Ora Brown Stokes Perry

Ora Brown Stokes Perry (1882-1957) was an American educator, probation officer, temperance worker, and clubwoman based in Richmond, Virginia.

Ora Brown Stokes, from a 1921 publication.

Early life

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

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, 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)[7] 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.[8][9]

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.[10] 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.[11] In 1924, she was Virginia chair of the Colored Women's Department of the Republican National Committee, but later described the experience as frustrating.[12] In 1927, Stokes was elected president of the Southeastern Association of Colored Women's Clubs.[13] 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.[14] In 1940, she was at the organizational meeting of the National Association of Ministers' Wives, organized by Elizabeth Coles Bouey.[15] She was an advisor to the National Youth Administration under Mary McLeod Bethune,[16] 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.[8]

Personal life

Ora Brown married twice. Her first husband was William Herbert Stokes, a minister at Richmond's Ebenezer Baptist Church;[17] they married in 1902.[2] She was widowed in 1936.[18] In 1948 she was married again, to physician and hospital administrator J. Edward Perry, the widower of Fredericka Douglass Sprague Perry.[19][20] She died in 1957, aged 75 years.

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References
  1. A. B. Caldwell, History of the American Negro: Virginia Edition (Caldwell Publishing 1921).
  2. Clayton McClure Brooks, The Uplift Generation: Cooperation across the Color Line in Early Twentieth-Century Virginia (University of Virginia Press 2017). ISBN 9780813939506
  3. "Mrs. Ora Brown Stokes Speaks" Chicago Defender (August 31, 1918): 12. via ProQuest
  4. "Early Social Work History" Making VCU, VCU Libraries Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University.
  5. William Anthony Aery, "Work of Colored Women's Clubs" The Southern Workman (September 1911): 506.
  6. Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Annual Report, Hampton Negro Conference (1911): 62.
  7. 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
  8. "Mrs. Ora Brown Stokes Discusses Work of Natl. Woman's Christian Temperance Union" New York Age (October 20, 1945): 2. via Newspapers.com
  9. "New Protective Officer" Times Dispatch (October 9, 1918): 12. via Newspapers.com
  10. Jennifer Davis McDaid, "Woman Suffrage in Virginia" Encyclopedia Virginia (October 26, 2015).
  11. "Virginia Normal Adds Mrs. Stokes to Faculty" Chicago Defender (December 24, 1921): 5. via ProQuest
  12. 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
  13. Benjamin Looker, A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press 2015): 102. ISBN 9780226290317
  14. "Mrs. Ora Brown Stokes Addresses Women Voters" Chicago Defender (April 28, 1928): 5. via ProQuest
  15. "Dr. Elizabeth Coles Bouey" International Association of Ministers' Wives and Ministers' Widows.
  16. "Mrs. Stokes Named Advisor for N. Y. A." Chicago Defender (November 2, 1940): 4. via ProQuest
  17. "Beyond Maggie Walker: 6 Other Richmond Women from the Turn of the Century" Virginia Union University Archives & Special Collections (February 12, 2018).
  18. "Bury Dr. Stokes at Richmond" Pittsburgh Courier (August 1, 1936): 20. via Newspapers.com
  19. 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
  20. "Hospital Head Marries Prominent Socialite" Pittsburgh Courier (March 27, 1948): 8. via Newspapers.com
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