Arenia Mallory

Dr. Arenia C. Mallory was an African American leader in education, religion, social welfare, and civil rights. Born in Jacksonville, Illinois, about 1905, Mallory moved to Mississippi in 1926. A well-educated woman, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Simmons College in Louisville in 1927, a master’s degree from Jackson State University, a master’s degree from the University of Illinois in 1950, and a doctorate of law from Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1951.

Mallory’s most important achievement was as founder and longstanding head of the Saints Industrial and Literary School in Lexington, Mississippi. She served as president of the school from 1926 to 1983. The daughter of musicians, she made music an important part of the school curriculum. In 1954, the school was renamed Saints Junior College, and in the 1970s it became Saints Academy, a private secondary school. This private, religious school for students in grades one through twelve was run under the Church of God in Christ, the largest African American Pentecostal denomination. In 1897, Charles H. Mason and Charles P. Jones established a church in Lexington, and it was at this site that the Saints school first opened. Mallory was a leader in the national church and active in the Women’s Department.

Mallory encouraged not only education but also the provision of health and welfare for sharecroppers in Holmes County, where African Americans predominated. In the 1930s, she helped to inspire several programs in the country during one of her fundraising tours. She frequently traveled across the country with her girls’ choir called the Jubilee Harmonizers, raising money and gathering books and clothing for her students and county residents. On a stop in Oakland, California, she convinced former Mississippi resident Ida Louise Jackson, president of a black sorority, to work in the Mississippi Delta. As a result, in 1934, Mallory’s school served as headquarters for the Alpha Kappa Alpha Summer School for Rural Teachers. In 1935, the sorority changed its summer educational program into a summer public health program, the Alpha Kappa Alpha Mississippi Health Project. Once again the sorority ran its program out of the Saints school.

Mallory advocated for black rights and women’s rights at the national, as well as local, level. As a member of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), an umbrella organization of black women’s groups, Mallory was one of sixty-five black women leaders to attend a conference in Washington, D. C., in 1938 on “The Participation of Negro Women and Children in Federal Programs.” Later she served as Vice President of the NCNW from 1953 to 1957. Among other accomplishments, she served as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., in 1963. Finally, in 1968, Mallory became the first woman and the first African American elected to the Holmes County Board of Education. Today, the Arenia C. Mallory Community Health Center in Lexington, Mississippi, and the Arenia Mallory School of Religion in Miami, Florida, honor her legacy in helping others. (June 2003, 495 words)

Susan L. Smith

Anthea D. Butler, “A Peculiar Synergy: Matriarchy and the Church of God in Christ,” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2001); Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (1994); George Alexander Sewell and Margaret L. Dwight, Mississippi Black History Makers (1977, revised 1984); Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890-1950 (1995); Subject File, Folder “Arenia C. Mallory,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi: includes Brenda Cochran, “Founder’s Day to Honor Dr. Mallory,” The Clarion-Ledger, 19 April 1974; Dorothy Ferebee papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Washington, D.C.; Records of the National Council of Negro Women, Bethune Museum and Archives, Washington, D.C.; Photo of Arenia Mallory in Washington, D. C., in Aframerican Woman’s Journal 1 (Spring 1940): 5, see also p. 13; and www.holmans-world.com/.