Jane Edna Hunter (1882-1971) created a network of safe housing, employment training and a community gathering space that transformed the opportunities available to young Black women during the Great Migration.
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s Local Legend created a network of safe housing, employment training and a community gathering space that transformed the opportunities available to young Black women during the Great Migration.
We’re talking about Jane Edna Hunter.
Jane Edna Harris was born on December 13, 1882 on Woodburn Farm near Pendleton, South Carolina. Her Father, Edward Harris was a sharecropper born enslaved. Her mother, Harriet, had narrowly escaped the same fate by being born on the day President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Tragically, Jane’s father died when Jane was just 10 years old. As a result, Jane was forced to work as a live-in servant to help make ends meet for the family. At the age of 17, in an effort to secure the family financial stability, Jane’s mother arranged for Jane to marry a man 40 years her senior, Edward Hunter. The union didn’t last. Fourteen months after their wedding day, the marriage dissolved. Jane never married again.
Now unwed and in need of work, Jane pursued a nursing degree and at the age of 23, moved North to Cleveland, Ohio.
As a young, single Black woman, Jane found it incredibly difficult to find safe, affordable, stable housing. At the time, Jane was one of only two Black professional nurses in Cleveland. The first place that was willing to rent her a room was a brothel. But her fortunes soon improved when she met the secretary to John D. Rockefeller’s doctor through a connection at church.
This introduction led to steady employment, which helped lift Jane out of poverty.
While Jane’s circumstances had improved, the system had not. She saw a need for resources and infrastructure for other Black women migrating north. In September of 1911, Jane took steps to intervene.
Along with seven friends, Jane founded the Working Girl’s Home Association. Dues were a nickel a week.
Two years later, Jane expanded the center. She secured the necessary donations using the access and goodwill she’d built up with the Rockefeller family. It was renamed the Phillis Wheatley Association, in honor of the 18th-century formerly enslaved Bostonian who is credited as being the first African American poet.
The PWA, as it was called, started out as a 23-room boarding house, and quickly upgraded to an 88-room apartment building with adjoining recreational facilities. It created a central place where Black women arriving from the South could find housing, employment resources and community. It was unique in that the members of the board of trustees were both Black and white.
The greater Cleveland community was not immediately sold on the idea.
Upper-class white civic leaders in Cleveland felt that Jane and this community of Southerners were bringing segregationists practices to the North. They even referred to the PWA as the “Jim Crow YMCA”. In response, Jane pointed out that their local YMCA actually had a cap on how many Black people it would admit. She made an argument that there was a larger community in need of more resources than what was currently being offered. Plus, she had built a reputation of training capable, reliable employees who served local businesses..
The PWA was a first-of-its-kind institution, designed specifically to address the needs of African American migrants. By the late 1920s, it had become the largest African American social service agency in Cleveland. It expanded to include a daycare facility, and added apartments catering to the elderly and individuals with disabilities. Jane expanded its offerings to include the arts and opened the Sutphen School of Music.
Jane continued her own education, too. She took extension classes at a local University and eventually earned a law degree from what was then, the Baldwin-Wallace Law School. She passed the Ohio bar exam in 1925.
Jane’s influence grew. In 1930, the National Association of Colored Women created a Phillis Wheatley Department with Jane as its chair. By 1939, she had opened additional houses in Illinois, North and South Carolina, Minnesota, Connecticut and all across Ohio.
W.E.B DuBois (dew-boys *he doesn’t like the french pronunciation, so you’re off the hook*) asked Jane to contribute to The Encyclopedia of the Negro. And Jane made several trips to the White House to meet with two women you may remember from previous episodes of Encyclopedia Womannica, education activist, Mary McLeod Bethune and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Jane distilled her experience navigating the Great Migration in her 1940 autobiography, “A Nickel and a Prayer”.
Over time, Jane received criticisms for some of her practices. She maintained a conservative view on recreational activities and strictly monitored the personal lives of the women who lived in the PWA homes. Yale University Professor, Hazel Carby, is critical of what she sees as Jane’s hypocrisy: always presenting herself as capable and independent, while suggesting her residents were hapless and in need of constant surveillance.
In 1947, Jane retired as general secretary of the PWA. She spent the next several years giving speeches and writing newspaper columns, but the majority of Jane’s attention remained devoted to the Phillis Wheatley Foundation, a scholarship fund for African American high school graduates, women’s programs and services.
On January 19, 1971 Jane died in Cleveland. She was 88 years old.
She left the bulk of her assets to the Phillis Wheatley Foundation, which later set up the Jane Edna Hunter Scholarship Fund in her honor. Jane was one of the first inductees to the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame.
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Talk to you tomorrow!