business administration and became a social worker. Mary and Georgia attended Miss Higbee’s School and made their debuts in Memphis where they expected to live comfortable and traditional lives. But Mary’s husband died, and Georgia’s marriage failed.

After Timmons Treadwell’s death in 1909, Mary and Georgia continued to manage the family business, a cotton factoring and wholesale grocery establishment. But their banker pointed out that the popularity of the automobile would create a demand for insurance. So the two young women who had never ever written a check got a rate manual, read it and began writing insurance through Chubb and Son and Fidelity Casualty Company.

At first, people gave them business because they felt sorry for them — all alone, trying to educate two young boys — but their customers soon developed respect for their frugality and business acumen. Treadwell & Harry wrote the surety bond on the Harahan Bridge, guaranteeing that the work would be completed on schedule. As their business flourished, they were able to hire male secretaries and in 1920, after writing insurance for almost everyone else of note in Memphis, Mary wrote a policy on her own automobile. It was a good idea. A police officer observed at the time that Mary always had her foot on the gas, never on the brake.

After World War I, George and Tim came into the business, but their mother and aunt remained active until 1935. Mrs. Treadwell died in 1946. Mary Harry, the quiet intellectual, lived to be 92. In 1971, the agency they founded was sold to Cook Industries, but the family regained control in 1983.

The same year saw Pat Walker Shaw’s untimely death, a tragedy in every sense of the word. She was head of one of the largest black-owned businesses in the South and had risen to national prominence as the first woman president of the National Insurance Association. Her accomplishments were remarkable: she held memberships with nearly 25 organizations, boards and commissions, including two government appointments. She was the first woman ever to serve on the Memphis Light Gas & Water Board.

Because of the segregated schools of Memphis, the Walkers sent their young daughter to a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, New York. Pat graduated from Fisk University and moved to Chicago, then later to Nashville where she was a social worker. In 1966 she, her husband Harold and their young son returned to Memphis where Pat took an entry-level position at Universal Life, an insurance company founded by her grandfather in 1923. The facts belie the popular notion that she “inherited” her job at the top. She worked in the data processing and the accounting departments, and she developed new marketing strategies for the company.

When the board of directors chose Pat to be the CEO in 1983, A. Maceo Walker said in an interview, “Girls can do the job just as good.”

Pat Shaw’s unique leadership abilities were recognized and appreciated by all Memphians; however, let us not forget she was a powerful black woman. Her deepest loyalties were to the black community. She said, “Most of the people we serve, the people who are our major customers, are grassroots folk who make $15,000 and below. We are, first of all, responsible to them.”

As we hold in our memories these three extraordinary women who mastered the insurance business and left their marks on this community, let us listen to the words of Pat Walker Shaw: “Women have to accomplish more; we have to prove ourselves over and over.’