My friend, Mrs. Pat Lile of Little Rock, has asked me to write a nomination of the late Adolphine Fletcher Terry for inclusion in the Arkansas Women's Hall of Fame. And, I always do whatever Pat Lile tells me to do. Also, March is Women's History Month. So, Mrs. Terry it is.
I tend to take Adolphine Fletcher Terry for granted. She is such a mainstay of 20th century Arkansas history, culture, politics, and race relations that it is easy for her to blend into the historical wallpaper. In her later years, Mrs. Terry shied away from the spotlight, tending to give more credit than she accepted. But, Adolphine Fletcher Terry was a force to be reckoned with throughout her long life.
Adolphine Fletcher was born Nov. 3, 1882, the first of three children born to John G. Fletcher and Adolphine Krause Fletcher. Her sister, Mary, was sickly as was the youngest sibling, John Gould Fletcher -- who would go on to become a writer and poet and winner of the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
John G. Fletcher came from frontier aristocracy, the family owning considerable land in Saline County. Historian Ben Johnson described the family as "backcountry Whigs," owners of slaves but not given to secessionist thinking.
John G. Fletcher relocated to Little Rock in 1856. After the Civil War he went into the mercantile and cotton brokering business with Austrian immigrant Peter Hotze. In 1877 he married Hotze's sister-in-law, Adolphine Krause. Adolphine Krause Fletcher was the daughter of German immigrants, and she was a strong woman -- as was her daughter, also named Adolphine.
The younger Adolphine grew up in a family which valued education, and at age 15 her mother insisted that she go to Vassar College in New York. Peggy Harris, the author of the entry on Mrs. Terry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, wrote that Adolphine's "east coast education and schoolmates broadened her views on race relations." She graduated in 1902, one of only a handful of Arkansas women with college degrees.
It did not take long before Adolphine was involved in various reform efforts in Little Rock and the state. This was the Progressive Era, when Americans sought reforms through both governmental and private means.
Adolphine Fletcher and Blanche Martin, another Vassar graduate, joined in an effort to consolidate many of the state's 5,000 school districts -- a futile effort. However, both these women would live to see widespread school consolidation, which started during the McMath administration. She also promoted college education for women, including helping found what became the Little Rock branch of the American Association of University Women.
One of Adolphine's most significant causes was the creation of a juvenile justice system. In 1910, she organized the first juvenile court in Arkansas. Realizing that jail was no place for young girls, Adolphine helped organize the Girls Industrial School near Alexander, Ark. She also helped organize the Little Rock Public Library and spent more than 40 years on its board.
It should not come as a surprise that Adolphine Fletcher was a leader in the hard-fought campaign to extend the vote to women. The first documented example of her work on behalf of women's suffrage dates to April 1910 when she wrote Arkansas' U.S. Senator James P. Clarke asking him to kindly receive the suffragists from Arkansas who would be visiting him shortly.
Bernadette Cahill, a young scholar who has become an authority on the history of the women's suffrage movement in Arkansas, has written that "... it is not surprising to find that the woman who became known as a radical reformer in the cause of racial civil rights later in life took a similar potentially unpopular stand fifty years before. In this case, she was concerned about basic civil rights for her sex."
In 1916, Adolphine, now married to David D. Terry, presided at a meeting in the Marion Hotel of Alice Paul's Congressional Union. Mrs. Terry would go on to serve on the Congressional Union's national advisory council. Alice Paul and her group were viewed as radical at the time for such unorthodox practices as posting silent pickets outside the White House. Mrs. Terry must have been supremely happy when Arkansas finally extended the vote to women in 1918, one of the early southern states to enfranchise women.
Mrs. Terry broadened her interests even more after the fight for the vote was won. She worked with the American Legion Auxiliary to secure Federal funds to hire librarians in the state. Later, she helped spearhead the creation of libraries statewide. In the late 1930s Mrs. Terry worked with the city to obtain a municipal housing authority.
By the time Gov. Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the integration of Central High School in Little Rock in 1957, Mrs. Terry was a revered figure living in the family's grand old home on East Seventh Street, built by Albert Pike in the 1840s.
Mrs. Terry was dismayed by the desegregation crisis, recalling later: "For days, I walked about unable to concentrate on anything, except the fact that we had been disgraced by a group of poor whites and a portion of the lunatic fringe." She concluded: "Where had the better class been while this was being concocted? Shame on us."
Mrs. Terry called upon two of those from "the better class" to help her organize the Women's Emergency Committee: Vivion Brewer of Scott, Ark. and Velma Powell of Little Rock. The WEC was, as Peggy Harris has written, "the first organized group of white moderates to oppose the governor and demand the reopening of the city's four public high schools." Finally, in May 1959, WEC, black voters and the recently organized Stop This Outrageous Purge, recalled the segregationist school board members, and the schools reopened that autumn.
Adolphine and David Terry, a Little Rock lawyer, were married July 7, 1910. They had four children, David, Mary, Sarah and William.
Mrs. Terry died on July 25,1976, at age 90. She was buried at Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock.
NOTE: The Friends of the Arkansas State Archives are holding a public conference to discuss the problems facing the State Archives and its parent agency, the Department of Arkansas Heritage. The meeting will be on Saturday, March 24, in Little Rock. Call (501) 771-1012 for details.
Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in rural Hot Spring County, Arkansas. Email him at [email protected].
NAN Profiles on 03/18/2018