Thelma Stevens

Southern Exposure Contributor

Thelma Stevens, originally from Mississippi, has been a "full-time church worker" all of her adult life. While a student at Hattiesburg State Teachers College in the late '20s, she became involved in the YWCA and organized interracial meetings between the students from the college and black schoolteachers in the town. The meetings had to stop when she was ordered by the college president to "stop building a climate for training yankee schoolteachers." After graduation from Scarritt College, she became the director of the Bethlehem Center in Augusta, Georgia. When the various branches of Methodism united in 1939, she became the executive director of Christian Social Relations for the newly created Women's Division of Christian Service and remained in that position until her retirement in the early '70s. (1976)

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