Ora Brown Stokes Perry (1882–1957) was an American educator, probation officer, temperance worker, suffragist, and clubwoman based in Richmond, Virginia.
Ora Brown Stokes Perry | |
---|---|
Born | 1882 Chesterfield County, Virginia |
Died | 1957 |
Occupation(s) | Educator, probation officer, temperance worker, suffragist, and clubwoman |
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]
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]
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.