Mary Jackson McCrorey

Mary Jackson McCrorey (November 9, 1867 – January 13, 1944) was an American educator, mission worker, and leader in the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA).

Mary Jackson McCrorey, from a 1921 publication.

Early life

Mary C. Jackson was born in Athens, Georgia, the daughter of Alfred Jackson and Louisa Terrell Jackson. She was the Jacksons' eighth child and their first free-born child, born after the end of the American Civil War and Emancipation. Mary C. Jackson attended Atlanta University.[1]

Career

Jackson taught school in Athens, after college. She was also a school principal in Orlando, Florida for four years.[1] From 1896 to 1916, Mary Jackson was associate principal at Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia, working closely with the school's founder Lucy Craft Laney.[2][3] She wrote a profile of Lucy Craft Laney for The Crisis in 1934.[4]

After her marriage, McCrorey was based in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she worked in various capacities at Johnson C. Smith University. She served as president of the Baptist Division of Missions for Colored People, and was active in bringing the first YWCAs for black women in the American South.[5][6] She was an officer of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races.[7] She was part of a network of Southern black women at universities who were also involved with the YWCA and the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACW), including Juliette Derricotte, Jennie B. Moton, Margaret Murray Washington, and Nettie Langston Napier.[8][9] From 1920 to 1944, Mary Jackson McCrorey served on the National Commission on Interracial Cooperation.[10]

In 1941, McCrorey was awarded an honorary doctorate by Benedict College.[11]

Personal life

Mary C. Jackson married Henry Lawrence McCrorey, a widower and the president of Johnson C. Smith University, in 1916. She died in 1944, aged 76 years. After Henry's death in 1951, the black YMCA in Charlotte, North Carolina was renamed the McCrorey Family YMCA.[12]

References
  1. W. H. Crogman, "Mary Jackson McCrorey" in Arthur Bunyan Caldwell, ed. History of the American Negro and His Institutions (A. B. Caldwell Publishing 1921): 620-624.
  2. "The Dark Vestal Virgin: Lucy Craft Laney" The Weekly Challenger (September 29, 2016).
  3. Audrey Thomas McCluskey, A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South (Rowman & Littlefield 2014): 43-44. ISBN 9781442211407
  4. Mary Jackson McCrorey, "Lucy Laney" The Crisis (June 1934): 161.
  5. Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925 (University of Tennessee Press 1989): 216-217. ISBN 9780870496844
  6. Nancy Marie Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-46 (University of Illinois Press 2007): 82-84. ISBN 9780252031939
  7. Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (Knopf Doubleday Publishing 2010): 615, note 329. ISBN 9780307593054
  8. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (Columbia University Press 1993): 317, note 66. ISBN 9780231082839
  9. Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, eds., Mary Mcleod Bethune: Building a Better World, Essays and Selected Documents (Indiana University Press 2001): 148. ISBN 9780253215031
  10. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Cauley-Wheeler Memorial Building (2008): 10.
  11. "Woman Gets Degree Doctor of Pedagogy" Pittsburgh Courier (July 5, 1941): 18. via Newspapers.com
  12. About Us, YMCA of Greater Charlotte.
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