Category: Determination

Women of Achievement
1992

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

Dorothy “Happy” Jones

Dorothy Snowden “Happy” Jones was a Memphis homemaker with three daughters and a full slate of volunteer work centered around the Republican Party and the Junior League in the mid-1960s. She was a daughter of a wealthy, conservative family which considered civil rights an idea that should be stopped because black people did not deserve equal rights or equal respect.

From that upbringing Happy stepped into the confusion and turmoil of 1960s Memphis with personal conviction and strength. Since then she has been an active participant and leader in the civil rights and women’s rights movements.

As a coordinator of the Concerned Women of Memphis, Happy led a march to Mayor Henry Loeb’s office to protest poverty, racism and the city’s failure to negotiate in good faith with the city’s sanitation workers even after the death of Dr. King. As a charter member of the Memphis Panel of American Women, she began to speak to groups in the area about racism. She became a member of the Memphis and Shelby County Human Relations Commission, but when she learned it had no real power to change government she drafted legislation creating the Memphis Community Relations Commission and served as its first chairperson from 1972 to 1974. The Commission began addressing practical ways to change the systems that had led to the discrimination and institutional racism that kept most black Memphians poor and powerless. Along with the 22-member Commission board and executive director Rev. James Netters, Happy organized a Police-Community Relations Board to address police harassment of blacks.

Happy’s long-standing commitment to the Panel of American Women led her to serve as the project director for a grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1975. She organized a conference demonstrating how optional schools could improve the quality of education in Memphis and be a desirable and functional alternative in the desegregation process. Because of her effort, there now are exceptional optional schools in the Memphis City Schools system.

The Commercial Appeal named Happy one of the 20 most influential political leaders in Memphis in 1968. Ever since then she has continued her work. She was a founder and first president of Network, served on the Urban League board, the Governor’s Jobs Conference, National Conference of Christians and Jews, and the YWCA nominating committee and advisory board. She developed her skills and became a professional family therapist.

Happy’s life is a story of pure determination to improve her city and the lives of her fellow citizens.

Happy died in 2018.

Women of Achievement
1990

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

Virginia Dunaway

In 1981, Memphis had thousands of hungry people — and no way to feed them. Thanks to the diligence of Virginia Dunaway, the Memphis Food Bank now distributes more than three million pounds of donated, wholesome food to 226 charitable programs and food pantries that feed the needy across the Mid-South.

Virginia Dunaway was active in Balmoral Presbyterian Church in Christian education. She had raised two sons and worked in her husband’s dermatology office when she became a VISTA volunteer on a neighborhood history project. With a year of her five-year VISTA term left, the Metropolitan Interfaith Association sent her to a training session on food banks. When she returned and said it sounded like something MIFA could do, MIFA leaders replied, “Go do it.”

Do it, she did. She designed systems for efficient food distribution, identified sources of food from individuals and industry, and worked with volunteers who solicited donations and community support. For two years, she wore blue jeans to work and kept a suit in the trunk of her car. In the jeans, she drove a truck for food runs, unloaded the truck, sorted food or scrubbed floors. In the suit, she met with business and community leaders to build awareness for fighting hunger.

In 1985, Virginia was named director of MIFA food programs and project director of MIFA MEALS. In 1988, the Food Bank became an independent agency and Virginia became its executive director as it moved to a larger warehouse at 239 Dudley. She meanwhile has helped the Second Harvest National Food Bank Network establish food banks in Jackson, Tennessee; Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Jackson, Mississippi.

The Memphis Food Bank provides food for 284,000 meals and snacks each month to the ill, the needy and to infants. Gid Smith, former MIFA executive director and a co-worker, summed up Virginia’s personal determination this way: “To my knowledge, she has done more to overcome hunger in Memphis than any other private citizen.”

 

Virginia retired from the Food Bank in September 1991. She received the DAR Medal of Honor in 1993. She travels as a consultant for Second Harvest National Food Bank Network.

Women of Achievement
1989

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

Joyce North

“It is an American characteristic not to confront any problem until it becomes insoluble, and then confront it by turning it over to the schools.”

Joyce North came to that conclusion through the direct personal experience of sending nine children in her combined family to the turbulent public schools of the 1970s.

When she married Dr. William North in 1971, the two had children ranging in age from seven to 19. Busing was just beginning, and in the next few years of changing ages and changing school boundaries, the children were in a total of seven schools. Joyce quickly observed that the quality of public schools varied greatly. Believing that public education is the backbone of a democratic society, and being determined that her children and all children receive the best education possible, she quit her paying job and began the unpaid work of improving the quality of education in our public schools.

By 1980, this former president of White Station PTA was chairperson of the Memphis Better Schools Committee. In 1984, she was appointed chair of the local Commission of Excellence, a group charged with studying city public schools and making recommendations to the Board of Education. The recommendations emphasized that education is a community prowess, a point Joyce North always has taken to heart. Cutting through miles of red tape, she succeeded in getting the funds remaining from the study released to set up a Model School Program at Georgia Avenue Elementary School.

Joyce visited every agency in Memphis that deals with children, and organized an informal committee that met for breakfasts and after work to discuss how to best meet children’s needs. Health was identified as a priority and — fighting opposition — the group worked with the Health Department to establish a clinic at Booker T. Washington High School. She currently works to keep pregnant and parenting teens in school.

Initially concerned that her own children receive an excellent public education, Joyce North’s unyielding determination led her to do everything in her power to see that all children get the same opportunity.

Joyce retired in 1993 with a $650,000 Kellogg grant and three day-care sites in place to support pregnant and parenting teens with the schools’ mental health department. She and her husband are involved in national wildlife volunteering.

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.

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.

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
1987

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

Willie Pearl Butler

When she moved to Memphis as a young woman, Willie Pearl Butler worked hard to support herself and her family. She was employed successively by the Chisca Hotel, Loeb’s Laundry, the Old White Rose Laundry, Memphis Steam Cleaners and Kay’s Nursing Home. But in 1968 her young son was in a serious accident and required her constant attention. It was then that she was forced to seek help from the Welfare Department.

An assertive woman, she was well treated but she was shocked at the poor treatment of others that she witnessed. Willie Pearl Butler decided that something must be done. She questioned the welfare workers, researched the laws, and then made an appointment with the director of the Welfare Department. She and nine other women organized the local chapter of the Welfare Rights Organization.  She went to a first meeting alone to state their grievances concerning the attitude of some social workers toward poor women.

While continuing her work on welfare rights, she helped organize the Resident Council Association of Public Housing and the LeMoyne Gardens Tenants Association. She also got involved in establishing Memphis Area Legal Services and became the first non-lawyer to chair that board. As time passed and her reputation grew, she found herself more often involved in meetings than in confrontations and demonstrations.

Through the years, when the rights of the poor in our community have been violated, Willie Pearl was on the front lines to see that justice was done.

With unfailing determination, she has struggled to achieve for poor people the respect that all people deserve.

 

 

Willie Pearl later worked for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department.

Willie Pearl Butler passed away February 4, 2012.

Women of Achievement
1986

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

Joan Turner Beifuss

By the first week of the sanitation strike in 1968, Joan Beifuss had instituted Rearing Children of Goodwill, a desegregation workshop similar to one she had been involved in a few years before in Chicago. Several weeks later, the former Sun-Times reporter marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and covered the strike for the National Catholic Reporter.

Shortly after Dr. King was assassinated, Joan joined an ad-hoc committee formed to understand the meaning of the events they had witnessed. In 1972 she began approaching publishing houses with a book based on the articles and interviews collected by the group. New York houses rejected it because it wasn’t “commercial.” While teaching at Memphis State University, she submitted it to the regional and university presses. They rejected the manuscript.

In 1985, at her own expense, she published At The River I Stand: Memphis, the 1968 Strike and Martin Luther King. Readers can’t put the book down so caught are they in the inexorable rush of events and the conflicts that create social change.

It was Joan’s determination that this story would not be lost that carried her through 17 years of working on the manuscript.

Joan later received the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Human Rights Award from Memphis State University in 1987, the T.O. Jones Award and others. At The River I Stand became part of an 18-volume series, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement in 1989. In 1990 St. Luke’s Press published a hardbound version. Joan died of lung cancer January 7, 1994. She was 63.

WOMEN OF AChIEVEMENT
1985

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

Angie D’Agostino

Long before domestic violence became a hot issue in the Tennessee Legislature, Angie D’Agastino was working throughout the community to furnish services desperately needed by women and children who had no place to turn.

In 1976 she began as a volunteer answering crisis-line phones, which were operative for only five hours per day. She then became coordinator of the Committee on Spouse Abuse, testified before legislative committees and organized lobbying efforts.

As program director of the YWCA, she has worked through the new media to educate the community on domestic violence, and has designed and conducted workshops to garner support for spouse abuse services. She has trained staff and volunteers to counsel and assist clients and has worked withy other organizations and agencies who provide help. Angie also manages the shelter facilities at the YWCA.

Angie’s pioneering work has been instrumental in providing these services and solving glaring problems in spite of active opposition from organizations and individuals who believe that such services are destructive to the family unit.

Since leaving the YWCA in 1988, Angie has continued to direct her energies toward issues that others are reluctant to address. As executive director of the Aid to End AIDS Committee from 1989 to 1992, Angie worked with people living with AIDS to provide direct services and to raise community awareness about AIDS. She became a supervisor at Case Management, Inc., working with the chronically mentally ill to ensure that they are treated with dignity and respect, and that they are not isolated from our larger community.