Fayetteville will honor a native who made a lasting impact internationally, but whose story isn't as well-known here. Theressa Hoover served as head of the Women's Division of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries for more than 20 years — the highest rank attained by an African American woman in any denomination in the United States up to that time.
On Feb. 28 at noon, a plaque honoring her contributions will be unveiled at Sequoyah United Methodist Church in Fayetteville.
To learn more about Theressa Hoover, we invited Janet Allured to the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio. One of the chapters in a book co-edited by Allured, Southern Methodist Women and Social Justice: Interracial Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, focuses on Theressa Hoover. Allured says she became interested in the Arkansas native's story while writing a different book about second-wave feminism in Louisiana.
Kyle Kellams: You came to Theressa Hoover's story through a separate research project. How did that happen?
Janet Allured: Most people, when I tell them that I have a book on second-wave feminism in Louisiana, say, "That must be a really short book." But it's actually not — it's a pretty substantial book. In the course of doing that research about these post-World War II feminists, I discovered that a substantial percentage of them were Methodist, which was kind of surprising to me.
And so in that book, I have an entire chapter devoted to religion and feminism — the religious feminists is another way to put that — because most scholars tend to think of those two things as being antithetical to each other, feminism and religion. But it depends what kind of religion you're talking about. If you're talking about evangelical religion, it's generally antithetical to feminism. And many second-wave feminists, because of that, especially in the North, were themselves hostile to religion because they regarded it as being a patriarchal construct.
So what I saw in these southern feminists in Louisiana — and this turns out to be true throughout the South — is that they were not antithetical to each other, and in fact that one bolstered the other. So Theressa Hoover very much represents that marriage of religion and feminism, or faith and feminism, where she saw the Bible, as did all of her compadres, as potentially liberating for women, and religion and faith as liberating for women. But not if the people who were doing the interpreting were all men. So it required that women develop a theological insight — and I consider her a lay theologian — to help understand and explain why feminism, in fact, could be good for women.
And so in a lot of ways, as the head of what at the time was called United Methodist Women — it's now United Women in Faith — she essentially educated these women about feminism and the need for feminism. And each one of the units effectively, because it's a federated system, each one of the local units effectively became consciousness-raising sessions, which was, of course, very familiar to people who were feminist — about how you began to understand gender relations in the United States.
Kellams: She was born in Fayetteville, went to primary school here. But of course, during her lifetime, high school here was segregated. She had to go to Atlanta, Texas, for high school. She had an aunt there?
Allured: Yes. Her father's sister, who was herself a schoolteacher and taught in one of the Black schools, hosted actually quite a few people — children, really — from Fayetteville. So it wasn't just Theressa, but several of her siblings and other people who were in her grade. I hate to say it was a privilege, because it's not much of a privilege that you have to leave home to be able to get a high school education. But if it hadn't been for her aunt, they wouldn't have had even that. I know some students went to Fort Smith as well, but this was a familial connection, and so that's where she went.
Kellams: And then what happens for her after finishing high school in Texas?
Allured: She graduated at the top of her class in Texas — she's very smart, everyone says that about her. And she went to Philander Smith. She was raised in St. James Methodist, and so she's been Methodist all her life. Her people were Methodist. And as a result of that, Philander Smith is a Methodist institution also, so that's one reason she goes to Philander Smith College in Little Rock.
She's getting additional Methodist education there. And the president of Philander Smith recommended her — she was again a top student — to the Little Rock Council, which was a group of Methodist women, actually an interracial group, which was highly unusual in the 1940s. An interracial group of Methodist women that also added some Black Methodist men to it as a way of bridging racial divides.
And one of the first things they did was hire her to be sort of an organizer for Black churches to help develop a women's society. So one of her first paying jobs is working for the Methodist Church — but not the Methodist Church in general, working for Methodist women. And that's essentially what she did the rest of her life.
Kellams: She traveled all over the country, and she did so at a time when traveling for her was not easy.
Allured: That's exactly right. She traveled alone all over the country as a young Black woman. That's daring. She's being paid to do it, but nonetheless — Jim Crow. It's the Jim Crow era. And so she can't count on where she can eat or where she can lay her head or use a restroom, since at least in the South, it's still strictly segregated.
Her travels took her all over, and so she did discover that it wasn't that way everywhere. She might encounter prejudice everywhere, but the states outside the South don't have the same kind of legal restrictions that the southern states did on African Americans. And so it gave her hope in a lot of ways, because she could see not all white people do this to Black people, and there's another way to live, and it's within our own country, and we can work towards that goal of a color-neutral society.
We should recognize that this was a very bold and courageous thing for a single woman, a Black woman, to make those kinds of travels, because she could not count on where she might eat or sleep or use the restroom. She generally contacted the Black churches before she got there and let them know she was coming so that they could help her and lodge her frequently.
Kellams: When you read anything about her, a word that comes up a lot is mentorship — that many people felt they were mentored by her.
Allured: Oh, yes. Absolutely. And that was her own personal characteristic, but also something that was encouraged in the women's societies themselves, which she, of course, gradually went up the ranks of. That was part of their purpose — to mentor women and children generally, but female children in particular.
It's part of the educational process to let people see what can be and what they can do in an organization that was single-sex, which is important for us to keep in mind, and was really in many ways autonomous from the general church, which meant they raised their own money, they made decisions about that money, and they elected their own leadership.
That's where female friendships can be really transformative, because they have the freedom in a situation like that to feel what kinds of possibilities are out there for them as women — empowered, not being limited because of their sex.
Kellams: Did she journal? Did she have a diary? Do we know much about her everyday life?
Allured: That is a great question, Kyle, and I wish I had a better answer for you. As a public figure — because she eventually becomes the head of what then becomes United Methodist Women, it's now United Women in Faith — she wrote a lot. That was part of her job. And she gave a lot of speeches. Again, that's part of her responsibility. So I have those things that were published, and it's a lot of material. And I have interviews that people did with her that are housed at the National Archives for the church, and I've seen all of those.
Little Rock did some interviews with her because, of course, she retired back here eventually. I've listened to all those or read the transcripts of those, and they're very helpful, and that's where I tend to get a little bit more of the personal information. But generally, no — there's a lack of that that's always bothered me, not just about her, but actually many of the women that I write about.
And that's kind of unusual, I think, for me as a historian and a biographer, to choose to write about someone who has not left that kind of material behind for someone like me to read and then analyze and put in book form. But I have. She's such a big figure, I couldn't not do it. She's really nationally important, even internationally important, and she just is not well known. And I feel like she should be better known.
Kellams: So, to that end, there will be on Feb. 28 the dedication of a plaque here in Fayetteville.
Allured: Yes. When she retired back here after 2000, she ended up joining Sequoyah United Methodist Church on Old Wire Road, even though her family was affiliated with St. James, because St. James was small and didn't have its own United Methodist Women chapter, and she wanted to obviously continue to do that kind of work in her retirement. And so Sequoyah was a better fit for her.
Her niece was also a close friend and in many ways a caretaker for her. The fact that she and her niece attended Sequoyah, and both of their funerals were at Sequoyah, is why we decided to have the historical plaque commemorating her at Sequoyah.
I also got a grant — the Curtis Sykes Fund, which is a state fund that provides money just for this purpose, for historic preservation of Black lives. Because it's public money, it has to be publicly available. And obviously I would want it to be publicly available anyway, even if that were not true.
Sequoyah has a good location next to the Greenway Trail, which runs right in front of the church. We're going to put it on the trail, but a little off of the trail. Sequoyah is helping us with that — they have a good plan for a nice concrete pad and landscaping around it and benches for people to sit and read. So it takes them kind of off the trail — they won't be in the way of joggers or people pushing strollers or something like that.
Kellams: She's the only woman to have a church named after her, right?
Allured: I'm glad you brought this up. Yes. The Theressa Hoover Memorial United Methodist Church in Little Rock was very influenced by her, and got her permission to name the church after her, and commemorates her every day.
A contingent from that church is coming, including the pastor who knew her and who counts herself as a mentee of Theressa Hoover. She will say a few words. So there'll be a Little Rock contingent.
And then also the current general secretary and CEO of United Women in Faith — the successor, but effectively the same organization that Theressa ran — Sally Vonner, is flying in from New York for this. She has a very limited window because she's so busy. As you might expect, she's in demand all over, all the time, to do these kinds of duties. But she's making this effort to fly in just for those few hours, and then she's flying right back out the same day. We are very pleased that the national leader will be able to attend.
Kellams: When she retired, she moved back to Fayetteville — and you think about this community that decades before wouldn't provide her a high school education. I don't know if I would be able to forgive a community for denying me an education.
Allured: That's a good point. But she does. Her family was here, and as she got older, her health began to need attention, too. She has this niece that was very close to her and ended up being her caretaker. But that's not the only family member who was here. So I guess in a way, she forgave Fayetteville. But of course, by then, things had changed considerably, and she even felt comfortable in a white church.
And I will say, too, that the Methodist Church as a denomination supported civil rights, and she is one of the people who was in part responsible for that, as well as gender equality. The Methodist Church was also really in the vanguard of a lot of gender equality positions at the time, because of the strong women's division that she headed — and not just her. The other women were very strong feminists and supporters of civil rights, too.
And so I'm sure there were many things that she appreciated — that she could, in a lot of ways, witness her handiwork as she came back in her later years.
The plaque honoring Fayetteville native Theressa Hoover will be unveiled Saturday, Feb. 28 at noon at Sequoyah United Methodist Church in Fayetteville. Janet Allured co-edited the book Southern Methodist Women and Social Justice: Interracial Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, which includes a chapter about Theressa Hoover. She co-edited that book with M. Kathryn Armistead, managing editor of Methodist Review. Our conversation took place in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio earlier this month.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
