Category: Heroism

Women of Achievement
1998

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

Alison Williams

Alison Williams’ parents raised their daughter to be colorblind. So it was no wonder that as the newly elected 17-year-old student body president of Hernando High School, she questioned the race-based student election system that began during integration in 1970.

Freshmen, sophomore and junior classes elected co-presidents – a black student and a white student for each class – as a way to give representation to black and white students. The high school also had two principals – one black and one white. The common response was, “That’s just the way we do it here.”

“Race relations are good, so why does the school need this system?” Alison wondered.

She spoke up about this policy at a DeSoto County School Board meeting in May 1997. The school board quickly dismissed Alison’s question, but they couldn’t dismiss her conviction. She believed that the student body should be able to vote for student council representatives based on individual merit and the individual’s desire to run and serve. She decided to fight to the end.

With assistance from a local parents group, Alison and her parents persuaded the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Education to investigate. As the investigation became publicized, Alison began losing friends at school. One teacher told her she was disappointed in her. Eventually the national media approached her – the Associated Press, Good Morning America, CNN, and 20/20.

A petition to have her impeached was started by a teacher and a few former friends. However, on June 2, 1997, the DeSoto County School Board announced that there would be no ethnicity requirements on any activity at Hernando High School. A month later, it became a countywide change. And she learned that the next year, there would be only one principal at the school.

Alison is now a senior and is thankful for the friends who stood by her in her fight. Alison has said that if she could go back, she would do it all over again. She is what we call people who challenge accepted practice and spark important debate about unpopular causes – a hero.

Alison completed high school out-of-state and is a straight-A student in criminal justice at Northwest Mississippi Community College. She works for the Sheriff’s Department and raises and trains horses.

Women of Achievement
1997

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

Lisa Herdahl

A heroine is a woman noted for her courageous and daring acts. Courageous and daring are words used many times to describe Lisa Herdahl, a woman who exhibited tremendous heroism in her legal battle against the religious practices of the Pontotoc County School District.

In 1993, Herdahl and her family moved from Wisconsin to Mississippi and into the Pontotoc County School District. Five of her six children attended the North Pontotoc Attendance Center and were exposed to daily devotionals over the intercom, biblical history classes subsidized by local churches, group prayer sessions in the gymnasium and religious videotapes shown in classes.

With the support of the American Civil Liberties Union and the advocacy group, People for the American Way, Lisa challenged these long-standing religious practices publicly when she brought suit against the school systems.

The trial, which drew national media attention, was declared a victory for Herdahl and her family in July 1996. A U.S. district judge ruled that the Pontotoc County School District was in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition of government establishment of religions and ordered the daily devotionals on the intercom to be stopped.

During the two-year legal battle, Lisa and her family were subjected to harsh criticism from students, teachers, townspeople and community leaders. They were ridiculed, taunted and belittled.

“My kids and I have been harassed for standing up for our religious freedom,” Herdahl said. “I don’t believe that any students should be forced to choose between going along with some official prayer or having to stand out and be ostracized.”

In response to her public stand on the school prayer issue, Lisa was called an atheist, was forced to quit her job and faced eviction from her home. But through it all, Lisa Herdahl held fast to her beliefs.

Lisa has been unable to find a job since the lawsuit. She is organizing a non-profit to help families assert their rights in dealing with public school systems regarding special education, disciplinary actions and other issues.

Women of Achievement
1996

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

Pauline Jones Hord

From the day she began teaching first graders in 1929 to today as she teaches prisoners at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, Pauline Hord has been on a mission. That mission is to teach reading to as many people as possible as quickly as possible. From the Delta of the southern United States to the mountains and savannahs of Columbia, South America; in classrooms, with individuals and through television broadcasts, Pauline has battled heroically and creatively to end illiteracy.

After years of teaching in the city schools, Pauline learned the Laubach method of reading. Laubach had always emphasized each-one-teach-one, a worthy idea but slow. Given the large population of illiterate adults in the Mid-South, Pauline was interested in maximizing results. In the mid-’50s she took Laubach to the air by working as volunteer director for a literacy program for WKNO. The program was broadcast into homes and community sites such as libraries. There, instructors met with groups of students to speed progress. Sights aimed high, she also worked to establish the World Literacy Foundation.

Aware that illiteracy is a global problem, in the early 1960s, and now in her 50s, Pauline took a leave of absence from the city schools to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer. Though speaking Spanish at only an elementary level, she had a good understanding of the written language. She was assigned to work in Columbia and stationed in Bogota. Using the Memphis model, she designed a Spanish language curriculum to be broadcast all over the country. The Peace Corps assigned over one-fourth of the young volunteers to help. One hundred twenty-five assistants fanned out over the country to tutor small groups, individuals and groups of prisoners.

By the early 1980s, Pauline had discovered the “Sing, Spell, Read and Write” teaching technique. She was convinced that this method could teach reading skills in a matter of months instead of years. She obtained a small grant from Plough to train eight elementary school teachers from one school. The next year the program doubled to 16 and by the eighth year, 454 teachers from 56 schools were trained to use the technique.

Aware that much of the adult prison population is functionally illiterate, Pauline decided to take the reading program for kids to the notorious Parchman Prison, the maximum-security facility in Mississippi, and by the time of her retirement from the school system in 1968, she had already begun. Working with equally dedicated nuns, she recruited as many prisoners as possible for the program. At one point, groups of students were working in five of the prison’s units. More than 30 years later, Pauline, who was 89 in April 1996, continued teaching in the prison, located 120 miles from her home.

In 2002, Pauline published a book of daily devotions titled Praying for the President which she has done daily since Jimmy Carter’s election in 1977.

Pauline Jones Hord passed away on March 5, 2005 at age 98.

Women of Achievement
1989

HEROISM
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Alma Lovett

Alma Lovett stepped out of the crowd and took the lead when drug crimes, violence, truancy, and lack of day care screamed for attention in her community – Memphis’ public housing projects.

Mother of six children and herself a high school dropout, she moved into Fowler Homes public housing 16 years ago. Soon she founded the Fowler Homes Youth Club to organize, entertain, and motivate her young neighbors to make something of their lives. She was elected president of the City-Wide Memphis Housing Authority Resident Council five years ago.

Outraged at what was happening to children in her world where murder and drug running can seem a way of life, she coalesced housing project tenants who marched on City Hall and drew police response for more patrols. She created and personally runs a free day care program that now tends 100 children. She attempted a program with school officials and Juvenile Court to keep children in school by targeting truants lingering near the housing projects and bodily taking them to class. Since her march on City Hall in October 1987, her car windows have been shattered and she has received threatening phone calls. But she carries on.

In August 1988, she became the first resident manager of a Memphis housing project when she took charge of her 320-unit apartment complex. She says, “I used to be fast. Now I’m in a hurry.”

A profile of Alma in May 1988, in The Commercial Appeal was headlined, “Neighborhood Hero.” Tennessee Illustrated magazine last month chose her as one of 20 “Good Folks … the state’s unsung heroes who in their own quiet and relentless ways are building a better Tennessee.”

A young man who attended the Fowler Home Youth Club and calls himself one of Alma’s success stories, said of her new battle against drugs in his old neighborhood: “It’s going to be a struggle. But if she can overcome that, she’s going to be a hero. She’s my hero, anyway.”

Alma eventually left public housing and worked as a manager of privately-owned apartments.

Alma Lovett passed away on March 15, 2002 at age 64.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.