Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey was born June 10, 1930 in Seneca, South Carolina. Roddey graduated from Oconee County Training School and received degrees from several colleges: a Bachelors of Arts from Johnson C. Smith University in North Carolina, a Master of Education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a doctorate from Union Graduate School in Cincinnati, Ohio.
She worked in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System in North Carolina as a teacher and principal and was the first African American to serve as an administrator in a predominately white school. She became the first chair of the Afro-American and African Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC-C).
James E. Ferguson II, an accomplished civil rights, criminal and medical malpractice attorney, president of the Charlotte-based firm Ferguson Stein Chambers Gresham & Sumter, has let one idea shape his more-than-40-year legal career: “Giving a voice to the voiceless,” he says.
From seeking justice for the Wilmington 10 to establishing a trial advocacy program in South Africa, Ferguson has followed the example set by his parents, who, as he grew up on Blanton Street in Asheville, opened their doors to those who needed a kind word and a warm meal.
Hattie Leeper
Ms. Leeper's accomplishments are as varied as the careers of several lifetimes. She started as a young radio intern in 1951 and after graduating high school she officially became a DJ with WGIV, the number one radio station at the time. Ms. Leeper went on to have her hands in various layers of the music industry. She has produced music and written liner notes for some of the biggest names in music, such as Aretha Franklin and Patti Labelle. She owned and operated her own record label called AwarE at one point, helping to excel the careers of many local acts.
Revisiting her parents' vision of her becoming a teacher, Chatty Hatty earned a Master's in Education Administration at Central Piedmont Community College. She taught at several colleges and universities, including her 11-year role as the dean of the communications department at Gaston College. She deepened her championship of education, becoming the founder and owner of Chatty School of Communication. Chatty has earned various awards and honors, most notably her induction to the Black Radio Hall of Fame.
In an interview with WCCB Charlotte, Chatty Hatty expressed "you got to be sincere about this business of being a trailblazer. You got to be humble, you got to be thankful. You got to help somebody." Just by pursuing her passion, Chatty Hatty has helped create a new lane for women of color in media, beyond Charlotte and into the national pathway.
She retired from academics as the Frank Porter Graham Professor Emeritus at UNC-C. She is married to Theodore Roddey. She is the mother of one daughter, Tawanna Proctor and has four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
.jpg)
Sarah Stevenson
Stevenson’s insistence since the 1970s has been that Black students not only attend integrated schools but be given truly equal chances to succeed in them. She’s also co-founder of the Tuesday Morning Breakfast Forum, where for 40 years some of the city’s thorniest issues have been debated. She’s “not only a queen of the Queen City but one of the crown jewels,” Adams said on the House floor.
Now 94, Stevenson lives in a Charlotte care facility and had felt “the end is nearing,” according to recent posts by her sister, Elloree Erwin, that were shared on the Breakfast Forum site. But on Monday, Erwin reported that she’d talked to her older sister and “she is her old self. She didn’t mention anything about leaving this world. Thank God for this.”
Stevenson has traced her activism to the day one of her three sons came home from school with a well-worn band uniform handed down from a white school. She began working with the PTA to raise money for new uniforms, eventually rising to lead Charlotte’s Black PTA council and then a consolidated council.
She later served on a citizens advisory board to help create a plan to bus students for desegregation when the Supreme Court ordered it in a landmark ruling in 1971. She was elected in 1980 and 1984 to the school board.
“Equity in education was always at the forefront of what she did, because even though the courts declared that ‘separate but equal’ was unequal, too many schools in Charlotte were both separate and unequal,” Adams said in her four-minute speech. “What she did made a difference.”
In 1984, Adams recounted, then-President Ronald Reagan stopped in Charlotte, where he repeated a familiar line that busing to integrate schools was a failed experiment. The line drew wild applause from most of Reagan’s audiences, she said, but Charlotte’s fell silent.
“That’s because in Charlotte activists like Sarah Stevenson worked hard so that Black and white parents could come together in support of Charlotte’s finest achievement, school integration,” she said.
Adams quoted a prayer that often opens the Breakfast Forum, one that asks God for “enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world.”
“Thank you, Miss Sarah, for working for justice, freedom and peace, and for blessing so many people with enough foolishness to believe that we can make the impossible possible,” she said.
