Lenora Rolla (March 4, 1904 – June 29, 2001) was a noted African-American activist, businesswoman, educator, and historian. The granddaughter of former slaves who grew up in poverty, Rolla became a civil rights leader and community activist in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. In 1977, she founded the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society, whose history museum is named in honor of Rolla.
Biography
Early life and education
Lenora Rolla (née Butler) was born March 4, 1904, near the towns of Palestine and Neches in rural East Texas, and raised by her grandparents in Neches until the age of five. Her grandfather, William Hall, was a former slave from Mississippi; her grandmother, also born into slavery, had been given as a wedding gift to a white couple who came to Texas from South Carolina. Lenora's father was a farmer and her mother, Amanda Hall, worked as a maid in Fort Worth, sending money back home to the family. Lenora spent the summers in Fort Worth with her mother until she moved there permanently in 1909, living in servants' quarters and helping her mother with laundry and ironing.
Rolla attended the Cooper Street School in Trezevant Hill, a historic African-American community in what is now Fort Worth's hospital district, and was baptized at Southside Baptist Church on Easter Sunday in 1916. In 1921, she graduated from the famous I.M. Terrell High School, the first public school for blacks in Fort Worth. She continued to work there as a substitute teacher, taking correspondence classes at historically black Prairie View A&M College and Bishop College. She completed a mathematics degree at Alcorn College in Mississippi, and attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., in the 1940s.
Career
Rolla supported herself by taking in sewing and working at her uncle's insurance business, an industry in which she worked through the 1920s and 1930s. During the Great Depression, she worked as a proofreader at the Fort Worth Mind, a local African-American newspaper. She spent most of the 1940s in Washington, D.C., working in the settlement house movement, an anti-poverty social movement that was still subject to racial segregation. She had the opportunity to hear First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt speak at Howard University and worked with civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, who as Director of Negro Affairs had an office in the White House during the Roosevelt administration. During World War II, Rolla worked as the supervisor of the clerical and typing pool at the United States Maritime Commission and was awarded a War Service Certificate for her leadership. By 1949, she had married, returned to Fort Worth, and become a licensed funeral director, working at Baker and Hardee-Adams funeral homes, which served the black community in segregated Fort Worth. From 1952-1956, she was the managing editor of the Dallas Express, the oldest black newspaper in Texas. From 1955-1958, she worked as dean of women at Jarvis Christian College in East Texas. She worked for Texas state senator Don Kennard in the 1960s and worked as a docent at Fort Worth Museum of Science and History in the 1970s.
Activism
Lenora Rolla was involved with religious and civil rights causes as a strong believer that civil rights group struggle without the support of churches in their communities. In 1946, she was a delegate to the National Christian Missionary Convention; in 1954, she was elected president of the organization. In 1953 Rolla spoke at the Disciples of Christ World Convention in Ontario, Canada. She was a delegate at both the 1950 and 1955 United Nations Seminar on World Order. She served as vice-president of the Christian Churches of Texas, a board member of the Fort Worth Area Council of Churches, a board member of the United Christian Missionary Society, and the first female elder at Fort Worth's Community Christian Church.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Rolla was a member of the Tarrant County Precinct Workers Council, which advocated for elimination of the poll tax. In the 1950s, she founded the Hattie Street Haven community center in a former fire station on Fort Worth's east side. She organized boycotts against local businesses that refused to hire blacks and "get out the vote" rallies in Chicago and Fort Worth.