Lenora Rolla

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 1946, she was a delegate to the National Christian Missionary Convention; in 1954, she was elected president of the organization.

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.

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 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.

From 1952-1956, she was the managing editor of the Dallas Express, the oldest black newspaper in Texas.

In 1953 Rolla spoke at the Disciples of Christ World Convention in Ontario, Canada.

In 1954 Rolla met Martin Luther King, Jr. while traveling on assignment to Montgomery, Alabama, to report on the Brown vs. Board of Education trial for the Dallas Express. She returned in 1955 to cover the Montgomery bus boycott.

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.

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 the 1960s, she traveled to Chicago to meet Alfreda Duster, the daughter of civil rights leader Ida B. Wells.

In 1963, she was selected to serve on Lyndon B. Johnson's Conference on Community Leaders, sponsored by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and participated in the historic March on Washington, in which Martin Luther King, Jr. presented his "I Have a Dream" speech and Rolla called the "high point" of her life.

About King, Rolla said, "He gave me motivation to keep on keeping on and to be less disturbed by our position…[he] has given me more steel in my limbs and faith."

Through her leadership in the civil rights movement, Rolla met and was influenced by Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin, Marian Anderson, Esther Rolle, Alex Haley, and Dick Gregory, and brought many such figures to Fort Worth.

In 1974, Lenora Rolla was appointed to Fort Worth's Bicentennial planning committee and tasked with gathering the history of African Americans in early Fort Worth history.

In 1977, she founded the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society, whose history museum is named in honor of Rolla.

This project and the release of Alex Haley's Roots inspired Rolla to form the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society, which formed in 1977 with 21 charter members led by Rolla.

Their first meeting was held at Tarrant County Junior College.

The collection was originally stored in the Rolla family's east Fort Worth home.

When donations made it grow too large for the home, the collection was moved to the East Berry branch of the Fort Worth Public Library and then to a dedicated building on East Rosedale next door to the home of Manet Helen Fowler, daughter of Manet Harrison Fowler.

She visited a number of African countries in 1980 as a missionary and again in 1994 as part of a "homeland" tour based on Alex Haley's Roots saga and organized by the author's son.

In 1986, Rolla participated in the Hands Across America benefit to end homelessness, standing along Lancaster Avenue with her friend and fellow activist, Opal Lee.