Standing on the shoulders of giants...the legacy of Mary E. Jones Parrish
By Evelyn C. White
December 3, 2021
In a 2011 interview, talk show personality Wendy Williams asked Aretha Franklin (1942-2018) to name the job she would have chosen had she not become a singer. “Prima ballerina,” said the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Barring a successful ballet career, the Queen of Soul said she would have pursued another occupation. “Executive secretary,” she declared, assuredly. “It’s something I feel I would have been excellent at, yeah very good.”
Meditating on Franklin’s response, I’m mindful that she would have been in her early twenties when, in 1965, the Adult Education Center opened in New Orleans. I’d wager that Franklin would have fit right in with the Black women who arrived to train, under the direction of Alice Geoffray, in an intensive secretarial program. Having mastered typing, shorthand, and other office skills, the women would later secure steady, well-paying positions with corporations including Shell Oil, IBM, and Delta Airlines.
Indeed, it’s easy to imagine Franklin in the role of Doralee Rhodes, the no-nonsense secretary played by Dolly Parton in the blockbuster movie 9 to 5. In keeping with her Appalachian roots, Parton delivered the film’s theme song with a country music vibe. I suspect Franklin would have “anointed” the tune in the gospel rhythms of the traditional Black church.
As for me, I was a senior in a predominately white Catholic high school when the Adult Education Center closed, in 1972. Despite the gains of the civil rights movement that would see, that year, Barbara Jordan become the first Black woman elected to Congress from the South, I was not encouraged (nor expected) to set ambitious career goals by the school’s white religious faculty.
Instead I was tracked into vocational courses such as typing. Half a century later, I can still conjure the visage of Sister Joan, leaning over my shoulder, as I completed keyboard exercises in the Gregg Typing Manual — which opened like a flip chart. The stern-faced nun had no idea that my proficiency in touch typing would prove central in a journalism career that began in the New York bureau of The Wall Street Journal.
Florence Mary Parrish learned to type from her mother, Mary E. Jones Parrish, who ran a secretarial school and later collected crucial testimony about the attack on Greenwood. PHOTOGRAPH FROM OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
This brings me to Florence Mary Parrish. A photograph of the beribboned Black girl (bearing a triumphant smile) appeared in the June 2021 National Geographic magazine. The issue featured a series of articles — “Reckoning With The Past” — that included a story about the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma Race Massacre.
The rampage was led by a mob of white vigilantes who killed dozens of Blacks and destroyed Greenwood, a bustling commercial and residential district in Tulsa known as Black Wall Street — then one of the most prosperous African-American communities in the United States.
Blacks lost an estimated $600 million of accumulated wealth (in today’s dollars) during the murderous spree that began after a Black teen was falsely accused of “assaulting” a white female.
The successful proprietor of a school that offered classes in typewriting and shorthand, Mary E. Jones Parrish (1892-1972) was among the Blacks whose businesses never recovered from the attack on Greenwood. However, in addition to the glorious photo of her daughter Florence (seated at a typewriter), Parrish’s legacy includes a book, The Events of the Tulsa Disaster (1923). A new edition of the volume, The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 was published in 2021.
Victor Luckerson delivers a compelling piece about Parrish in his New Yorker article “The Women Who Preserved The Story of the Tulsa Massacre” (May 28, 2021).
Graduates of the Adult Education Center and Black women such as myself whose typing skills led to sustained employment, stand on the shoulders of people like Mary Parrish. I’m sure that she and Alice Geoffray (1924-2009) would have embraced each other with, as Aretha sang it: R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
A former reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, Evelyn C. White is the author of Alice Walker: A Life (WW Norton, 2004).