Category: Initiative

Women of Achievement
2002

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

Joyce Cobb

Joyce Cobb is one of the best known and most-loved of performing Memphis musicians. She is an essential part of our musical fabric, contributing blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, folk and just plain good music to our community. Her name brings to mind a big smile, huge voice, quality in musicianship and depth in delivery. She’s carved out her place in the music profession as a performer, teacher and donator of her talent.

Joyce first performed in her grandmother’s church in Okmulgee, Oklahoma – and she never forgot the warm response she received from the audience. She grew up listening to her parents’ excellent collection of jazz and classical music. But it was in her high school’s girls’ choir that she got her real start. Director Sister Mary de Lassis uncovered in Joyce a passion for singing that continues today.

In Nashville, Joyce worked for WSM radio and TV for six years and opened at the Opry. She came to Memphis in 1976, lured by a contract with a Stax Records subsidiary but Stax folded shortly after her arrival. She worked for a month at the Holiday Inn and there met Wayne Crook and Warren Wagner. In talking with them she realized that her dream included songwriting, so she signed with their company, Shoe Productions. Her first song, “Dig the Gold,” was about the poorly paid black gold miners of South Africa. The song earned a number 42 spot in Billboard magazine.

Joyce has run her own Beale Street jazz club and has toured nationally. She has won four Premier Player Awards for Best Female Singer from the Memphis chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. She has recorded on several labels including RCA and Cream Records. In 1997 she hosted Beale Street Caravan, a nationally syndicated radio program highlighting the music of the Delta. She received Memphis Arts Council funding for the dynamic live program Beale Street Saturday Night, focusing on Memphis music. She has taught at the University of Memphis and the Community Music School.

Joyce has volunteered with WEVL radio for more than 20 years. She has served on the program committee, currently serves on the board and hosts several shows. All this time, she’s been writing songs, sometimes spending as much as 12-15 hours a day in the studio. She now has 30 to 40 songs to her credit.

Her biggest challenge has been to continue writing and performing her own material, but she has begun producing a CD on which she sings her own songs. Throughout her career, Joyce Cobb has shown initiative in music, business and education.

Women of Achievement
2001

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

Cordell Jackson

“I consider myself an inventor,” says internationally acclaimed rock ’n’ roll guitarist Cordell Jackson. “I’m just richly blessed with ideas … I have now more than ever. If I think of it, I do it.” Initiative has been the driving force behind this colorful music pioneer since her childhood in Pontotoc, Mississippi. Inspired by her musical father, Cordell began learning at age 12 to play piano, bass, mandolin, banjo, harmonica and the guitar. “When I picked up the guitar, I could see it in their eyes, ‘Little girls don’t play guitar,’ they thought. I looked right at ’em and said, ‘I do.’”

And play she did. In 1943, she graduated from high school and moved to Memphis. In 1946, she purchased her own recording equipment. During this same period of time she met and married William Jackson Jr. and went on to become the country’s first female recording engineer. She was the first woman to write, sing, accompany, record, engineer, produce and manufacture her first record. Cordell also became one
of the first women to start her own record label, Moon Records, in 1956.

During the next few decades, Cordell continued to pursue her love of music and to distribute her Moon Records products to 48 states and 35 countries. One night during the 1960s, Cordell was in the audience at a fundraiser where Alex Chilton and Tav Falco were playing. To Cordell’s surprise, they were playing her music instrumentally. When Falco later told her it was “new wave from London,” she informed him it was hers and invited him to hear her recordings.

But it was writer-producer Celia McRee who truly cast the spotlight on Cordell. In 1985, Celia brought Cordell to New York for the New Music Seminar. While there, she joined old friend Tav Falco on stage at the Lone Star Club. “I started playing, and they stood up in one swoop, like a gust of wind,” says Cordell. History was being made again, and Cordell was a star.

Soon after, Cordell had an award-winning video in the New York Film Festival and on MTV, and then was featured in New York’s Interview magazine. And things haven’t slowed down. She’s been named Memphis Musician of the Year, Memphis Songwriter of the Year, honored by Who’s Who of World Women, and been included in the Smithsonian Institution, the Rock ’n’ Soul Museum in Memphis, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

Cordell also has made numerous television appearances, including 1992’s award-winning Budweiser commercial with famed guitarist Brian Setzer. She’s currently writing a book, The Brighter Sides and My Music, and recently completed work on a movie, Wayne County Rambling, which will feature one of her songs, “Jazz Fried.” In addition to her ongoing recording career, she found new success as an accomplished artist and has sold paintings to collectors in London, Japan, Stockholm and across the U.S. In Memphis, her work can be seen in Jay Etkins’ Gallery.

Women of Achievement
2000

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

Rachel Shankman

The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Rachel Fromer Shankman was born in a displaced persons camp in Munich, Germany, in 1946. The family came to the United States and settled in Nashville, where Rachel was raised. Like many Holocaust survivors, her parents didn’t talk much about their experience. But in 1960, they were interviewed by a Nashville reporter, and Rachel began asking questions. She was told stories of beatings, hunger, deprivation and death. She was told stories of small acts of courage and love that helped people in an untenable situation survive one more day. Afterward, she no longer took life for granted.

In the late 1980s, she and her husband saw a short documentary about a Canadian high school teacher who had been challenging the reality of the Holocaust in his classroom. Rachel was incredulous and outraged. Knowing that survivors and witnesses will not always be alive to tell their stories and aware that young people might have to choose between conflicting versions of history, Rachel started to look for solutions.

In 1976, former Memphian Margo Stern Strom cofounded Facing History and Ourselves. The program was designed to teach students critical thinking skills. Using the Holocaust and the events of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s as a case study, students learned that history is a result of a series of small decisions, many of them made by individuals.

In 1987, Facing History and Ourselves began a pilot program in six Memphis City Schools and Rachel volunteered. Rachel had previously served as the regional director for B’nai B’rith Youth Organization and director of Memphis State University’s Jewish Student Union. When Facing History and Ourselves opened a Memphis office in 1992, Rachel’s many years of experience in working with youth and her passion for the organization made her an obvious choice for executive director.

Under Rachel’s leadership, Facing History and Ourselves has worked with more than 300 educators in the Memphis area. Teachers learn an interactive process that includes readings, videos, group discussions and exercises. They then return to their schools and use the program in the way that is most effective for their setting. As a result, more than 30,000 students have learned that history is about ordinary people leading ordinary lives.

Under Rachel’s direction, Facing History and Ourselves has moved into the larger community. In 1996, the office initiated a coalition called Cultures United. The group developed Memphis Building Community, a guide for schools and area clergy to use to discuss the history of Memphis. This guide became a model for other cities, including Chicago and New York. Always interested in coalitions and alliances, Rachel’s most recent project involves training young attorneys to go into the classroom to discuss issues surrounding law, morality and hate crimes.

Women of Achievement
1998

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

Tonga Nguyen

Tonga Nguyen knows what it’s like to start your life over – and over again. She has found success after coming to a new country, learning a new language, experiencing a new culture, buying a new business and then yet another new business. And all before she was 26 years old.

Tonga, her parents and two brothers came to Memphis in 1990 as South Vietnamese refugees fleeing the brutal North Vietnamese Communist government. Unlike immigrants, refugees are designated by the United States government as having documented political or religious persecution that could cost them their lives in their native land. The family arrived in their new homeland with only $50, minimal possessions, and hopes for safety and freedom. They were placed in an apartment on Court Street in Midtown Memphis and received additional help from the agency that resettled them, Refugee Services of Associated Catholic Charities.

Tonga spoke little English when she arrived in the United States. Determined to receive an education, she entered the 10th grade at Central High School when she was 18 years old. She tenaciously pursued her studies and spent many hours away from school in the library. Tonga graduated from high school in 1994 at the age of 22. She became a U.S. citizen in 1995.

While still a student, Tonga worked after school in the office of the apartment building where the family lived. Eventually she was promoted to manager. After graduating, it was clear that Tonga was a natural entrepreneur. She convinced her brother to help her purchase a grocery store in North Memphis. It proved to be a dangerous business. The family sold the store in 1995 after numerous robberies, which resulted in an employee being killed and her father being critically wounded.

Tonga was unwilling to give in and pursued another business endeavor. She used the proceeds of the sale of the grocery store, her family’s savings and other financing to purchase two apartment buildings with 80 units on Court Street. In 1996, just six years after arriving in Memphis with nothing, Tonga and her family purchased the building where they first lived. Her position evolved from tenant to manager to landlord. Today, in addition to her duties as a landlord, she manages more than 400 apartments in other buildings in the neighborhood for Roberts Properties.

She said in a recent newspaper interview, “When I came (to America), I expected freedom. And I believed that if you worked hard, you could make it.”

Women of Achievement
1997

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

Karen Shea

It was in 1976 when Karen Shea first tested her own strength. After a divorce left her in need of a way to support her two young children, Karen set her sights on becoming an institutional securities broker. Little did she expect the reaction she got. Women, she was told, are not cut out for such a high-powered job, and they simply do not have what it takes to succeed in the financial arena.

After she got over her shock, Karen took the initiative to prove them wrong. She sold her house in Memphis, packed her bags and headed to Houston. There she got the training and support she needed and built such a strong reputation that those in Memphis who had once overlooked her skills started calling her for advice.

While in Houston, Karen became disillusioned by the corruption in local politics. In 1981, she saw a bright new face on the political horizon and began volunteering in Kathy Whitmire’s first mayoral campaign, helping her win a landslide victory. The following year Karen went on the campaign trail again, this time with Ann Richards who became the first woman elected to a statewide office in Texas in 50 years.

Karen’s most recent – and perhaps most passionate – initiative is her fight against violence among and by young people.

It was three years ago that Karen’s son was shot while trying to help a woman who was being mugged. Karen today still tears up when she talks about the incident. “Every time a child is hurt, it feels like it’s my child. They are all our children and what happens to them affects all our lives.”

After her son’s recovery, Karen served as board chair for the Gandhi Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. She also assisted with the implementation of conflict-resolution programs in the city schools, and even took a job as a schoolteacher as a way to teach young people that violence doesn’t solve problems.

Karen has now returned to the financial services industry. Women of Achievement was designed to honor ordinary women doing extraordinary things. She is just such a woman.

Karen is a financial planner with Fish & Associates.

Women of Achievement
1996

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

Evelyn Thorpe-Hibbler

After a decade of teaching in the Memphis City School system, Evelyn Thorpe-Hibbler moved to Seattle, Washington, where she enrolled her young children in a Montessori school.

Inspired by the school’s effectiveness and philosophy, she decided to become a Montessori teacher and start her own school.

Upon returning to Memphis, certified by the American Montessori Society, she interned at Lamplighter School and taught at another Montessori school. Then in 1991, with her brother, Houston attorney Richard M. Cole III, as a business partner, Evelyn founded First Class Montessori, the first African-American-owned Montessori school in Tennessee.

Unaware of the rules regarding land use in the area, they bought a cozy house on the corner of Cleveland and Peabody, capturing the concerned attention of residents in two historic neighborhoods, Annesdale Park and Central Gardens. Evelyn says, “The neighborhood people did not want a school here. We had to hire an attorney and pursue it in spite of petitions against us and go before Land Use (Control Board) and the City Council.”

First Class Montessori is a day-care center and preschool for children ages 3-6. The Montessori philosophy, developed in 1907 by Italian physician Maria Montessori, is based on the idea of the child as an individual with spiritual worth and dignity and that the most important years for learning are from birth to age 6.

First Class Montessori is limited to 36 children due to limited parking. Six teachers, on site at various times of the day, teach Swahili, Spanish, Japanese, mathematics, geography, phonetics and reading.

In August 1993, Evelyn received an Ordinary People Award consisting of a proclamation by Rep. Harold Ford, a certificate of merit from the state of Tennessee, certificate of recognition from the city of Memphis and certificate of appreciation from the Shelby County government.

Evelyn, who attended high school in Memphis, earned her master’s degree in music education at the University of Memphis in 1985 and later obtained her administration/supervision endorsement. She earned her American Montessori Society certificate at Seattle University and speaks regularly at local schools.

Evelyn says, “Children should learn independence because it helps build positive self-esteem and responsibility. I feel that children should learn respect for self that would eventually evolve into respect for others.”

“The most exciting thing for me,” Evelyn adds, “is to see children who come filled with timidness and who leave with self-assertiveness.”

Women of Achievement
1993

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

Edith Kelly-Green

Edith Kelly grew from her grandmother’s house in Oxford, Mississippi to a position in senior management at Federal Express. Along the way, she is paving the road into corporate America for future generations of women.

Born into a poor family, Edith was raised by her grandmother, who worked as a maid at then all-white Ole Miss. She attended segregated high school until her senior year when the school system was integrated. Always an outstanding student, her interest in math led her into an accounting degree at the University of Mississippi.

With no professional role models in her family, she struggled to adjust in her first job in an accounting firm where she was the first black person and one of only three females on a professional staff of 60. She was once asked by a senior partner not to return to an audit because one of the firm’s clients did not want a black person working in his office.

In 1974 Edith sat for her CPA and became the youngest black person — and one of the first black women — to pass the exam in Tennessee. She became a leader in accountants’ professional organizations where she encouraged women to enter accounting and informed the public and the profession about the skills and achievements of women in accounting.

She joined Federal Express in 1977 as a senior accountant in the general accounting area, and moved to manager and then director. When she made a lateral move to manage Publishing Services, employees took bets that she wouldn’t last six months. She stayed 14 months, developing operational experience, and was promoted to vice president of internal audit and quality assurance.

Edith has been recognized by Dollars and Sense and Ebony magazines as an up-and-coming woman in corporate America. She remains the first and only black vice president at Federal Express. She speaks frequently to groups of working women and students to tell her story of success and to urge them on.

“I started from scratch, and many of them are,” she says. “At any point, on any day, or sometimes within any minute, discouragement can be such that it’s easier to give up … but the real importance of this to me will be an easier road for my children and other children to walk in Corporate America.”

Women of Achievement
1992

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

Peri Motamedi

Parvenah “Peri” Motamedi was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1944 during the reign of the Shah. After graduation from high school she worked for the Shah, collecting and illustrating press clippings. But her picture of a woman’s future was very different from what Iran’s Muslim society dictated, and that is where her long struggle started.

After being humiliated by some family members and friends because of her ideas about life and the arts, she left her home country to come to the United States to build her dream. She could speak no English.

In 1965, she began three years of study at Monticello Junior College in Illinois, followed by a year at Washington University in St. Louis. After a marriage, a brief return to Iran and the birth of a daughter, she came to Memphis. In 1975, at age 31, she entered the Memphis College of Art, earning a B.F.A. in panting in 1977. She has not slowed down since.

Rather than be a “starving artist” and waiting for a gallery-goer to buy her work, Peri purposely identified a marketable craft that people would buy, freeing her to pursue her real love — fine art. Her commercial stained glass firm, Motamedi’s GlasArt, is now 15 years old and employs four other women. Her stained and leaded glass designs are found in homes, businesses and churches. But, she says, “I never tried to get big in business. My heart and effort was in fine art and teaching.” Her love for sculpture sends her out in her pickup truck to rescue junkyard metals for skillful transformation under her welding torch.

Yet Peri gives much more than her art to our community. She has taught art to children at the Jewish Community Center and YWCA, to adult mentally ill in a rehab program at Lowenstein House, to Girl Scout leaders, and students at Shelby State Community College and Memphis State University. Peri regularly contributes art for causes, such as WKNO, Playhouse On The Square, and the Orpheum. She also volunteers time with 12- and 13-year-old students at Rozelle Elementary School to encourage them to draw or paint their feelings to music.

In 1990 she conceived and funded a very special art project. The Memphis Arts Council administers the $3,000 Visualization of Music commission, which selects an artist or artists to create work based on a piece of music selected by the Memphis Symphony conductor. The art then is unveiled at a symphony art-and-music performance featuring the selected music.

Peri Motamedi travelled thousands of miles and across cultures to build her dream of a free life and artistic expression. The success of that dream is a tribute to her initiative and talent.

Women of Achievement
1991

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

Franketta Guinn

In January 1984, at age 37, Franketta Guinn left her secure job with Shelby County Health Care Center to start Metro Home Health Care. Originally employing three people, the business now employs 58 and has in the past year doubled both patient visits and revenue.

One of nine children, Franketta has always “leaned toward non-traditional fields.” In the ‘60s she was active in the local civil rights movement. She graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit, with a Bachelor’s degree in health, recreation and physical education. She coached high school basketball, taught elementary physical education, and was a swimming instructor.

In the late ‘70s, Franketta returned to school to become certified to teach health and discovered the growing need for health care administrators. She entered a Master’s program in that field and in 1977 joined the Shelby County Health Care Center. There Franketta met many older people and their families. She saw that when the elderly are taken from their homes they can become confused and that hospital environments are less conducive to healing than are familiar surroundings. She realized that staying in the home surrounded by family and friends could greatly improve the quality of life for a growing population of aging Americans.

Since Franketta always wanted to own her own business and continue her work with geriatrics, she put these ideas together and came up with Metro Home Health Care. After involved licensing procedures, the company was set up and Franketta obtained her first patient — her father. That first year, Metro Home Health Care made 1,200 visits. This past year, that number had grown to 15,000.

Franketta Guinn defines success as “being all you can be at any one point in life — every time there is an opportunity to do better, you should.” Her initiative to redirect her talents has meant more peace and freedom for hundreds of senior Memphians.

Franketta later was named the Small Business Person of the Year for Tennessee and the Southeast region by the Small Business Administration. She won the Black Business of the Year award from the Black Business Association in 1991 and Supplier of the Year Award from the Mid-South Minority Purchasing Council in 1992. In 1993 she was appointed to the board of MLGW, the Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Beale Street Advisory Board.