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Women’s History Month – 2023

BHMA Is Celebrating Women

Women have always played an essential role in shaping history, but their accomplishments are often ignored or erased. During Women’s History Month, the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington celebrates the women whose courage and intellect have pushed our society towards a more equal union. From Constance Baker Motley, who co-wrote the argument in Brown v Board of Education, to our own Mrs. Evelyn Syphax and Mrs. Dorothy Hamm.

During Women’s History Month, we celebrate the countless women who have fought tirelessly and courageously for equality, justice, and opportunity in our Nation. We also reaffirm our commitment to advancing rights and opportunities for women and girls in the United States and around the world.

Sadly, so many of the stories we tell about our country’s history, so often overlooks the contributions of the women. In every generation women’s efforts and ideas have helped make us who we are today. By paying tribute to the women who shaped our past, we empower and inspire the ones who will shape our future.

In most U.S. history textbooks, women are described as playing supporting roles to men, but we all know that women are not side notes in American history. Women are innovators, educators, politicians and more. As director and President of the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington Virginia, I am proud of what our museum adds to the national conversation by recognizing strong powerful women whose stories have gone unheard for far too long.

Happy National Women Month

Dr. Scott Edwin Taylor, PhD

(president)

Evelyn Reid Syphax

(June 3, 1926–March 14, She graduated from Virginia Union University in 1948 and began teaching. In 1951, she moved to Arlington County, where she continued to teach while earning a master’s degree in early childhood education from New York University. In 1956, she married Archie D. Syphax, a firefighter whose family had a long history of public service in Arlington.

When Evelyn Syphax could not find a preschool in segregated Arlington that would accept her son, she established the Syphax Child Care Center in 1963. She offered a high quality education while emphasizing respect for each child and his or her culture and ethnicity. She also taught and served as a reading specialist in the county’s public schools until retiring in 1972. In 1980, Syphax began a four-year term on the Arlington School Board, where she advocated a program to improve the reading, writing, and math skills of underachieving elementary students.

A champion for children and women, Syphax organized a local Alpha Kappa Alpha chapter to provide scholarships and mentoring programs. She also established a local chapter of the Coalition of 100 Black Women to improve the social and political status of Black women. Syphax also believed in documenting African-American history, helping to lead the fight for a state historic marker at the site of the Freedmen’s Village and creating the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington. In 2010, Virginia Union University named its School of Education for Evelyn Reid Syphax.

Evelyn Reid Syphax

(June 3, 1926–March 14, She graduated from Virginia Union University in 1948 and began teaching. In 1951, she moved to Arlington County, where she continued to teach while earning a master’s degree in early childhood education from New York University. In 1956, she married Archie D. Syphax, a firefighter whose family had a long history of public service in Arlington.

When Evelyn Syphax could not find a preschool in segregated Arlington that would accept her son, she established the Syphax Child Care Center in 1963. She offered a high quality education while emphasizing respect for each child and his or her culture and ethnicity. She also taught and served as a reading specialist in the county’s public schools until retiring in 1972. In 1980, Syphax began a four-year term on the Arlington School Board, where she advocated a program to improve the reading, writing, and math skills of underachieving elementary students.

A champion for children and women, Syphax organized a local Alpha Kappa Alpha chapter to provide scholarships and mentoring programs. She also established a local chapter of the Coalition of 100 Black Women to improve the social and political status of Black women. Syphax also believed in documenting African-American history, helping to lead the fight for a state historic marker at the site of the Freedmen’s Village and creating the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington. In 2010, Virginia Union University named its School of Education for Evelyn Reid Syphax.

Joan Cooper

Joan Cooper (1940-2014) was an Arlington social and civic activist, community leader, and passionate anti-drug campaigner. Born and raised in Arlington’s Green Valley community, Cooper first became an activist in the 1960s as a member of the Action Coordinating Committee to End Segregation in the Suburbs (ACCESS). In July 1966, she participated in sit-ins and pickets demanding that fair and equal housing opportunities be made available to all apartment renters in Arlington County.

Shifting her focus to her immediate community, Cooper tackled issues of drug abuse, crime, and poverty/unemployment, worked to help drive out drug dealers, sought to increase and provide treatment and counseling for addicts, and endeavored to find positive alternatives and activities for young people.

She challenged her community to make changes as well, stating, “People have to realize, that we as community members have to do our job, too.”

In 1970 Cooper led a series of marches and held informal “rap sessions” in Green Valley, focusing on the dangers and extent of drug abuse in the community. She also founded an antidrug facility called the Community Inn, which functioned as a counseling and treatment referral center.

With her message of “Be persistent, consistent, and insistent,” Cooper helped launch an initiative called “Crackdown on Drugs” in July of 1992. Cooper’s dedication and leadership in this campaign were hailed by then-President George H.W. Bush upon his visit to Drew Model School. Her efforts included driving individuals to drug and alcohol detox programs, helping to patrol corner blocks of the Green Valley neighborhood, and serving as a liaison between residents and police. That same year, she was named a Notable Woman of Arlington by the County’s Commission on the Status of Women. The Arlington Community Foundation continues to maintain a fund in Cooper’s name which supports a variety of endeavors, including student scholarships, sports programs at local schools, and repair efforts for Lomax A.M.E. Zion Church of Arlington.

In 1993, Cooper was the first recipient of the William Newman Jr. Spirit of Community Award, given by the Arlington Community Foundation. She also received a William Brittain Jr. Community Appreciation Award from the Arlington branch of the NAACP. In addition, she was a member of the United Way of the National Capital Area and remained an active presence in her community until her passing in 2014.

Joan Mulholland

An icon of the Civil Rights Movement , Mrs. Mulholland participated in her first peaceful protest as a student at Duke University in 1960 and later , the peaceful lunch counter protest in Arlington June of that same year.

“My advocacy started with sit-ins to simply draw attention to the notion of equal treatment,” Mulholland said. “The next year, the Freedom Rides were a method deployed to test the ‘Boynton v. Virginia’ Supreme Court decision, which intended to bring about the integration of interstate travel service stations. We believed that the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, related to nonviolent protest, meant that others had to step up and take the effort forward.”

She took up sit-ins again to support the “Freedom Riders” journey by a group of activists in the summer of 1961. That protest drew international attention as their interstate buses were set afire and passengers attacked as they passed through Alabama from Washington D.C. to New Orleans.

“We sought to make clear that segregation was not legal, even if it meant filling jails as part of our protest,” Mulholland said. “We would later return to these communities and support change, through voter registration campaigns and other efforts, to assure the rights of all citizens who lived and worked there.”

Mulholland continued her education at Tougaloo College outside Jackson, Mississippi, a historically black institution. She endured more hatred and violence during a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson. While at Tougaloo, she became a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., the nation’s largest Greek-lettered African-American organization.

Her associates in continuing demonstrations and protests included Stokely Carmichael, of The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Medgar Evers, John Lewis (pictured) and Martin Luther King. Mulholland took part in the March on Washington, the Selma to Montgomery March, and in 1966, the Meredith March against Fear, which concluded in Jackson.

“President Lyndon Johnson made a speech in 1965, saying he would pursue a Voting Rights Act. He looked directly into the television camera to say ‘We shall overcome,’” Mulholland said. “That statement alluded to the traditional spiritual and was a real death knell to the politics that fought against civil rights freedoms.”

That song and ‘Amazing Grace’ are a couple of pivotal ways that we were able to spread the message that this injustice could not stand, that we must change our ways as a society.”

Mulholland is a recipient of the 2020 Simeon Booker Award for Courage. She and other female Freedom Riders were recognized by President Barack Obama in 2014, and she received the National Civil Rights Museum Freedom Award a year later.

Sojourner Truth

Truth was born Isabella Bomfree, a slave in Dutch-speaking Ulster County, New York in 1797. She was bought and sold four times, and subjected to harsh physical labor and violent punishments. In her teens, she was united with another slave with whom she had five children, beginning in 1815. In 1827—a year before New York’s law freeing slaves was to take effect—Truth ran away with her infant Sophia to a nearby abolitionist family, the Van Wageners. The family bought her freedom for twenty dollars and helped Truth successfully sue for the return of her five-year-old-son Peter, who was illegally sold into slavery in Alabama.

Truth moved to New York City in 1828, where she worked for a local minister. By the early 1830s, she participated in the religious revivals that were sweeping the state and became a charismatic speaker. In 1843, she declared that the Spirit called on her to preach the truth, renaming herself Sojourner Truth.

As an itinerant preacher, Truth met abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Fredrick Douglass. Garrison’s anti-slavery organization encouraged Truth to give speeches about the evils of slavery. She never learned to read or write. In 1850, she dictated what would become her autobiography—The Narrative of Sojourner Truth—to Olive Gilbert, who assisted in its publication. Truth survived on sales of the book, which also brought her national recognition. She met women’s rights activists, including Elizabeth Caddy Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, as well as temperance advocates—both causes she quickly championed.

In 1851, Truth began a lecture tour that included a women’s rights conference in Akron, Ohio, where she delivered her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. In it, she challenged prevailing notions of racial and gender inferiority and inequality by reminding listeners of her combined strength (Truth was nearly six feet tall) and female status. Truth ultimately split with Douglass, who believed suffrage for formerly enslaved men should come before women’s suffrage; she thought both should occur simultaneously.

During the 1850’s, Truth settled in Battle Creek, Michigan, where three of her daughters lived. She continued speaking nationally and helped slaves escape to freedom. When the Civil War started, Truth urged young men to join the Union cause and organized supplies for black troops. After the war, she was honored with an invitation to the White House and became involved with the Freedmen’s Bureau and lived at Freedman’s Village in Arlington Virginia, helping freed slaves find jobs and build new lives. While in the Washington DC area, she lobbied against segregation, and in the mid 1860s, when a streetcar conductor tried to violently block her from riding, she ensured his arrest and won her subsequent case. In the late 1860s, she collected thousands of signatures on a petition to provide former slaves with land, though Congress never took action. Nearly blind and deaf towards the end of her life, Truth spent her final years in Michigan.

Mrs. Dorothy Hamm

Hamm led efforts to desegregate schools in Virginia, to improve fairness in elections, and for equal access to jobs, housing, restaurants, theatres, and hospital rooms. She was a plaintiff in five landmark court cases affecting civil rights, including the 1956 decision that ended school segregation in Arlington Virginia.

A resolution passed by the Virginia House of Delegates in 2002 commended her, highlighting the historic nature of her accomplishments, and noted that she “was also a plaintiff in the cases that eliminated the pupil placement form, desegregated all athletics in the Arlington public schools, desegregated theaters in Arlington, and eliminated the poll tax.”

Mrs.Hamm was an officer of elections in Arlington County for more than 27 years. She served as a delegate to Arlington County and state conventions of the Democratic Party in 1964. She was later appointed assistant registrar and a chief election officer in the Woodlawn precinct in Arlington. She worked with the Congress of Racial Equity as they organized in Arlington, and participated in the 1968 Poor People’s March On Washington.

Hamm led the establishment of a Head Start Program in Arlington in the mid-1960s and taught there for several years. She was also a leader in three churches she attended over the years, including Wright’s Chapel United Methodist Church, where she served as secretary, trustee and in the drama group. She received the first Arlington County Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service in 1982 and a separate award from the Young Arlington Democrats for “Pioneering Civil Rights in Arlington.”

Hamm died on May 14, 2004, in Richmond Virginia.

In 2018 the Virginia Capitol Foundation announced that Hamm’s name would be on the Virgina Women’s Movement glass Wall of Honor.

In 2018 the Dorothy Hamm Middle School in Arlington, Virginia, was named in her honour