Jane Edna Hunter and poster

New Documentary Film: The Jane Edna Harris Hunter Story

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Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Dr. Rhondda Robinson Thomas headshot

Please welcome guest author Dr. Rhondda Robinson Thomas. Dr. Thomas is an Associate Professor of English at Clemson University in Clemson, SC, where she teaches early African American and American literature. She is also co-chair of Race and the University: A Campus Conversation, an initiative sponsored by Clemson’s College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities for the 2014-15 academic year. She is currently conducting archival research for a multifaceted project—a mobile app, website, and book—that will illuminate the life stories and contributions of African Americans to Clemson University, including enslaved laborers and sharecroppers who worked on John C. Calhoun and Thomas Green Clemson’s Fort Hill Plantation and convict laborers who helped to build Clemson Agriculture College in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She has published Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro Atlantic Identity, 1774-1903 and co-edited The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought, A Reader.

‘The Jane Edna Harris Hunter Story’ celebrates the life, work, and legacy of South Carolina native Jane Edna Harris Hunter, founder of the Phillis Wheatley Association (PWA) in Cleveland, OH. Starting with just a nickel and a prayer, Hunter established the PWA to provide affordable housing, job training and placement, and wholesome recreation to thousands of African American women and girls who relocated to Cleveland from the South during the Great Migration of the early twentieth century.

Hunter was born on December 13, 1882, to Harriet Milliner and Edward Harris, former slaves who worked as wage earners on Woodburn Farm, a former plantation on the outskirts of Pendleton, SC. Her father moved their family into town so that his children could receive an education at the school affiliated with the Silver Spring Baptist Church.

Jane Edna Hunter (1882-1971) from her early years just as she established the Phillis Wheatley Association.
Jane Edna Hunter (1882-1971) from her early years just as she established the Phillis Wheatley Association.

After her father died following a brief illness, 10-year-old Jane was forced to work, performing jobs such as domestic work, which ended soon due to maltreatment by her employers; picking cotton, which she confessed to finding very difficult to accomplish; and babysitting, which didn’t last long because of an accusation of insolence by the baby’s mother. Then in her earliteen years, Jane persuaded her mother to allow her to attend Ferguson and Williams College, a boarding high school started by African American Presbyterian missionaries in Abbeville, SC.

After completing the 4-year program, 18-year-old Jane found a job near the school, but her mother forced her to return home and enter into an arranged marriage with Edward Hunter, who was 40 years older. Within 18 months, Jane made the unconventional choice of permanently separating from her husband and moved to Charleston, SC, where she lived for the next five years. There she cared for the children of Attorney Benjamin Rutledge, Jr. before enrolling in the Training School for Nurses at the Cannon Street Hospital founded by African American physician Alonzo C. McClennan.

Jane worked with well-established white and black doctors in the lowcountry before enrolling in the nursing training school affiliated with Dixie Hospital at Hampton College in Hampton, VA. After completing one year of the two-year program, Jane headed to Richmond where friends convinced her to relocate with them to Cleveland.

In 1905, Jane’s transition to city life was filled with challenges. White northern doctors refused to hire a southern black nurse. When she attempted to find safe, affordable housing, she ended up living in a brothel. When she sought entertainment, she mistakenly attended a party where the local hustler Albert “Starlight” Boyd was recruiting female newcomers for his prostitution ring.

After finally finding a steady nursing job and good housing with the assistance of new friends from her church, Jane plunged into suicidal depression due to the sudden death of her mother in 1910. She was able to push past her grief by redirecting her sorrow into helping young women and girls who were being turned away from Cleveland’s white YWCA due to its segregationist policies to avoid the pitfalls of urban life.

On set with the crew of 'The Jane Edna Harris Hunter Story.'
On set with the crew of ‘The Jane Edna Harris Hunter Story.’

‘The Jane Edna Harris Hunter Story’ will trace Jane Hunter’s rise from a poverty-stricken childhood in the late 1800s to an influential, nationally renowned social activist in the early- to mid-1900s. The production team reflects a towns-and-gowns approach, linking a Clemson University professor and her students with a local company, Dead Horse Productions, and a Jane Edna Hunter advocate, Carol Burdett, the former mayor of Pendleton and the president and chief professional officer for the United Way of Anderson, SC.

Hunter came to my attention during the summer of 2007 as I prepared for my first semester of classes by visiting historical societies located around the university in an effort to find a local author to feature in my African American literature course that fall. After several visits to the Pendleton Historic Foundation, I asked a staff member, whom I later learned was Jo McConnell, if she could recommend a book. “Have you heard of A Nickel and a Prayer?” she asked as I left their office on my final visit to the site. I had not but promised her that I would find the book.

There was one fragile copy of the book in Clemson’s Special Collections, which librarians used to make copies for my students. I purchased a signed copy of the book on Amazon.com for $50. As my students and I finished discussing the book, I asked them to respond to the final chapter, “Fireside Musings.” They looked puzzled. I gave them hints to jog their memories. They looked even more puzzled. So I opened my book and pointed to the chapter title. “We don’t have that chapter, Dr. Thomas,” one of my students replied.

That discovery led to the establishment of The Jane Edna Hunter Project. Two teams of undergraduate researchers in Clemson University’s Creative Inquiry Program assisted with the research for the scholarly edition, including conducting archival work in the Western Reserve Historical Society Library and the PWA in Cleveland, where Hunter’s papers are housed, and helping to write a book proposal that led to a contract in the Regenerations series sponsored by the West Virginia University Press. The Regenerations series features significant out of print and neglected texts by African American writers.

More recent trailer for documentary by Clemson Student Creative Inquiry Team.

We eventually discovered that Hunter had published two editions of her autobiography in 1940 and 1941 with the editorial assistance of John Bennett, a writer and cultural critic from Charleston whom she had met at Woodburn. Our meticulous search for the identities of numerous individuals Hunter identifies as friends and supporters of the PWA yielded a list of many of the most influential black and white businessmen, politicians, civic women, and clergy in the city of Cleveland.

The Dead Horse Productions team and Burdett soon learned of my research and we began to work together, with the assistance of a third Clemson Student Creative Inquiry Team, to produce a documentary about Hunter’s life and work. As we prepared for the production process, we sought ways to reintroduce Hunter to the South Carolina Upstate region. In 2012, our application for her induction into the Anderson County Hall of Fame was accepted. We have also made presentations in a variety of venues, including the Martin Luther King Jr. Prayer Breakfast sponsored by the mayor of Anderson, the United Way’s Black History Month Program, and for a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Some have been surprised to learn of the extent of Hunter’s influence and success. For example, she received financial assistance from nationally renowned Cleveland businessmen and philanthropists John D. Rockefeller—a $100,000 donation for her $600,000 capital campaign for a new PWA building and summer camp; as well as from Henry Sherwin, president of the Sherwin-Williams Paint Company—the first year’s rent for her first PWA facility. Her board of directors included Constance Mather Bishop, a descendant of the influential colonial minister Cotton Mather, as well as Charles W. Chesnutt, a prominent African American author and civil rights activist.

Official trailer for documentary by Dead Horse Productions.

By 1927 when Hunter opened the new 8-story PWA building, which included an integrated cafeteria, a beauty shop, and a gymnasium, she had made enormous strides in her professional life. She had earned a law degree and passed the Ohio bar exam. She had become active in the black women’s club movement, including affiliations with Mary McLeod Bethune, African American educator and founder of Bethune College, later known as Bethune-Cookman College, and Nannie Burroughs, African American educator and founder of the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C.

She had joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and earned a leadership role in the Republican Party at the local and national levels. And she had transformed the PWA into a community center that provided a variety of programming to the African American community, such as music lessons, sports programs, cultural events, in addition to special services designed for African American female migrants.

The documentary will also explore aspects of Hunter’s life beyond 1941 when she published the second edition of her autobiography. After being forced to retire from the PWA in 1948, she increased her participation in the lecture circuit, speaking to diverse audiences around the country regarding democracy, interracial cooperation, and women’s rights. She also wrote columns for local Cleveland newspapers and national African American newspapers.

Additionally, Hunter began investing in the stock market, eventually using her nest egg to establish the National Phillis Wheatley Foundation to provide college scholarships for women from Ohio and South Carolina. Since the early 1970s, the foundation has awarded scholarships to women enrolled in colleges throughout the United States and Europe.

Ohio has inducted Jane Edna Hunter into its Hall of Fame. The City of Cleveland has named its social services building in her honor. Influential scholars such as Hazel Carby and Darlene Clark Hine have written extensively about the complexities of Hunter’s work for African American women during the Jim Crow era.

Now a team from Pendleton and Clemson is seeking to bring this remarkable women’s story to life in a documentary that will help restore Jane Edna Harris Hunter to her rightful place as one of the most influential American social activists of the early twentieth century. You can be a part of the effort! Please consider making a donation at http://www.razoo.com/story/Jane-Documentary-Film-On-Jane-Edna-Hunter. Thank you for your support.

More articles on documentary films about Appalachia:

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