Author: WOAmemphis17

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Elnora Payne Woods

Women of Achievement
1995

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

Elnora Payne Woods

Elnora Payne Woods was born in Olive Branch, Miss., the third of six children. The school she attended in Byhalia only went through the eighth grade. In order to finish high school, she moved to Memphis and boarded with her mother’s cousin. She supported herself by working as a waitress and dishwasher seven days a week. After her graduation she continued to work to help her younger brother and sisters through school.

In 1953 she married J.C. Woods, a cab driver, and together they had four children. In 1976 Mr. Woods bought Orange Mound Cab Co. He continued to drive a cab and Elnora worked in the office. Two and a half years later her husband died unexpectedly and Elnora was left to run the company.

Elnora had a little experience but a lot of determination. She already had trained to be a masseuse, keypunch operator and data transcriber, so she had confidence in her ability to learn new things.

At first each day was a struggle. According to Elnora she initially worked just to pay the expensive insurance. “I took one day at a time and listened to others,” she said. “Then I did what I could do and what I had to do.”

Under her leadership the company became Citywide Cab and grew from a total fleet of 22 cabs to 100 cabs and from 14 drivers to more than 100 drivers. The company now is self-insured and debt-free.

In 1992, Citywide Cab was named Small Business of the Year among companies with 75 – 350 employees in the annual Memphis Business Journal awards. Her goal was financial security for herself and her family.

Through initiative, Elnora Payne Woods built a thriving business and a legacy for her children.

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Veronica Coleman-Davis

Women of Achievement
1994

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

Veronica Coleman-Davis

Veronica Coleman is a woman of “firsts” who has carved a wide path through Shelby County’s legal community and right into America’s history books. Along the way, she has worked to identify crime’s root and to foster programs to slow its growth.

Born in Washington, D.C. Ronnie’s family moved to Brooklyn when she was still a baby. In 1956 her father opened an insurance company in Ghana. Ronnie lived in Africa during her junior high years, but in 1959 she was sent back to a Pennsylvania boarding school and spent summers with her parents in Africa.

She graduated from Howard University, moved to Memphis with her husband and graduated from Memphis State University Law School in 1975 — while raising three sons. She first practiced law as an assistant public defender for the city and then for the county. Then, inspired to practice as a private defense attorney, she and two friends formed Memphis’ first all-female law firm — Coleman, Sorak and Williams. Next, she was appointed to serve as an assistant in the District Attorney General’s office where she remained for three years. Then this varied legal career took another turn, this time into the academic arena as assistant to the president and legal counsel for Dr. Thomas Carpenter at Memphis State.

After a year and a half, Ronnie returned to litigation as senior attorney for Federal Express Corp. But soon came another twist in the path — and in 1989 she was appointed referee of Juvenile Court, the first woman on that bench in 25 years. When she ran for district attorney in 1990, she said, “Most people did not feel that a woman should lead a law enforcement agency. In 1990 I thought I was born too soon. But obviously my perspective has changed. Clearly, I was born at just the right time.”

Ronnie’s path through the law reached its highest point so far last year when she was appointed by President Clinton as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee — the first woman and the first black person to hold that post in the United States. U.S. District Judge Odell Horton extended the oath of office in October. “We are witnessing,” Horton said, “a unique and important event in our lies, in the life of the court, life of the judiciary, city, county and nation.”

Ronnie is past president of the local Chapter of the National Bar Association, founding president of the Coalition of 100 Black Women, Memphis chapter, and active in Leadership Memphis, Goals for Memphis, and more. During her tenure as president of the Coalition of 100 Black Women, she initiated in 1984 the first volunteer mentoring program for teenage mothers.

Ronnie has said, “People call women a minority and women are not a minority. Once the public realizes that women are capable of being leaders, there are no limits to what women can do in government or in the private sector.”

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Sandy Sanders and Patty Wallace

Sandy Sanders
Patty Wallace
Women of Achievement
1995

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

Sandy Sanders and Patty Wallace

Sandy Sanders and Patty Wallace wear classic clothes and perfect makeup. They cook in country blue kitchens and have husbands who go duck hunting. But now their privileged lives have changed forever.

In December 1992, between kids’ basketball games and church suppers in Dyersburg, Patty Wallace and Sandy Sanders raised their right hands and swore to tell the truth about being sexually assaulted by Judge David Lanier, one of West Tennessee’s most politically powerful men. He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison for using his authority to violate the civil rights of five women, and he was removed from office by the Tennessee Legislature.

The heroic action of these two women set a national precedent and drew national publicity as the first case in which a judge was sentenced under federal guidelines producing a long prison term.

In all, 13 women worked with federal investigators to track Lanier’s history of sexual assault and harassment in his courtroom and in his chambers. Eight testified about how Lanier pressured female courthouse workers and women with custody cases in his court to submit to his sexual assaults. One woman said he kept a sleeping bag in his office for the assaults. Another said he forced her to perform oral sex and another said the judge fondled her from behind his bench where no one could see.

Lanier was convicted for actions involving five women. Fear of further harassment kept most of them from allowing their names to be used in news accounts. However, two women, Patty Wallace and Sandy Sanders, agreed in April 1993 to let the public know how their experiences changed their lives. Maybe then, they hoped, the insulting banter would be replaced by compassion and respect for women who endure the crime of sexual harassment and choose to fight back.

For Judge Lanier, the jurors were in a courtroom. But Sandy and Patty found themselves on trial in shopping malls and grocery checkouts, where the comments and looks from neighbors continued. And so did the nightmares.

Patty and Sandy were heroic enough to go the extra mile. They shared their stories with The Commercial Appeal, U.S. News and World Report and television’s Inside Edition.

They are saluted as representatives of all the women who dared go to federal court, day after day, to describe the horrors of sexual abuse.

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Dorothy Sturm

Women of Achievement
1995

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Dorothy Sturm

Artist, educator and mentor all describe Dorothy Sturm’s achievements. She excelled in each of these areas during her lifetime and her impact continues to be felt.

Born in Memphis in 1911, Dorothy Sturm graduated from St. Mary’s Episcopal Girls’ School in 1929. Her father gave her a bus ticket to New York, where she arrived in 1930 to study art.

She returned to the Delta in 1938 to become an instructor at the Memphis College of Art where she taught until she formally retired in the late 1970s. During her teaching career she continued to create her own art. In addition to her abstract pieces, she is world-famous in the medical community for her watercolors of blood cells, which were first published in a 1953 text.

These are the facts surrounding the life of Dorothy Sturm. But they in no way fully describe the impact she had both on the art world and on her students and friends.

One of her many supporters said, “Dorothy is a woman who knew no boundaries. She persevered, challenged and excelled in all arenas in which she participated, regardless of obstacles or opposition. She was an artist whose expressive mode was always on the edge pushing our vision and intellect.”

In the 1950s, when abstract art was new, Dorothy expressed herself in the traditional mediums of painting and drawing. She also forged ahead and applied abstract technique to many other media, which was unheard of at the time. She was one of the few Tennessee artists to be represented by a New York Gallery and her work was exhibited nationally. Simultaneously, in the early 1950s she was making meticulous renderings of blood cells from slides assigned to her by Dr. L.W. Diggs. One nominator says, “To my knowledge, no one has ever approached the quality and excellence of her renderings of cell formations.” The book, The Morphology of Blood Cells was published in 1954 and is now in its fifth edition.

Her impact as a teacher and mentor cannot be understated. She was a role model for women artists at that time. Countless letters from former students and colleagues of both sexes state that contact with Dorothy changed their lives.

A female student from the 1960s says, “She was an avid conversationalist with a broad range of subjects. She was warm, tolerant, accessible and interesting. Her powerful presence was felt by students and colleagues alike.” These sentiments are echoed in letters from working artists and arts educators from across the country.

Dorothy Sturm did not just teach art skills. She taught self-discovery and respect for others, the wonder of nature, pursuit of excellence and how to maintain a spirit of inquiry and curiosity.

Dorothy Sturm died in 1988 but the power of her life’s work continues to ripple through the art world.

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Ruth Knight Allen

Women of Achievement
1995

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

Ruth Knight Allen

Ruth Knight Allen is determined to help native people, and she brings all the power of her spirit and her Cherokee-Choctaw heritage to that task. Ruth came to Memphis from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 51 years ago and began her formal schooling at age 13, in the third grade at Peabody Elementary. She went on to raise two children, work for 17 years for Holiday Corp., where she built the in-house printing department, and then founded her own business, Pipestone Printing, while working full-time at the American Red Cross.

Underlying everything that she does is the desire to exemplify what American Indian women are capable of accomplishing. She helped create the Far-Away Cherokee Association, now the Native American Intertribal Association, to highlight native heritage and offer support services to native people. She helped organize the American Indian Association for Native American military personnel in Millington.

She funded her own travel to Colorado in 1986 to the National Governor’s Interstate Indian Council conference to represent Tennessee’s Indian people for the first time in the council’s 37 years. Then she worked to have Tennessee as the site of the 1988 conference, to coincide with a celebration of “The Year of the Indian in Tennessee – 1988.” She served from 1987 to 1990 as secretary-treasurer of the council.

She was the only woman on the five-member Tennessee Commission of Indian Affairs from 1983 to 1990, and was the 1990 census liaison among Indian people. Ruth formulated, in a six-year process, documents for recognition of American Indians living in Tennessee. Her proposal for an American Indian Heritage Route was submitted to Congress as part of the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission report and was one of four actions chosen as feasible for implementation.

She is one of two Tennesseans on the advisory committee of the Delta Tourism Development Commission and is working to obtain the “Old Marine Hospital” at Chickasaw Heritage Park for a Delta American Indian Cultural/Resource Center. As a member of the University of Memphis Advisory Committee for Chucalissa, she is working to save that ancient native village.

Ruth has shared her culture with diverse groups around the country. She also was saluted as one of The Commercial Appeal’s “1,000 Points of Light” in Memphis in 1989.

What is it like to be an American Indian in today’s world? According to Ruth, “It is a tremendous responsibility being both history and future.” Ruth carries that burden with grace and strength, determined, she says, to restore the American Indian to a place of dignity and respect, thereby helping preserve the heritage of all Americans.

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Nickii Elrod

Women of Achievement
1995

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

Nickii Elrod

Nickii Elrod knows how to tackle the big boys. Sexism and racism in the pages of a major metropolitan newspaper? Let her at it! A railroad trying to kill a historic neighborhood? Here comes Nickii! Poor children needing a warm smile and an open heart? Tell her where they are …

Nickii came to The Commercial Appeal in 1969 as a staff reporter in what was then the “women’s section.” She had already had one career – as an Air Force wife who lived in 27 cities around the world in 27 years. She came to Memphis, the biggest city near her hometown of Greenwood, Miss., to rebuild following her divorce.

She was for many years the only feminist in the newsroom. She embraced as her own the task of being the translator in Memphis of the struggle for women’s equality. She persevered, despite the prevailing legacy of male domination and ignorance of women’s issues at the newspaper and throughout the region.

When the historic Tennessee Year of the Woman Conference was held in Clarksville in June 1977, Nickii shipped a page-one story every day. “I totaled 16 hours of sleep in four days,” she later said, and in one 24-hour stretch she worked 22 straight hours.

Her sense of fairness also reached to people of color. She joined the National Council of Negro Women and the NAACP. She wrote about issues in the black community and incorporated black people into stories about Memphis and the area in general, something that was not common then. As Angus McEachran, editor and president of The Commercial Appeal wrote of her in a nominating letter: “Not all that she wrote about were popular topics of the day, but she had the courage of her convictions and the tenacity to carry them through.”

The same courage carried Nickii when the Missouri Pacific Railroad started eminent domain proceedings to take over large tracts of land in Rozelle-Annesdale in 1975. The railroad’s plan would have turned a stable South Memphis neighborhood into a mega-center for handling cargo and 18-wheeler trucks.

Nickii joined the effort to save the neighborhood and the antebellum Raynor House. Against everyone’s advice, she bought the house, and in 1978, just short of her 60th birthday, she moved in and began its restoration, got it placed on the National Register of Historic Places and saved the house and the neighborhood.

Nickii retired from the newspaper in December 1986, but the path she blazed so courageously is still open. She led the way in coverage of women as community players beyond the “society pages.” Nickii Elrod gave Memphis women – black and white – their many voices.

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Mary Robinson

Women of Achievement
1988

STEADFASTNESS
for a woman with a lifetime of achievement:

Mary Robinson

When she was 16 Mary Wright Sullivan Robinson graduated as Valedictorian from her high school. She was awarded an academic scholarship to college but World War II and family considerations prevented her from attending. After years of work in a male-dominated field, she was one of the first three women to become a registered stockbroker in the State of Tennessee. She retired in 1987 after 20 years as a pioneer in that profession.

Mary was in the forefront of women’s progress through her efforts for job banks, WAGES, the Chamber of Commerce, the YWCDA, the Girls Club, NOW, the Black White Social Group, and Republican Career Women. She was a founder and first president of the Women’s Resources Center, which in turn gave birth to two pivotal groups for Memphis women — the Spouse Abuse Center and the Rape Crisis Center. She also is a founding member of Network. In 1975 she received the National Conference of Christian and Jews first Women’s Rights Award.

Known as the “founding mother of women’s liberation in Memphis,” she has worked on behalf of the personal and professional advancement of women for so long that many are unaware that she paved the way to our acceptance. She has also been active in environmental issues and in the Civil Rights movement. Equally important as her public endeavors are her private ones. Countless women point to Mary as their role model, mentor, advisor, counselor, motivator, door opener and friend. She has shown others that they are special and capable of great accomplishment. Her example of commitment, hard work, generosity and courage inspired women to lives of public leadership and private independence and security.

From Mary Robinson’s steadfast example many have learned that respect and tolerance for all people, and the determination and courage to act on one’s beliefs, can enable us each to become a “woman of achievement.”

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Thom Thi Bach

Women of Achievement
1988

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

Thom Thi Bach

In 1977 Thom Thi Bach left Vietnam in a boat. She fled her country with 10 children, one of whom was only 12 months old. After four days and nights in a boat, the family landed in Malaysia where they spent seven long months in a refugee camp. At the camp, U.S. Catholic Charities found her and helped her come to the United States in 1978. Her husband could not get out of Vietnam; he died there several years later.

In Saigon she had been a professional egg roll maker, a skill she was taught by her mother. As she searched for a way to support her family in Memphis, she seized upon those homemade Vietnamese egg rolls and proceeded to turn them out in her kitchen.

The Health Department twice declared the egg rolls illegal, however, on technical grounds. Thom Bach, still struggling to comprehend English, sat through hearings on her right to make egg rolls and said to a reporter at one point: “I ask you where you get license for Vietnamese egg rolls, but nobody can tell me.” Finally, Health officials ruled that she could make her egg rolls in any commercial kitchen, but not at home, and she began to make them in local restaurants.

In 1982 she opened the Indochina Care at 2146 Young Street, specializing in Vietnamese food, including the egg rolls. She operates the restaurant with the help of her children — the older ones waiting tables and doing homework between orders, and younger ones playing on the floor behind the counter.

Necessity — to flee Communism and to seek a better future — made her family into “boat people. Initiative — the determination to make a good life — made her a Memphis businesswoman, restaurant owner and, above all else, an independent woman.

Following a fire in 1990, Thom relocated and opened Minh Chau Asian Foods at 1324 Madison. She continues to work to help friends and relatives leave refugee camps to start new lives

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Nancy Hastings-Sehested

Women of Achievement
1988

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

Nancy Hastings-Sehested

Despite the repeated refusal of the 14.6 million-member Southern Baptist Convention to approve the elevation of female ministers to the pastorate, Rev. Nancy Hastings Sehested continued to seek just such a role.

When finally asked to serve as pastor of Prescott Memorial Baptist Church in Memphis, she defended her commitment before a conference of the all-male Shelby County Baptist Association. She was expelled from its “fellowship.”

The 36-year-old Southern Baptist minister — and daughter and granddaughter of Southern Baptist ministers — was told by the Association that only men could preach the gospel. Rev. Sehested said, “What the Association told the world is that God can do all things except call a woman to preach. In my mind, it was an issue of the freedom of the Holy Spirit. And what the Association said was, ‘No.’”

More than 450 Southern Baptist women are ordained for the ministry, but only 11 serve as pastors or co-pastors. Prescott became the largest Southern Baptist Church headed by a woman and the first in Tennessee. Supportive letters and telegrams poured in from all over the country.

Nancy’s became one of THE stories in the United States in 1987. Major newspapers published stories about the dispute. More recently, she was featured in Bill Moyers’ documentary examining the denomination’s policies and politics.

Through it all, Nancy Sehested stood firm in her calling, in her commitment, in her right to serve her God. As one nominator wrote, she is a heroic example for today’s youth — and their parents also.

By early 1994, Nancy said, about 900 Southern Baptist women were ordained and 25 were serving as pastors or co-pastors. Most of them were serving tiny churches.

Nancy Hastings Sehested is now co-pastor of Circle of Mercy Congregation in Asheville, North Carolina.

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Julia B. Hooks

Women of Achievement
1988

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Julia B. Hooks

The life of Julia B. Hooks spanned 90 years and encompassed much of the history of the United States. Julia was born free in 1842, the daughter of a former slave. Her mother, Laura, was the daughter of Captain Thomas F. Marshall of Kentucky and his slave. Laura had been given her freedom when she married a man who was free.

Julia also was a musical prodigy, accompanying her mother in vocal concerts on the piano at the age of six.

It was the experience of traveling with her mother to perform that made Julia aware of the importance of color in the thinking of Americans. While her mother and older sister Mary were quite fair, she was copper-skinned like her father. Sometimes on trains heading to engagements Julia and her mother were mistaken for a mistress and little slave. The impression this made on the child never left her as an adult.

After the Civil War Julia’s family moved to Berea, Kentucky so that the children could receive an education at the integrated Berea College. After three years of college, during the last year of which Julia taught music to other students, black and white, she left to go to Mississippi. At that time in the history of the United States, Reconstruction brought new equality, and indeed in Mississippi, dominance by the numerically superior blacks. It offered exciting opportunities for the young teacher, including working in Blanche Bruce’s successful campaign for U.S. Senator. Reconstruction’s changes were short-lived, however, so Julia moved to Memphis in 1876.

Julia’s life in Memphis was centered on children, civil rights, and music. She taught in the public schools, but finding them to be inadequate, started her own private Hooks Cottage School. Jim Crow laws were steadily eroding the gains made by the Civil War, but Julia, educated beyond most women of her time, refused to accept the new restrictions on the rights of blacks. Time after time, she entered a theater only to be ejected because she was sitting in the “white folks” section.

Julia persisted in trying to achieve civil rights for all people. Her grandson, Benjamin Hooks, former president of the NAACP, is an example of the extent of her influence into the present day.

Among other civic activities, Julia and her husband Charles helped raise funds to establish a much-needed Colored Orphans and Old Folks Homes. Julia organized the Liszt Millard Club to provide a musical opportunity for blacks in a segregated world. She operated her own music school. She taught harmony to one student who would become famous, W.C. Handy. She was called “the angel of Beale Street” by Lt. George W. Lee because of her selfless work on behalf of the poor. Along with her husband, Julia administered the first juvenile detention home in the city for black youths. Even when Charles Hooks was shot and killed by one of the inmates, Julia’s work with the juveniles continued.

Julia B. Hooks’ legacy for the future is the determination to make this a more just world for all people, of all ages and races. Her courage inspires us to fight prejudice and to enhance the world around us.