Author: WOAmemphis17

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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.

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Lucille Ewing

WOMEn OF ACHIEVEMENT
1988

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

Lucille Ewing

Award-winning performers and ordinary kids alike grew like giant morning glories over the walls of Southern segregation because Lucille Ewing dared to teach life’s lessons through the medium of a theater for all children.

For more than 25 years Lucille was the driving force of Memphis Children’s Theater. She followed in the footsteps of her aunt, Martha Macan Byrnes, who initiated theater for children through the Memphis Park Commission.  It evolved from Recreation Players, a program on WMPS radio in the late 1940s and ‘50s. In the early 1950s, Lucille launched plans for a full-blown theater that would be run by and for children. They would act, build sets and be totally responsible for each play they acted.

At that time, Memphis was even more racially divided than it is today. Yet Lucille made it clear that any interested young person would be welcome in the theater, regardless of race or economic background Productions were cast according to talent and availability — not type.

Despite active attempts to close the theater, funding shortages and strong sentiments in the community that children shouldn’t be so engaged, she persevered for nearly three decades. She broadened the children’s outlook by financing trips to theater productions in the region. On one such outing in Alabama, she and her children held a spontaneous sit-in when a black child with them was refused service in a restaurant.

Lucille’s efforts spanned creation of other children’s theaters throughout the region. Whether regular folks or award-winning performers, the hundreds of Memphis children Lucille Ewing touched grew — the better for her determination to give them a stage on which to stretch their talents.

 

Lucille Ewing passed away October 22, 2001, aged 86.

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Alzada Clark

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
1988

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

Alzada Clark

In a 25-year career as a labor organizer, Alzada Clark has braved personal threats and racial epithets in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma. In 1965 she became the first black woman organizer of state employees in Tennessee and she is responsible for establishment of the local Service Employees International Union.

She was asked in 1967 to organize the women in a furniture plant in Canton, Mississippi. She went into that racially troubled state to help the employees. When the vote failed, she told the men in charge that she would lead the effort next time. Thanks to Alzada’s leadership and courage, at the end of a year of work the vote did pass and the union was organized.

When workers received their first salary increases, two came to Alzada to thank her. One, a black man, said, “Now I can eat a piece of steak more than once a year.” The other man, who was white, said, “Now my kids won’t have to wear tennis shoes in the winter.”

Later, Alzada organized the furniture workers in her native Memphis and in several other Mid-South towns. While president of the local Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, she became the first woman elected to the national position of Second Vice President. That organization also awarded her the Fannie Lou Hamer Award for her efforts on behalf of the people.

Alzada is a vocal civil rights activist and served on the NAACP board. When she sees a problem of injustice she speaks up, despite the possibility of being jailed or losing a job. Often in her career she has required the assistance of bodyguards.

In the words of one nominator, “She has the determination and the courage to seek what is right morally, what is good, and what is noble. She stands as a beacon of light amid the darkness.”

 

Alzada Clark passed away November 26, 2009.

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Margery Rumbarger McSweeney

Women of Achievement
1987

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

Margery Rumbarger McSweeney

Despite active opposition, Margery Rumbarger fought for the cause of women to have the right to give birth to their children in their own homes, with the assistance of midwives.

Ninety percent of all births worldwide occur in the home. Currently, the majority of births in this country take place in hospitals. Yet in recent years a growing number of women have decided to give birth at home. Reasons for this include the wish for more participation in the process and more control of the decisions surrounding birth.

While home birth is not for all women, the birth process is a natural part of the life cycle. Margery believes that for women at low risk, home birth should remain an alternative. It is her strong belief in this philosophy that led Margery and a friend to found the Homebirth Midwifery Service in 1980. Since that time she has assisted more than 200 babies into the world.

But home birth remains controversial in our high-tech society. In March 1984, as a result of her lay midwifery practice, Margery was fired from her position as a pre-natal health care educator for the Shelby County Health Department. After the Civil Service Merit Board ruled the firing was improper, she was reinstated and offered a transfer to the Tuberculosis Clinic, which according to state guidelines is a “high health risk.” She refused the transfer and was offered another to the Immunization Clinic. She refused that as well.

Three years later she still is involved in a lawsuit against the Health Department. Margery believes that the turmoil is a result of “strong prejudice in the medical community” against law midwives. Yet Margery Rumbarger, an R.N. with the highest level of obstetrics training available, continues to courageously practice lay midwifery in order to provide women with an alternative in which she deeply believes.

Margery’s lawsuit against the Shelby County Health Department was settled in federal court in 1988. The Department wrote Margery a formal letter of apology and paid her a financial settlement for her time off work. She chose not to return to the Heath Department, and works part time as a supervising nurse with a home health agency while continuing her midwifery. She had assisted about 370 deliveries as of February 1994.