Ora Brown Stokes Perry
Ora Brown Stokes Perry | |
|---|---|
 Ora Brown Stokes (later Perry), from a 1927 newspaper | |
| Born | 1882 Chesterfield County, Virginia |
| Died | 1957 |
| Occupation(s) | Educator, probation officer, temperance worker, suffragist, and clubwoman |
Ora Brown Stokes Perry (1882–1957) was an American educator, probation officer, temperance worker, suffragist, and clubwoman based in Richmond, Virginia.
Early life
[edit]Ora E. Brown was born in Chesterfield County, Virginia, the daughter of Rev. James E. Brown and Olivia Knight Quarles Brown.[1] She trained as a teacher at Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, graduating in 1900. She also studied at Hartshorn Memorial College and the University of Chicago.[2][3] In 1917, she was refused admission to the newly organized Richmond School of Social Economy because of her race.[4]
Career
[edit]Ora Brown Stokes taught school in Milford, Virginia for two years as a young woman, before marrying and taking up the work of a pastor's wife. In 1911, she addressed the Hampton Negro Conference on the topic "The Negro Woman's Religious Activity".[5] "We need women who will demand a clean pulpit as well as a clean pew," she declared, "women who will demand a high and equal standard for men as well as for women."[6] That same year, Stokes co-founded the Richmond Neighborhood Association,[7] holding the first meeting in her own home.[2][1] Seeing a need for vocational training and housing for African-American women in Richmond, Ora Brown Stokes and Orie Latham Hatcher (a white woman)[8] co-founded the Home for Working Girls.[4] From 1918, she was appointed by Justice John Crutchfield as a probation officer for black women and girls in the juvenile courts of Richmond.[9][10]
During World War I, she chaired the Colored Women's Section, National Defense of Virginia, and organized the National Protective League for Negro Girls.[1]
After suffrage, Stokes was head of Virginia's Negro Women's League of Voters, formed when the League of Women Voters in Virginia declined to include black women.[11] In 1921 she was named a non-resident lecturer and member of the faculty at her alma mater, the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, and she gave a speech to the school's alumni association.[12] In 1924, she was Virginia chair of the Colored Women's Department of the Republican National Committee, but later described the experience as frustrating.[13] In 1927, Stokes was elected president of the Southeastern Association of Colored Women's Clubs.[14] In 1928, when she addressed the national meeting of the League of Women Voters, she was listed as president of the National Independent Order of Good Shepherds.[15] In 1940, she was at the organizational meeting of the National Association of Ministers' Wives, organized by Elizabeth Coles Bouey.[16] She was an advisor to the National Youth Administration under Mary McLeod Bethune,[17] was vice-president of the Negro Organization Society of Virginia, was vice-president of the National Race Congress, and was national field secretary for the Women's Christian Temperance Union.[9]
In 2018 the Virginia Capitol Foundation announced that Stokes Perry's name would be included on the Virginia Women's Monument's glass Wall of Honor.[18]
Personal life
[edit]Ora Brown married twice. Her first husband was William Herbert Stokes, a minister at Richmond's Ebenezer Baptist Church;[19] they married in 1902.[2] She was widowed in 1936.[20] In 1948 she was married again, to physician and hospital administrator J. Edward Perry, the widower of Fredericka Douglass Sprague Perry.[21][22] She died in 1957, aged 75 years.
References
[edit]- ^ a b c A. B. Caldwell, History of the American Negro: Virginia Edition (Caldwell Publishing 1921).
- ^ a b c Clayton McClure Brooks, The Uplift Generation: Cooperation across the Color Line in Early Twentieth-Century Virginia (University of Virginia Press 2017). ISBN 9780813939506
- ^ "Mrs. Ora Brown Stokes Speaks" Chicago Defender (August 31, 1918): 12. via ProQuest
- ^ a b "Early Social Work History" Making VCU, VCU Libraries Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University.
- ^ William Anthony Aery, "Work of Colored Women's Clubs" The Southern Workman (September 1911): 506.
- ^ Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Annual Report, Hampton Negro Conference (1911): 62.
- ^ Lehman, Angela (July 19, 2023). "Ora Brown Stokes and the Richmond Neighborhood Association". Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved July 19, 2023.
- ^ Clayton McClure Brooks, "Unlikely Allies: Southern Women, Interracial Cooperation, and the Making of Segregation in Virginia, 1910-1920" in Angela Boswell and Judith N. McArthur eds., Women Shaping the South: Creating and Confronting Change (University of Missouri Press 2006): 131-132. ISBN 9780826264862
- ^ a b "Mrs. Ora Brown Stokes Discusses Work of Natl. Woman's Christian Temperance Union" New York Age (October 20, 1945): 2. via Newspapers.com
- ^ "New Protective Officer" Times Dispatch (October 9, 1918): 12. via Newspapers.com
- ^ Jennifer Davis McDaid, "Woman Suffrage in Virginia" Encyclopedia Virginia (October 26, 2015).
- ^ "Virginia Normal Adds Mrs. Stokes to Faculty" Chicago Defender (December 24, 1921): 5. via ProQuest
- ^ Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932 (University of North Carolina Press 2009): 161. ISBN 9780807894033
- ^ Benjamin Looker, A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press 2015): 102. ISBN 9780226290317
- ^ "Mrs. Ora Brown Stokes Addresses Women Voters" Chicago Defender (April 28, 1928): 5. via ProQuest
- ^ "Dr. Elizabeth Coles Bouey" International Association of Ministers' Wives and Ministers' Widows.
- ^ "Mrs. Stokes Named Advisor for N. Y. A." Chicago Defender (November 2, 1940): 4. via ProQuest
- ^ "Wall of Honor". Virginia Women's Monument Commission. Retrieved 2 April 2022.
- ^ "Beyond Maggie Walker: 6 Other Richmond Women from the Turn of the Century" Virginia Union University Archives & Special Collections (February 12, 2018).
- ^ "Bury Dr. Stokes at Richmond" Pittsburgh Courier (August 1, 1936): 20. via Newspapers.com
- ^ Gary R. Kremer, "J. Edward Perry", in Lawrence O. Christensen, William E. Foley, Gary Kremer, eds., Dictionary of Missouri Biography (University of Missouri Press 1999): 608-609. ISBN 9780826260161
- ^ "Hospital Head Marries Prominent Socialite" Pittsburgh Courier (March 27, 1948): 8. via Newspapers.com
External links
[edit]- A 1921 letter from Ora Brown Stokes to W. E. B. DuBois, W. E. B. DuBois Papers, University of Massachusetts Amherst Special Collections.
- Home for Working Girls brochure, Ora Brown Stokes, President, Social Welfare History Image Portal, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries.
- Ora Brown Stokes and the Richmond Neighborhood Association, Social Welfare History Project, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries.