Community Builders: Early African American Women in Grand Rapids

For over 25 years the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council has underwritten efforts dedicated to rediscovering and crediting the rich past of area women, including the history of the 115 -year-old Grand Rapids Study Club, the oldest African American women’s club still in existence.

During the 1890s, local women’s clubs proliferated so rapidly and organized women into such a social force that newspapers were compelled to create new sections featuring their plans and activities. What is revealed in these early accounts? That Grand Rapids Jewish women, Polish Catholic women, all women, were gathering for self-education and charitable purposes, hosting state- and nation-wide gatherings--and stepping up publicly to denounce racist articles as did the African American Married Ladies Nineteenth Century Club in 1898.

In 1907, five local African American women’s groups, representing a miniscule percentage of the city’s population, hosted the Michigan Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. Delegates were welcomed by the Grand Rapids mayor and treated to gracious receptions and trolley tours.

Who were these hosts? They included leaders like Emma Ford and Mary Roberts Tate, individual African American women who began speaking their minds in public, on area stages and in newspapers both.

On February 11th , Yvonne Sims and Jo Ellyn Clarey will tell a fascinating story that corrects errors and fills gaps in Grand Rapids history. For example, they will reintroduce the Beverly sisters, addressing misinformation about Hattie, the first African American teacher in the Grand Rapids Public Schools, and introduce her longer-lived sister, Ethel, whose contributions to the community were much more extensive.

While women community builders, especially the African American, have often been forgotten locally, ignored statewide, and dismissed nationally, Grand Rapids women have been breaking down barriers impeding them from the very beginning. Only now are women’s historians pulling their stories out of the rich social environment that fostered their emergence onto the public stage. And their histories are now challenging most every generalization made about them ever since.

About the Presenters

During and after her career as a teacher and administrator in the Grand Rapids Public Schools, Yvonne Sims has helped lead such significant community events as the Forum on Violence and won the Giants Award in 1986 for community service. This native Grand Rapidian has served as a Lifestyles columnist for the Grand Rapids Times and invested in projects of the Grand Rapids Study Club, the city’s longest-continuing African American women’s group—one subject of this program. Sims has ensured that the club kept “rowing, not drifting” into the 21 st century toward its goals of bettering the community. Her historical programs and oversight of club archives have been a major addition to local women’s history.

By profession a literary scholar, Jo Ellyn Clarey taught at a variety of academic institutions before redirecting her path into the world of local women’s history. She has helped document the achievements of lost women and forgotten events, including those representing early African American women in Grand Rapids. Besides winning the 1999 Albert Baxter Award in local history, she has served on the boards of the Greater Grand Rapids Women's History Council, the GR Historical Society, the GR Historical Commission, and organized women’s history research and programming statewide and nationally.

“Community Builders: Early African American Women in Grand Rapids”, Thursday, February 11, 2016, 7:00 p.m.Aquinas College—Donnelly Center, presented by Yvonne Sims, Grand Rapids Study Club and Jo Ellyn Clarey, GRSC & the Greater Grand Rapids Women's History Council.