book review

University of Georgia Press

Chapter Title: Mary L. Ray (1880?–1934) Arkansas’s Negro Extension Worker Chapter Author(s): DEBRA A. REID

Book Title: Arkansas Women Book Subtitle: Their Lives and Times Book Editor(s): Cherisse Jones-Branch, Gary T. Edwards Published by: University of Georgia Press. (2018) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1vhtrh3.17

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Mary L. Ray (i88o?-i934)

Arkansas s Negro Extension Worker

D E B R A A. R E I D

Mary L. Ray joined the staff of the Arkansas Agricultural Extension Service on March 16, 1916, as the first Negro home demonstration agent.1 That position required her to meet with girls and women in rural communities in central and eastern Arkansas. Two years later, on July i, 1918, she received a promo- tion to serve as the local district's home demonstration agent for Negro exten- sion work. This position gave her administrative responsibility for a rapidly growing workforce that had been hired with emergency funding to mobilize the homefront during the World War I. Mary Ray covered a lot of territory as one of few female staff members serving black farm families in Arkansas. Her work across the state kept her on the road and aware of the conditions in which rural black families lived. Her job involved personnel management and public relations. She managed as many as twenty-eight women in short-term appointments during 1918. During the 19208 Ray kept busy managing around ten home demonstration agents assigned to work with black farm families. By 1928, Ray had "proved herself very competent" in managing the staff, coordi- nating state-level training, and negotiating the politics of home demonstra- tion work in the segregated South. Ray worked with the Arkansas extension for eighteen years, with some breaks in her service due to medical leave. In 1934, the Arkansas Agricultural Extension Service reported that she had "re- tired because of illness and later died [on July 25, 1934] after having served long and capably."2 She is buried in Oakland-Fraternal Cemetery, a historically African American cemetery in Little Rock. The inscription on her tombstone reads:

237

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2 3 8 D E B R A A . R E I D

RAY

M A R Y LEE

Died July 25,1934

A Lovely Home Maker

A 4-H Club Leader

A Friend to Humanity3

Women of Ray's professional status often self-consciously documented their lives. Mary L. Ray did not. Her husband, Harvey Cincinnatus Ray, did not men- tion her in his biographical entry in Who's Who of the Colored Race, probably because they married on December 23,1915, after the editors compiled the list- ing. Mary's death certificate confirms that even her husband did not know her real age or the identity of her parents.4 Yet Mary Lee McCrary Ray had a suc- cessful career in Arkansas and wielded influence. She functioned in a world that brought rural and urban people together, that emphasized education and self-governance, that furthered local economic development, and that targeted property-owning businesspeople (black farm-owning families). She worked with educated peers, and together they negotiated challenges based in racism, sexism, and anti-intellectualism. Her job was not easy, but her life's work was not unique; her accomplishments are comparable to those of her peers in edu- cation and rural reform. The value of Mary Ray's history rests in the ways she, as a professional African American woman in a racist and sexist world, managed to accomplish anything at all.

Ray kept her personal life private, despite her career as a civil servant, but other factors beyond her control further reduced her visibility in the historical record. Ray's ill health sometimes prevented her from participating in extension work at the best of times, but neither could she function fully at the worst of times, for example, during the 1927 Mississippi River flood in Arkansas, when her husband's duties as the district Negro county agent gave him state and national visibility. Her death in July 1934 of course removed her from influence during the rapid expansion of agricultural extension work in southern states prompted by New Deal relief, recovery, and reform policies. The twentieth an- niversary of the Federal Extension Service occurred in 1935, and her husband wrote a history of extension work in Arkansas, but Mary had died before then, and H. C. Ray remarried seven months later. Her absence from the anniversary compilations ensured her absence from most studies of extension history in Arkansas. Scholars have explored only selected portions of the history of Negro agricultural extension work in Arkansas in any comprehensive way. Some men- tion Mary Ray and include excerpts from her annual reports, but they disclose

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Mary L. Ray 239

nothing about her involvement in the vibrant middle-class black communities in Little Rock and throughout rural Arkansas. This chapter about Mary Lee McCrary Ray focuses on her influence through her work with Negro home demonstration in Arkansas between 1916 and 1934.5

Mary Ray's professional maturation followed paths that other southern rural progressive reformers had trod. From all indications, Mary lived a full life before she met and married Harvey C. Ray and moved to Arkansas. Tuskegee Institute archivists confirmed that she earned certificates in cooking and dress- making from Tuskegee in 1897 and then taught in private schools until she moved to the frontier to teach at the Colored Agricultural and Normal Univer- sity in Langston City Oklahoma.6 She used her full name, Mary Lee McCrary, while in Oklahoma. She married Harvey C. Ray, a former colleague in Langston City, in late 1915, and they moved from Langston to Little Rock, Arkansas. Her education and previous experience qualified her for the duties she undertook in Arkansas, and she spent the remainder of her life doing Negro extension work for the Arkansas Agricultural Extension Service. This was a federal pro- gram implemented in 1914 through a partnership between the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Federal Extension Service and land-grant universities in each state. The programs for women and men had progressive goals aimed at im- proving agriculture and rural life.

Mary Ray transferred her experiences with formal classroom instruction and community uplift to reach rural children and adults in Arkansas. She em- phasized knowledge and skills that progressive reformers believed would make rural families into better farmers. This included financial management and techniques to improve health and nutrition and to stabilize farm economies. She involved women and children in group activities that modeled civic engage- ment. The club work that resulted required setting agendas, holding regular meetings, and maintaining a visible role in community development. Ulti- mately, Ray arranged for local support in the form of financial appropriations from county quorum courts. These funds matched state and national moneys that paid extension service employees, including home demonstration agents, and that supported new initiatives, such as movable schools.7

Mary Ray undertook these initiatives in Arkansas with confidence attained during her formal training at Tuskegee. Coursework there prepared her to teach in the new common schools and industrial institutes opening across the South. Critics recognized the racist thinking that legitimized this practical education for freed people, and they labeled it "education for a new slavery." Regardless, Ray found that her Tuskegee training could spawn economic development. She took risks as she spent thirty-five years teaching and working with rural families

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2 4 0 D E B R A A . R E I D

in Alabama, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, furthering that philos- ophy, and she faced the consequences of legalized segregation despite the rela- tive economic comfort that she enjoyed. She had to travel in segregated convey- ances and use "colored only" entrances, water fountains, toilets, and hotels. She worked with young people prohibited from standing on equal ground by white voters. She did not have the right to equal status with her white peers. But she secured positions that put her at the forefront of a growing black professional class dedicated to rural reform during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.8

The "separate but equal" world in which Mary L. McCrary Ray lived during her adult life coalesced during her time at Tuskegee when the Supreme Court of the United States issued its decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896. She entered the workforce with her Tuskegee credentials at the same time that the national government acquiesced to southern states' authority over schools that separated black from white students. She secured her first permanent position in higher education at the new Colored Agricultural and Normal University, the 1890 land-grant institution created to teach black students agricultural and industrial subjects, in the black separatist community of Langston City, Okla- homa Territory. She became "the first instructor of girls in 'domestic economy'" around 19OO.9 The 1902 curriculum focused on practical subjects taught in a se- quence aligned with the university's goal of training students to have productive careers. Mary was one of two female faculty members. She established the do- mestic economy curriculum for girls, including courses in cooking, sewing, and other skills required to "prepare girls to be housewives or to be self-supporting in 'domestic' careers such as dressmaking." The other woman faculty member, Zelia N. Page, the daughter of Inman E. Page, president of the university, and Zelia R. Ball Page, provided instruction in music.10

President Page expected the faculty of the Colored Agricultural and Normal University (known as Langston) to be engaged in the community at many levels and not just in intellectual or cultural pursuits. Faculty members helped develop the economic infrastructure in the growing community. They paid rent. Some purchased homes. They bought what they needed at local businesses, and they also opened businesses. By 1906 Mary McCrary operated "a prosperous dress- making establishment," which likely employed young women who had excelled in her dressmaking courses and who hoped to stay in or near their homes while furthering their careers. A 1912 study of black artisans listed fifty dressmakers and only two milliners in Oklahoma.11

Mary McCrary met her future husband, H. C. Ray, when he joined the staff at Langston. He was born on February 2,1889, in Bunceton, Missouri, and gradu-

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Mary L. Ray 241

ated from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1911. His alma mater

may have caught the attention of Langstoris president because Page had served as president of Lincoln for a decade in the late nineteenth century Whatever

brought Ray to Langston, he worked there for two and a half years as farm su- perintendent and then as an assistant in the Department of Agriculture. During that time Ray studied at Tuskegee Institute, completing academic and industrial arts coursework in 1914. Mary McCrary and H. C. Ray probably interacted dur-

ing that time since there were few faculty employed at Langston during these formative years.12

Farmers' cooperative demonstration work began in Arkansas in 1905, ten years before H. C. Ray gained his appointment. It followed the model established by Dr. Seaman Knapp in Texas in 19O3.13 Knapp, a special agent for the U.S. Department

of Agriculture's farmers' cooperative demonstrative work, extended the program to Arkansas with the appointment of J. A. Evans as state agent and A. V. Swatty as district agent. The number of Department of Agriculture employees expanded

to four district agents and seven county agents by 1907. In 1909, 4-H Club work began; in 1911, canning clubs began, which expanded into home demonstration

work. This growth occurred because of private philanthropy and local appropria-

tions. The process was replicated across the former Confederate states with white administrators and agents working out of 1862 land-grant universities and black administrators and agents working out of 1890 land-grant institutions.14

Early cooperative demonstration work focused on the agricultural tasks that men performed, but women sought appropriations as well. Black women edu- cators, including Mary McCrary, watched these developments, perhaps with a sense of anticipation because expansion of the program could mean jobs for

women studying domestic science. The General Education Board (GEB), the Slater Fund, and Sears, Roebuck and Company provided millions of dollars to

support rural reform across the South. In Arkansas, Sears, Roebuck challenged each county to match a $1,000 donation. If the county raised that amount by private subscription, then Sears, Roebuck would contribute $1,000 for the sal-

ary of an agent. White men received appointments as a result, but the influ- ence did not stop there. By 1910, Arkansas legislators had authorized counties to match GEB funds too, thereby encouraging rural reform supported by two

private philanthropic organizations without tapping into state operating funds. Regardless of the type of funding, GEB officials believed that "the work [across the South] is far from adequate to the need and the demand. Five hundred

Southern counties [out of 1,163 counties] had not been reached at all at the end of 1912; needless to say that perhaps no single county has been exhaustively

worked and many have been barely touched."15

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2 4 2 D E B R A A . R E I D

The GEB funds helped cooperative demonstration work reach fifteen thou- sand residents in 77 percent of all Arkansas counties during 1912, and the funds did not benefit white Arkansans alone. Agents hired with GEB funds were sup- posed to include black farmers as demonstrators. Ultimately, black farmers were supposed to be hired to be agents. This occurred in nine southern states, including Arkansas, as of 1912. Individuals who worked with Arkansas's black farmers before the appointments of the Rays have not been documented in any comprehensive way. Yet it appears that at least one black farm agent worked in the state before the Rays arrived. A comparative history of Hot Spring and Lee counties in Arkansas, published in 1937, indicated that officials in Lee County employed a Negro farm agent from 1912 through 1929 with only a one-year gap. The cost for this appointment in 1912 was $75, equivalent to the cost of hir- ing a white female girls' club demonstrator. This means that three years before H. C. Ray received his appointment as the first Negro farm agent in Pulaski County, with direction to serve African American landowners, Lee County may have met the Sears, Roebuck or GEB funding challenges and hired a black man to do demonstration work with black farmers. Rev. R. E. Bryant filled that posi- tion at least from 1917 to 1923.16

Mary McCrary would have been familiar with GEB work based on her ob- servations while in Oklahoma. During 1912, the GEB claimed that funds helped cooperative demonstration work reach more than fifteen thousand residents in 55 percent of Oklahoma counties. Annie Peters Hunter became the first black woman appointed to demonstrate canning, starting on January 23, 1912. She did not work in Langston, but in another all-black town, Boley in nearby Ok- fuskee County, Indian Territory. She worked six weeks during canning season and earned $40 while the white demonstrators earned $75 for equivalent work.17

Similar appointments occurred in 1912 across the South, including Arkansas. The GEB claimed sole financial responsibility for girls' club work, but imple- mentation depended on a partnership with local funding sources and extension service supervision. Girls' club work focused on canning and poultry. In 1912, the GEB granted $1,500 to the Arkansas Department of Education to start to- mato canning clubs.18 Initially the state hired white women to work with white girls' clubs. An overview of work in Pulaski County indicated the scope: "In Pulaski County four hundred girls aged ten through eighteen living near Little Rock were organized into tomato clubs. Each member grew one-tenth acre of tomatoes and canned them. They also received instructions in making uniform caps, aprons, and tea towels."19 Black women and their families had to wait two years for these services. In 1914 nine African American women received a total of $2,501, probably for short-term employment doing girls' club work. This was

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Mary L. Ray 243

the only time before 1916, when Mary Ray was hired, that black women did demonstration work. One of these women may have been Vivian Young in Lee

County but the women's names and the counties in which they worked await further research.20

The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 ended GEB funding for demonstration work.

This reduced services to black farm families significantly. Arkansas lost eleven African American workers. But the GEB'S support of southern education did

not end. Instead, it shifted toward direct support for black students across the South, an agenda already addressed by other funds, including the Jeanes Fund,

established by Anna T. Jeanes in 1907 to support "rudimentary education" in "Rural, Community, or Country schools for the Southern Negro."21 The GEB gained leverage with rural schools starting in 1915 when it dedicated $3,500 to

cover the salary of a rural school agent for Negro schools in Arkansas. The rural school agent was supposed to supervise rural homemaker clubs, an opportu- nity not otherwise available to rural black women. Thus, by the time Mary Ray received her appointment, a network of farm families familiar with extension

programs existed. Ray combined lessons learned at Tuskegee Institute with ex-

perience gained from her work at the fledgling public 1890 land-grant institu-

tion in the territory of Oklahoma to deliver practical instruction to Arkansas farm families. This helped them stabilize their income and make their living conditions more comfortable.22

By 1914 the Arkansas Co-operative Agricultural Extension Service's staff in- cluded one state agent, one state home demonstration agent, one state 4-H Club agent, three district county agents, several specialists, fifty-two county agents,

fifteen home demonstration agents, and the necessary clerical force. Harvey C. Ray joined this workforce before Mary did. As his obituary stated, "Mr. Ray was the first Negro county agent to work under federal appointment" after the

U.S. Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act and the state of Arkansas accepted Smith-Lever appropriations. White staff members claimed that "Ray was taken sight unseen on the recommendation o f . . . Booker T. Washington." Ray relo-

cated to Arkansas and began work on February i, 1915. He spent the rest of the year living in Little Rock and working in Pulaski County with black landown-

ers. On December 15, 1915, he became the special agent in charge of work in

several more counties (Arkansas, Crittenden, Jefferson, Lee, Monroe, Phillips, and Pulaski).23

Mary married H. C. Ray just over one week later, on December 23,1915. She

became the first Negro home demonstration agent under the Smith-Lever proto- col in Arkansas on March 16,1916, teaching domestic science to girls and women

in farm homes, gardens, and chicken yards. Job opportunities in Arkansas and

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2 4 4 D E B R A A . R E I D

Harvey Ray's employment there apparently motivated Mary to leave her faculty position, marry and relocate south. Other factors, including dissent among fac- ulty and administrators at Langston over President Page's preference for a human- ities curriculum, may have provided added incentive to both Rays to relocate.24

Employees in the new Negro divisions of state agricultural extension services came from several 1890 land-grant institutions, including Tuskegee Institute. The appointments of H. C. Ray in early 1915 and Mary just over one year later extended Tuskegee's influence into the Arkansas extension service. Mary had experience working with separatist institutions, where the administrative hier- archy among black staff mirrored that of white staff. But in extension work, the black staff held subordinate positions to all white staff. The administrators at the state level distributed the federal appropriations unequally between the white and black divisions. This resulted in unequal pay despite comparable work and unequal office facilities, transportation allowances, and other financial support. In 1914-1915, the cost for Negro extension work conducted by the two farm agents in Arkansas (Harvey Ray in Pulaski County, February i, 1915, to Decem- ber 15,1915, and the agent in Lee County, October 7,1914, through December 31, 1915) cost $1,380 total. In 1916, the number of farm agents increased to four and the work cost $2,637; f°r women, with the appointment of Mary Ray, it cost $341. In 1917, with six male agents, Negro extension work cost $3,017, and with Mary Ray responsible for all the women's work, it cost $1,050. These figures are the complete costs covered by three sources: Federal Extension Service appro- priations and state and county funds. The costs indicate the limited remunera- tion for the work. Mary Ray took a pay cut from the $1,000 that she had earned at Langston in 1912. Her salary when she was appointed to be the local district home demonstration agent for Negro extension work on July i, 1918, however, came closer to what she had earned at Langston and to the salary of her peer in Texas, Mary Evelyn V. Hunter, who earned $i,O2o.25

Extension services in neighboring states had different strategies to secure funding to keep district agents and farm and home demonstration agents in the field. The Texas Agricultural Extension Service required county commis- sioner courts to appropriate no less than $300 in matching funds before the service would place an agent in the county. In Tennessee, the opposite situation existed. Counties appropriated zero dollars for Negro extension work, and all funds came from the two state land-grant colleges, the University of Tennessee and the Agricultural and Industrial State Normal School (later Tennessee State University), and from the GEB. Each state set salaries for their agents, and local and philanthropic support affected individual salaries, which reflected power structures based on racist and sexist cultural constructs. By the late 19208, white

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Mary L. Ray 245

male county agents earned more than twice what black male agents earned; white female home demonstration agents earned 75 percent of what white male county agents earned and more than twice what black women earned.26

Most of Arkansas's cooperative demonstration staff, including administra- tors, agents, and specialists (all white), worked out of Little Rock before 1914. The central location in the state's capital seemed logical and helped maintain

the visibility of the service in political circles, but it distanced the staff from the land-grant institution in Fayetteville and from farmers throughout the state. The changes that resulted from the Smith-Lever Act included relocation of the

business office to Fayetteville and the land-grant college campus, at the behest of the college's president. This did not happen without controversy, and the relo- cation proved temporary. Most district agents and specialists returned to Little

Rock in 1920. By early 1925 the staff worked out of the Donaghey Building at the corner of Seventh and Main in downtown Little Rock even though the building

apparently remained under construction.27 Mary Ray and her husband lived in

Little Rock at 2111 Cross Street, and by 1925 they maintained an office at 712^ West Ninth Street. They did not operate out of Pine Bluff, the location of Branch

Normal School, an 1890 land-grant institution, or in Fayetteville, where exten-

sion service officials worked but where fewer black people lived than in the Mis- sissippi Delta counties. Their home and office in Little Rock gave the Rays ready access to Pulaski County's black population, which they had a duty to serve, but

removed them geographically and culturally from the residents of Mississippi Delta counties, which they also were contractually obligated to serve.28

Mary Ray traveled from the state capital to the Delta counties during 1916

and 1917 on a regular basis. This allowed her to meet with rural women and their families and to form 4-H and homemaker clubs in communities in Pu- laski County and in the two Delta counties that she also served, Phillips and

St. Francis. Then in 1918, she had to travel even more given the increased re- sponsibilities associated with the supervision of twenty-eight African American home demonstration agents working on behalf of the war effort. The burden of

travel eased slightly in 1919 when the number of home demonstration agents assigned to Mary Ray declined to twenty-one. But the loss of seven agents added different pressures associated with constituents no longer served but still war- ranting attention.29

Mary Ray shared logistical challenges with supervisory staff in Negro exten- sion work across the South, including poor roadways that, at best, resulted in

bumpy rides and, at worst, were impassable. Ray and her white peers had to over- come unreliable automobiles, thin tires, and considerable distances between or- igin and destination. Ray also had to do her job with fewer resources, including

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246 D E B R A A. R E I D

a lower salary and no travel allowance, and she had to outmaneuver the ob- stacles of racial segregation. Black professionals could not stay in segregated hotels, had to use "colored" entrances or walk-up windows at restaurants and lunch counters, and could not use "white-only" facilities in service stations. The segregated nature of travel forced Ray to stay in motels or rooming houses owned and operated by black families or to lodge with friends and colleagues on overnight trips. Ray likely traveled with peers, or with her husband, as often as possible. Staff in other states did this routinely as they delivered programs and attended conferences together. The shared experiences may have lightened the burdens of those in the car, but did not eliminate the logistical, financial, and emotional insults.30

Mary Ray and other home demonstration and farm agents depended on black landowning farm families for support during their travels and for engagement to make the Negro extension work programs possible. Ray learned this strategy during her years at Tuskegee Institute and in her work with schools in rural Alabama during the mid- to late 18908, prior to her relocation to Oklahoma. H. C. Ray had more direct experiences with farm ownership. He grew up on a family-owned farm in Palestine Township, near Bunceton, Missouri, though that farm was mortgaged in 1900. Landowning farmers worked for themselves, often contracted with tenants or sharecroppers to cultivate their properties, and wielded some influence in their communities. Sometimes farm-owning families lived apart from others, but families also clustered near crossroads, railroad de- pots, businesses such as sawmills, or schools. Black agents targeted these com- munities because they knew that the landowning families had the potential to help the agents accomplish their goals of rural reform, including improving liv- ing conditions and increasing economic independence, and because the agents came from similar cultures, often having been the children of farm owners, educators, or business operators. Families paid taxes on personal and real es- tate property, and this gave them leverage to lobby at local quorum courts to request appropriations. The goal might be humble, funds for the purchase of a canning retort or pressurized canner, for instance, to help tomato clubs turn their produce into a marketable commodity. The farm-owning families also had homes and yards where they could construct poultry houses to diversify their income or privies to improve sanitation. Thus class consciousness affected programmatic choices.31

Harvey Ray engaged with these farm-owning families immediately as a way to establish extension services. Mary Ray built on the groundwork he laid through his work with farm men and children. For instance, Harvey organized the first club for black Arkansas youth, which later became a 4-H Club, in 1915

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Mary L. Ray 247

in Maumelle Township, five miles northwest of Little Rock on the Arkansas River. Two farm-owning couples, James and Virginia Baker and Nathan and Caroline Lee, lived in the community in 1920. The Bakers lived in a section of the township populated by white farm families, but the Lee family lived in a sec- tion with a population equally divided between white and black families. Some were educated, some had children, some owned their homes, and some rented. Some were day laborers in the Little Rock Lumber and Manufacturing Com- pany; others were sharecroppers on the farms owned by white and black farm proprietors. Mary cooperated with black farm families in Pulaski, St. Francis, and Phillips Counties to establish homemaker clubs and canning clubs. These served a dual purpose: they diversified the farming economy and also provided evidence of the validity of home demonstration work.32

Mary Ray confirmed the value of her work with women and girls through descriptions in the annual reports that she submitted to her supervisors. These emphasized the mutual dependency that existed between the success of Negro extension work and the landowning farm families, small business owners, and community cultural and social centers that featured prominently in her narra- tives. Her 1916 report, "The Community Fair: A Factor in the Negro Work," indicated that fairs offered a venue to feature these economic success stories and make agricultural extension work visible at the same time. The fairs en- couraged friendly rivalry between communities, and their success depended on the involvement of schoolchildren, farm families, technical experts, and agents. In 1918, Ray, with the help of another supervising agent and twenty-four local agents hired with federal funding dedicated to the war effort, worked with schools, churches, lodge halls, and other rural organizations in thirty counties to establish temporary war kitchens and other services. She and her constituents pursued their work "with a view toward helping to care for the nearly two mil- lions of people who are solely dependent upon us and our allied governments for food and clothing."33

In reality, most of the "two millions of people" Ray mentioned as needing the services did not get it. The expansion of Negro extension work in Arkansas dur- ing World War I helped solidify the program but proved short-lived. The num- ber of agents hired with emergency appropriations returned to the prewar level by 1920, and the agents returned to work with the residents who lived where they worked, who did not have the potential to relocate each January i as share- cropper contracts changed. H. C. Ray helped formalize relationships among the male heads of these farm households with the formation of the Arkansas Negro State Farmers' Association in 1920. This still left the majority of agricultural laborers and sharecroppers underserved, however, and gave no credit to farm

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2 4 8 D E B R A A . R E I D

women and children for the roles they played in sustaining farm ownership. Agents also reached out to tenant farm families and to families that owned more personal property and negotiated better contracts with landowners. Agents re- frained from stating their preferences for working with stable farm families and not the uneducated, illiterate, and impoverished workers, but occasionally such sentiments appeared, if only as allusions, in the annual reports. Strikes by agricultural laborers, including sharecroppers and cotton pickers, threatened the security of rural black communities in which Mary and H. C. Ray worked. The agents carefully avoided entanglement in incidents such as the 1919 racial confrontation in Elaine in Phillips County. They stepped lightly because their appointments and the whole of Negro extension work in Arkansas depended on whites' approval. Association with sharecroppers and tenants trying to organize against white planters would have destroyed it. But race and class bias might have also affected the choices of the Rays. In extreme circumstances, H. C. Ray, at least, let his guard down and showed his class bias. He did not specify the race or ethnicity of the working classes, which likely included white, black, and perhaps Mexican laborers, but he conveyed his attitude at the time clearly in his annual narrative report about the 1927 flood: "The bottoms have always been over-run with an abundance of cheap and inefficient labor."34

Mary's reports focused more on nutrition and decorum, not activist agendas. This fit the pattern for agent reports across the South. That said, her lessons in community organizing and economic development could be put to use in situ- ations that had the potential to challenge white authority. In 1921 she indicated that lessons in gardening led to successful economic diversification. Girls and women could earn enough money by marketing fresh vegetables, including to- matoes, to attend the annual farmers' conference and short course, a day or two of educational programs designed to meet farm families' needs. One girl in Faulkner County purchased cans and glass jars to preserve the excess produce and still pocketed a profit of $44. Ray did not dwell on tomato production in her "High Points in Home Demonstration Work in Arkansas," appended to her 1922 report. Instead she emphasized the careful planning required to grow the program. She described auto tours of demonstration homes and garden plots that helped county residents see the potential of raising marketable commodi- ties, including sweet corn and tomatoes. Auto tour participants photographed girls harvesting a wagonload of tomatoes at one stop.35

Mary Ray dedicated a lot of energy to improving farm families' nutrition. To that end, she described the ways that the "campaign idea" had helped her promote better bread making. She organized a series of meetings that featured a nutrition specialist talking with agents. Then agents met with community or-

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Mary L. Ray 249

ganization leaders; those leaders then held demonstrations with their local members. After training, communities held bread-making contests. Winners competed at the county level, and the highest scorers in each county entered the state bread-making contest. Ray indicated that such organizing was not for the faint of heart:

A very easily discouraged person could not have pushed the work, when we realize

the unfavorable conditions under which the initial demonstrations were given....

There are only a few schools equipped for teaching this line of work. But whenever

other possibilities failed, the rural schoolhouse was the place chosen.

On bread baking day one would usually see a farm wagon coming to the school-

house containing a range and cooking utensils that had been borrowed from some

member of the club. Often times a hard fight would have to be made before the

stove pipe was subdued and remained intact; suitable wood and water were made

plentiful and the many other things so necessary to insure the success of the dem-

onstration. But no one would shrink from their duty when the many anxious,

happy, and appealing faces were there, because they wanted to learn.36

The programs that Mary Ray described in her annual reports fit the trends evident in black home demonstration reports across the South. Programs such as bread baking reached black constituents with some economic clout, usually farm owners. But these relatively economically viable farm families had limited influence politically. The agents had problems finding suitable locations to de- liver their programs and had to create workspaces in locations that served other needs. Ray described a solution in her 1921 report: "The club girls of McGehee [Desha County] raised money and purchased a stove, necessary cooking uten- sils and placed them on shelves made in a corner of a large classroom. In this kitchenette many demonstrations are conducted before a large class. Perfect cooperation exists here between the agent [Clara Dixon] and the teacher." The demonstrations likely included bread-baking programs and canning demon- strations. Overall, Ray tried to generate visibility for the programs that she, the home demonstration agents, and the clubwomen and girls presented. She did this without threatening the extension service's race-biased hierarchy or jeopardizing white patronage, which was conveyed through quorum court appropriations or permission to conduct demonstrations. The descriptions in her narrative reports emphasized the aesthetic improvements possible through home beautification and blooming gardens or the utility of canning a whole beef, a demonstration often delivered to farm families so they could process an entire beef carcass using appropriate canning methods. These self-help pro- grams depended on individual investment as well as collective and communal

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250 D E B R A A. R E I D

action. Any of these could have been perceived as threatening the racial status quo in Arkansas if demonstrators had emphasized the ways the lessons could have empowered poor rural black populations.37

Ray used new technology to increase the visibility of self-help programs. She described the ways that county clubs used motion pictures during rallies to increase membership. These likely included the film Making Negroes Better Farmers, produced in 1920 by the Federal Extension Service and featuring co- operative demonstration work near Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Ray also en- couraged agents to use photographs to their advantage. The county home dem- onstration agents included photographs in their monthly and annual reports, as Annie Larimer, the local home demonstration agent in Faulkner County, did in 1923. Latimer's photographs featured displays of canned goods, girls who won bread-baking contests, and members of a community club building a poultry house. One of the photographs of the poultry house under construction ap- peared in two Arkansas Extension Service publications. Another photograph featured in those publications depicted African American community members canning a whole beef. These illustrations depicted what Mary Ray wanted view- ers to see: well-dressed African Americans working on projects to preserve and process foodstuffs, building home, farm, and community. One annual narra- tive report prepared by white extension administrators conveyed the message: "The negro work is helping to develop thrift and citizenship among members of that race and is making the race more self-supporting and giving them a pride and ambition in improving their homes." This made the extension service, in general, look good. It also did not indicate the inequity in the countryside that kept the majority powerless and impoverished.38

Mary Ray's work with women during the 19208 faced numerous challenges. Communities that had prospered during the years when the Rays first estab- lished Negro extension work in Arkansas began a steady decline after 1920 as residents aged and the agricultural economy worsened. Owners often remained on their land and involved in their communities longer, but their children and the tenant and sharecropper families left. The combination made it difficult for farm families to maintain and retain their property. This reduced the popu- lation density and thus the number of constituents that the agents could serve and increased the challenge to secure the spaces needed for demonstrations. This sequence of events played out across the South. Agents responded in dif- ferent ways.

The Rays devised a new extension service in 1929, the movable school for Ne- gro farm folk, which allowed the agents to reach residents in counties not served regularly by agents and communities without clubs. Jennie Lou Woodard,

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Mary L. Ray 251

formerly the home demonstration agent in Lee County in 1921 and in Miller County by 1924 and the acting local home demonstration agent during Mary Ray's leave due to illness in 1927 and 1928, began as the movable school agent on January i, 1929. The movable school delivered 1,133 programs and traveled 7,770 miles in a 1928 Ford pickup. Woodard indicated the critical role that sup- port from Mary Ray and her husband played in making the movable school a success. Measurable outcomes included the construction of poultry houses and numerous home improvement initiatives from building sanitary toilets to screening windows and whitewashing structures.39

The support Mary Ray provided as an administrator helped make programs in rural communities possible, but her work also employed educated black women and launched their careers. Julia Ada Miller provides an example. Miller was born and raised in Round Lake, Mississippi. She graduated from Tuskegee In- stitute in May 1924 and apparently worked in Alabama in home demonstration before coming to Arkansas.40 She then served as the home demonstration agent in Pope County, Arkansas, from 1925 to 1928. A feature called "Negro Work," published in the Extension Cooperator (the monthly newspaper published in Fayetteville) mentioned Miller's influence: "The negro girls and women of Pope County who are members of demonstration clubs made an exhibit of their cloth- ing and cooking in Atkins.... The display showed that much good work had been done by the Local Home Demonstration Agent, Julia Miller, who makes her headquarters in Atkins."41 Miller relocated to Florida to assume a position equivalent to Mary Ray's, the local district home demonstration agent assigned to work with the Negro women of Florida starting in 1928.42 Miller did not stay there long. In 1931 she accepted the position of home demonstration agent in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma.43

The pace of the work exacerbated Mary Ray's ill health. But it took years for her debilitating condition, chronic interstitial nephritis, also known as granu- lar kidney, to kill her. Over seven years, between 1927 and 1934, her condition worsened. She took a ten-month medical leave during 1927-1928, and she wrote about that on the front page of her 1929 report when she announced her return to work. Doctors have observed advanced stages of this disease in middle-aged adults who survived severe childhood illnesses, such as scarlet fever, acute rheu- matic fever, or other infections caused by viridans streptococci bacteria.44

Mary Lee McCrary Ray died on July 25, 1934. Fannie Mae Boone, the local home demonstration agent in Lee County, dedicated future home demonstra- tion work to Ray's memory: "The home demonstration work and the 4-H club work in the state of Arkansas, among Negroes, are a monument to her untiring efforts. The monument, which local home demonstration agents will set up to

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252 D E B R A A. R E I D

honor her, is the building of a program of home demonstration work which will be an everlasting memorial in the hearts of the people who loved her." Boone eulogized her with a stanza that indicated admiration for Ray's work for a noble cause:

Go to thy grave at noon from all labors cease.

Rest on thy sheaves, thy harvest work is done.

Come from the heat of battle and in peace.

Soldier, go home, with thee the fight is won.45

The photograph that Boone used to illustrate her dedication showed Mary Ray and her husband with John B. Pierce, who was the first black agent hired with GEB funds in Virginia in 1906. In 1918 he became one of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's field agents for Negro extension work. During the Depression, Pierce toured the cotton South developing the live-at-home program, and he met regularly with black agents and club members during farmer conferences and short courses. His work included cooperation with female as well as male agents, and Pierce no doubt had enjoyed a long relationship, professional if not personal, with the Rays.

Mary's death certificate has provided few leads to learn more about her early years or to document the context in which she might have developed the chronic condition. The person completing the death certificate wrote "Georgia" as her birthplace and recorded her date of birth as February 21, 1885. At some point thereafter, someone typed over the "5" with a "o," so 1885 became 1880, and this required an adjustment to her age, from forty-nine to fifty-four years. The person completing the form also wrote "Dont Know" [sic] next to the space for the names of her mother and father.46 Thus, Mary L. Ray's death certificate raised more questions than answers about a woman who spent thirty-five years educating African Americans in several states, eighteen of those in Arkansas, and promoting rural reform.

H. C. Ray provided officials with the information entered on his wife's death certificate. Harvey's lack of knowledge of Mary's parents' identities indicated that he had not met her parents or even talked with her about them. The cor- rected birth year indicated that Mary had not known her actual birth year or had self-consciously concealed her real age from her younger husband. Either seems plausible.47

Succession at work occurred relatively seamlessly because Mary Ray's death did not come as a surprise. Women well informed about Negro extension work and experienced in the programs covered her jobs during her leave of absence and took over when she retired. When Ray died, she left seven home demonstration

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Mary L. Ray 253

agents working with African American women and girls in seven counties across Arkansas.

Mary Ray's life and work indicate that relationships transcend geography Networks of personal and professional relationships helped agents create pro- grams that addressed inequality in the countryside. The farm families with whom Ray interacted invested in their private property and in their commu- nity organizations to improve sanitation, nutrition, and economic solvency. The agents invested their energy in these local renewal efforts. The supervi- sors, including Ray, worked tirelessly to sustain these initiatives. She walked a tightrope between the politics of black communities, where the interests of farm owners did not always reflect the agendas of the majority of landless agri- cultural laborers, and the politics of white supremacy. She did this through the gender-specific tasks that the extension service expected a home demonstra- tion agent to pursue—making clothing, canning, raising poultry, bread baking, home improvement, and gardening. She also accomplished this work through public engagement outside the parameters of the racialized South. She appeared before local quorum courts to request appropriations. She interacted with her white peers in ways that resulted in visible proof of black home demonstration work. She secured support from cash-strapped locations even when funds be- came even more limited during economic crises. The moveable school served a purpose during the Great Depression, from 1929 through the early 19308. But increased appropriations during the New Deal increased agents in the field and made the movable school obsolete.

Mary Ray did not live to see the fruits of those labors. Harvey Ray did not dwell on Mary's accomplishments when he submitted his brief history, "Ne- gro Extension Work in Arkansas," with his 1935 annual narrative and statistical report, in recognition of the twentieth anniversary of Negro extension work in the state. White administrators, however, praised the couple: "Much of the present progress of the Negro extension program in this state can be traced to the work of this pioneering team in establishing a foundation for future accom- plishment."48 Harvey Ray continued with the Negro division of the Arkansas Agricultural Extension Service until he retired around 1953.49

NOTES

Generous scholars shared primary sources, including Cherisse Jones-Branch, Arkansas State Uni- versity; Elizabeth Griffin Hill, author of A Splendid Piece of Work, 1912-2012: One Hundred Years ofArkansas's Home Demonstration and Extension Homemakers Clubs; Jeannie Whayne, University of Arkansas; and Gary Zellar, University of Saskatchewan. Cheryl Ferguson, Tuskegee University;

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254 D E B R A A. R E I D

Jameka B. Lewis, Langston University Libraries; and Holly Reed, Still Picture Reference Team, National Archives and Records Administration, responded to research requests. Anita Sego, East- ern Illinois University, affirmed my interpretation of Mary Ray's medical condition. Jana L. Aydt and her interlibrary loan colleagues at Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University, processed numer- ous interlibrary loan requests.

1. I use the term "Negro" throughout this chapter when it appeared in the official records to designate professional positions.

2. Mena Hogan referenced official Arkansas Extension Service records, including office files, personnel files, and annual narrative and statistical reports as the basis for her "A History of the Agricultural Extension Service in Arkansas," MS thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1942. Hogan documented Mary McCrary (Ray)'s arrival in Arkansas (139) and included excerpts from her 1918 report (142). For mention of Mary Ray's death, see "Negro Demonstration Work," in An- nual Report: Extension Service, College of Agriculture, University of Arkansas and United States De- partment of Agriculture Cooperating: Fiscal Year July i, 1933, to June 30, 1934, with Report of Field Activities December i, 1933, to November 30,1934, Extension Circular 335 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, January 1935), 42; Death Certificate, State of Arkansas, Mary L. Ray, July 25,1934, Little Rock, Pulaski County.

3. J. C. Barnett, "Brief History of Farm and Home Demonstration Work in Arkansas," in Silver Anniversary: Cooperative Demonstration Work, 1903-1928: Proceedings of the Anniversary Meeting Held at Houston, Texas, February $th, 6th, and yth, 1929 (College Station: Extension Service, Agri- cultural and Mechanical College of Texas, n.d.), 91-96, quote on 94. Hogan, "History," includes one chapter on the Negro division, 136-59, drawing heavily on 1939 material by Harvey Ray, which I have been unable to locate, and on Mary's 1918 report (142) and 1932 report (154-55). Mary Lee Ray, Fraternal (African American) (now Oakland-Fraternal) Cemetery, Pulaski County, Ark., July 25, 1934, gravestone photograph, contributed to Arkansas Gravestones by "excellmoney," August 14, 2008, http://arkansasgravestones.org/view.php?id=4373O.

4. "Ray, Harvey Cincinnatus," in Who's Who of the Colored Race: A General Biographical Dic- tionary of Men and Women of African Descent, ed. Frank Lincoln Mather (Chicago: Half-Century Anniversary of Negro Freedom in U.S., 1915), 1:227; Hogan, "History," 139. No marriage license has yet been located to confirm the marriage date or location. See Mary L. Ray Death Certificate.

5. For farm agent or county agent work, see Gary Zellar, "H. C. Ray and Racial Politics in the African American Extension Service Program in Arkansas, 1915-1929," Agricultural History 72, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 429-45; Jeannie Whayne, "'I Have Been through Fire': Black Agricultural Extension Agents and the Politics of Negotiation," in African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950, ed. R. Douglas Hurt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 152-88. "Services for H. C. Ray to Be Today," Arkansas Gazette, April 26,1965, 66:3, indicated that Ray had been a member of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Little Rock for more than forty years and was the superintendent of Sunday school classes and a thirty-third-degree Mason. Mary's involvement in comparable organizations, including women's clubs, remains unknown.

6. Cheryl Ferguson, archival assistant, Tuskegee Library Archives, email to Debra A. Reid, No- vember 6, 2013, confirmed the following: Mary L. McCrary attended Tuskegee from 1893 to 1897; she graduated in 1897 with certificates in cooking and dressmaking; she was a teacher at Mt. Meigs Village School, Mt. Meigs, Alabama, after graduation; she was a teacher in domestic science at Langston University; and she served in extension service housekeeping in Little Rock, Arkansas. For descriptions of McCrary's work in Langston, see Theo Baughman, "Along the Color Line: Mr. Theo. Baughman, the Plaindealers Globe Trotting Scribe Tells of Negro Advancement in Okla-

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Mary L. Ray 255

homa," Plaindealer (Topeka, Kans.), April 16,1915,1.1 thank Cherisse Jones-Branch for sharing this source. University of Chicago catalogs documented Mary L. McCrary of Langston, Oklahoma, as a student in summer courses, but listed her previous education at Hampton Institute (not Tuskegee).

7. Mary L. Ray submitted annual reports to her supervisors starting in 1916. These describe routines as well as exceptional case studies. The reports of all agents in Arkansas, black and white, female and male, are housed in the Records of the Extension Service, RG 33, National Archives and Records Administration, Southwest Region, Fort Worth, Tex. (hereafter NASW). The National Ar- chives Microfilm Publications issued 106 microfilm rolls of Arkansas reports, arranged chronologi- cally with state administrator reports first, followed by county agent reports. See T848, Extension Service Annual Reports: Arkansas, 1909-1944, available as University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service Records, MCL 145, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayette- ville. For an overview of these records, see Joshua Youngblood, "Home Demonstration Records Document Twentieth Century Services to Rural Families," Arkansian 6, no. i (Spring 2012): i, 4-5. Some of the annual narrative and statistical reports from state and county agents in Arkansas, 1909-1944, have been digitized, including reports from the Negro agents in Pulaski County, Ray's home county. Hogan, "History," included excerpts of Mary Ray's 1918 report. Elizabeth Griffin Hill included excerpts from Ray's reports from the 19205 in her A Splendid Piece of Work, 1912-2012: One Hundred Years of Arkansas's Home Demonstration and Extension Homemakers Clubs (N.p.: [Elizabeth Griffin Hill], 2012), 1920 report, 48, 86; 1921 report, 55; 1922 report, 35-37, 41, 42; 1926 report, 87; 1927 report, 13.

8. Robert E. Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle of Black Freedom, 1861-1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); H. B. Frissell, H. B. Turner, and Alexander Purves, "The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute," in their The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and Its Work for Negro and Indian Youth (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis, Printer, 1899), 9, 7. This promotional literature for Hampton also conveyed biased opinions: "There is danger that the blacks will lose the trades, which were their best heritage from slavery, unless industrial education is pushed. Young women well trained in domestic science must go out to reconstruct the home" (10). See also Debra A. Reid, "People's Colleges for Other Citizens: Black Land-Grant Institutions and the Politics of Educational Expansion in the Post-Civil War South," in Science as Service: Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865-1930, vol. i, ed. Alan I. Marcus (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), 141-71.

9. Zella J. Black Patterson, Langston University: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma, i979)> 2.26. Mary L. McCrary is listed as an instructor of domestic economy at the Colored Agri- cultural and Normal University of Oklahoma, known as Langston, in the following publications: Organization List of the Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations in the United States, Bulletin 111 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1902), 55; Organization List of the Agri- cultural Colleges and Experiment Stations in the United States, Bulletin 122 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1903), 61.

10. Patterson, Langston University, 154, 226. See Linda Williams Reese, Women of Oklahoma, 1890-1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), for brief biographical information on Zelia N. Page (Breaux), 164-66. Inman E. Page, "1902 Official Report of the President of the Col- ored Agricultural and Normal University to Governor T. B. Ferguson," transcribed by Tammie Chada, Logan County, Okla., http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ok/county/logan/grads/i9O2lang.htm (accessed December 31, 2013).

11. Patterson, Langston University, 195, 226-27. Richard W Thompson, "Anniversary Aftermath: Echoes from Tuskegee Institute's Memorable Silver Jubilee: Pertinent Points about People," The

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Freeman (May 5,1906), described Mary McCrary as the "proprietor of a prosperous dressmaking establishment at Langston City, Oklahoma." See The Oklahoma Red Book (Oklahoma City: Office of the Oklahoma Secretary of State, 1912), 2:201; W. E. B. Du Bois and Augustus Granville Dill, The Negro American Artisan: A Report of a Social Study Made by Atlanta University under the Patronage of the Trustees of the John F. Slater Fund: With the Proceedings of the ijth Annual Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, Held at Atlanta University, on Monday, May 2jth, 1912 (Atlanta, Ga.: Atlanta University Press, 1912), 73. The study included Indian Territory with Oklahoma.

12. "Ray, Harvey Cincinnatus," 227. Harvey Ray's parents were George and Catherine (Davis) Ray of Bunceton, Missouri. See Harvey Cincinnatus Ray, Graduate Class 1914 Program, Thirty-Third Annual Commencement, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Tuskegee, Ala., May 24-28, 1914; Annual Catalogue of the Colored Agricultural and Normal University Founded 1897,1911-1912 (Langston, Okla.: N.p., n.d.). Staff lists published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture include Ray as "farm superintendent," Organization List of the Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Sta- tions in the United States, Bulletin 253 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913), 69; as "agri asst," List of Workers in Subjects Pertaining to Agriculture and Home Economics in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and in the State Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, Cor- rected to June i, 1914 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1914), 55; as "agri asst," List of Workers in Subjects Pertaining to Agriculture and Home Economics in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and in the State Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, Corrected to August i, 1915 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1915), 78; as "agri asst," List of Workers in Subjects Pertaining to Agriculture and Home Economics in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and in the State Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, Corrected to December i, 1915 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1916), 85; and as "agriculture assistant," List of Workers in Subjects Pertaining to Agriculture and Home Economics in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and in the State Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, Corrected to January 1917 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1917), 50.

13. Debra A. Reid, "Racism and Sexism in Rural Texas: The Contested Nature of Progressive Rural Reform, 18708-19105," in Seeking Inalienable Rights: Texans and Their Quests for Justice, ed. Debra A. Reid (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009), 37-57; and Reid, Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, the Extension Service, and Rural Reform in Jim Crow Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University, 2007), esp. 7-113.

14. Barnett, "Brief History," 91-96, said that canning clubs began in 1911, but the General Edu- cation Board did not appropriate funding until 1912. Financial backing from Sears, Roebuck may have funded earlier canning demonstrations.

15. Barnett, "Brief History," 91; The General Education Board: An Account of Its Activi- ties, 1902-1914 (New York: General Education Board, 1915), 37, 49, 56, http://archive.org/stream /generaleducationo293iimbp/generaleducationo293iimbp_djvu.txt (accessed August 13, 2014).

16. General Education Board, 56. See J. V. Highnll and M. C. Wilson, Progress of Extension Teach- ing in Lee and Hot Spring Counties, Arkansas, Extension Circular 397 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, June 1937), 7, for the dates of the first three appointments (likely for three different in- dividuals): June i, 1912-September 30, 1914; October 7, 1914-December 31, 1915; and February i, 1917-December 31,1923. See also W. B. Mercier, Extension Work among Negroes, 1920, U.S. Depart- ment of Agriculture, Circular 190 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1921), table: "Negro Extension Work—Number of Men and Women Agents and Estimated Cost for Each Fiscal Year from 1908 to 1921, Inclusive," 7. Mildred Grady, "'Famous Firsts' for Blacks in Lee County," in History of Lee County, Arkansas (Lee County, Ark.: Lee County Sesquicentennial Committee,

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Mary L. Ray 257

1987), identified Rev. R. E. Bryant and Vivian Young as the county's first farm and home agents,

respectively. For a photograph and brief biography of Bryant as a member of the board of trustees

of Arkansas Baptist College, see E. C. Morris, Sermons, Addresses and Reminiscences and Important

Correspondence, with a Picture Gallery of Eminent Ministers and Scholars (Nashville, Tenn.: National

Baptist Publishing Board, 1901), 258. The 1920 federal manuscript Census listed Bryant as a farm

demonstrator.

17. General Education Board; Cecelia Brooks, "'Touch the Bottom and Lift': Black Women Home

Extension Agents in Oklahoma, 1912-1935," Chronicles of Oklahoma 86, no. i (Spring 2008): 88-108;

for specifics on Hunter and canning, see 94. See also Ernest E. Scholl, "History of Extension Work

in Oklahoma," in Silver Anniversary, 84-87, including mention of the appointments sometime

between 1910 and 1914 of Russel Council and Anna [sic] Peters, "both colored people of Boley,

Oklahoma . . . to do work with colored farmers and their families in the vicinity" (86); Jan Scholl

and Tanya Finchum, "Annie Peters Hunter: One of the First Extension Home Demonstration Edu-

cators," Forum for Family and Consumer Issues 17, no. i (Spring-Summer 2012), http://ncsu.edu/ffci

/publications/2oi2/vi7-m-2oi2-spring/scholl-finchum.php.

18. General Education Board, 37, 65.

19. Hogan, "History," 46-56. Quote from D. Clayton Brown, "Prosperous Farms and Happier

Homes: Arkansas Agricultural Extension Service, 1911-1966," Prologue 30, no. 2 (Summer 1996),

http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/i998/summer/arkansas-extension.html.

20. Mercier, Extension Work among Negroes, 7; Hill, A Splendid Piece of Work, 10, citing Hogan,

"History," 39-49. Grady, "'Famous Firsts' for Blacks," identified Vivian Young as Lee County's first

home agent. Canning clubs began as part of cooperative demonstration work in Texas in 1912 when

white women were hired for the summer canning season, in cooperation with local chambers of

commerce and the Truck Growers Association. See Reid, "Racism and Sexism in Rural Texas,"

37-57, esp. 47-52.

21. Alice Brown Smith, Forgotten Foundations: The Role ofjeanes Teachers in Black Education

(New York: Vantage, 1997); Daniel Kreisman, "The Next Needed Thing: The Impact of the Jeanes

Fund on Black Schooling in the South, 1900-1930," Journal of Human Resources 52, no. 2 (Spring

2017): 573-620, quote on 577.

22. Earl W Crosby, "The Struggle for Existence: The Institutionalization of the Black County

Agent System," Agricultural History 60 (Spring 1986): 131, cited the following on the loss in numbers:

letters, Anonymous to Booker T. Washington, August 14, 1914; J. A. Evans to Monroe N. Work,

with enclosure "Negro Agents in the United States Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work,"

February 20, 1914, revised to July 9, 1914, typescript, 3, box 988, Booker T. Washington Papers,

Library of Congress. Katherine M. Cook, Supervision of Rural Schools, Bulletin 10, Bureau of Educa-

tion (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1922), 23; "A Guide to the Photographs,"

ser. 1054 "General Education Board, ARK 44—Supervisor of Rural Schools—Negro: Homemaker

Clubs," 1915, box 42, folder 412, Rockefeller Archives Center, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.

23. Barnett, "Brief History," 91-96, quote 94; "Services for H. C. Ray to Be Today"; J. A. Evans,

Recollections of Extension History, Extension Circular 224 (Raleigh: North Carolina Agricultural

Extension Service, 1938), 1-51; Zellar, "H. C. Ray and Racial Politics," 432-33. Folk's Southern Di-

rectory Company's 1916 Little Rock City Directory, 470, recorded Harvey C. Ray, special agent with

the U.S. Department of Agriculture, residing at 2415 Cross Street with George Ray, a black planter,

boarding at the same address.

24. For the 1915 turmoil at Langston, see Donald Spivey, "Crisis on a Black Campus: Langston Uni-

versity and Its Struggle for Survival," Chronicles of Oklahoma 59, no. 4 (Winter 1981-1982): 430-47.

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25. Zellar, "H. C. Ray and Racial Politics," 436, for salaries of black agents averaging 45-50 per- cent less than those of white agents. For numbers of agents and costs between 1908 and 1921, see Mercier, Extension Work among Negroes, 7. For more on the extension milieu in which Harvey and Mary Ray functioned, see, for example, Kathleen C. Hilton, "'Both in the Field, Each with a Plow': Race and Gender in USDA Policy, 1907-1929," in Hidden Histories of Women in the New South, ed. Virginia Bernhard et al. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 114-33. More studies exist of the origins and controversies of the southern farm agent system than of home demonstration: Allen W. Jones, "The South's First Black Farm Agents," Agricultural History 50 (October 1976): 636-44; Earl W. Crosby, "The Roots of Black Agricultural Extension Work," Historian 39, no. 2 (February 1977): 228-47; Earl W. Crosby, "Limited Success against Long Odds: The Black County Agent," Agricultural History 57, no. 3 (July 1983): 277-88; Crosby, "Struggle for Existence"; Whayne, "I Have Been through Fire," 152-88. Much has been written about the development of extension programming at Tuskegee Institute, for example, Karen J. Ferguson, "Caught in 'No Man's Land': The Negro Cooperative Demonstration Service and the Ideology of Booker T. Washington, 1900- 1916," Agricultural History 72, no. i (Winter 1998): 33-54, but much less exists on Negro divisions in other states. See Reid, Reaping a Greater Harvest; Barbara R. Cotton, The Lamplighters: Black Farm and Home Demonstration Agents in Florida, 1915-1965 (Tallahassee: Florida A&M University, 1982); and Carmen Harris, "A Ray of Hope for Liberation: Blacks in the South Carolina Extension Service, 1915-1970," Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2002. For McCrary's salary at Langston, see W. B. Richards, comp., The Oklahoma Red Book (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma [Territory] Legis- lative Assembly Council, 1912), 2:201, https://archive.org/stream/oklahomaredbookoookla#page /2oo/mode/2up/search/langston.

26. The list of costs in each southern state do not convey the complexity of funding: Mercier, Extension Work among Negroes, 7-8. For funding strategies and salaries in Texas, see Reid, Reaping a Greater Harvest, 45, 89-90. For Tennessee, see Melissa Walker, "Home Extension Work among African American Farm Women in East Tennessee, 1920-1939," Agricultural History 70, no. 3 (Sum- mer 1996): 487-502, esp. 489. For salaries at the end of Mary Ray's career, see Gladys Baker, The County Agent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c. 1939), 201. As of 1935-1936 Negro county agents' salaries averaged $1,500-$1,600, and Negro home demonstration agents' salaries averaged $1,000-$1,100 per year.

27. Hogan, "History," 60; Annual Report July i, 1923, to June 30, 1924, with Summary of Field Activities from December i, 1923, through November 30,1924, U.S. Department of Agriculture Coop- erating Extension, Circular 193 (Fayetteville: Extension Service, College of Agriculture, University of Arkansas, February 1925), 14.

28. Folk's Southern Directory Company's 1917 Directory of Little Rock, 433, recorded Henry Ray, a white clerk, residing at 2111 Cross Street, and Harvey C. Ray residing at 2415 Cross Street with Mary L. Ray, district agent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, boarding there. Harvey C. Ray's registration card for the draft, dated June 5,1917, listed his residence at 2111 Cross Street. The 1919 Little Rock City Directory, 291, listed H. C. Ray at 2111 Cross Street, but listed Mary L. Ray boarding at 2415 Cross Street (292). For the first time, the 1920 Little Rock City Directory, 355, listed Mary L. and Harvey C. Ray residing at 2111 Cross Street. The draft card and all city directories were accessed through www.ancestry.com. Manuscript Census enumerators in 1920 and 1930 recorded Mary and Harvey Ray's address as 2111 Cross Street. Ray maintained an office at 904 Broadway Street, Little Rock, in 1915 ("Ray, Harvey Cincinnatus," 227); an office at 7i21/2 West Ninth Street (Annual Report July i, 1923, to June 30,1924, 47); and later an office at 6io1/2 West Ninth Street. See "Ray, Harvey Cincinnatus," in Who's Who in Colored America: An Illustrated Biographical Diction-

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Mary L. Ray 259

ary of Notable Living Persons of African Descent in the United States, /th ed. (Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Christian E. Buckel, 1950), 430.

29. See Ray, Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports, 1916-1919, RG 33, NASW. 30. I have documented the logistical challenges that black agents faced as they traveled from

Texas to Negro extension meetings in other states, which were recorded in the minutes of staff meetings. See Reid, Reaping a Greater Harvest, 129, 151. For more on racism and how it affected middle-class travelers, see Susan Sessions Rugh, Are We There Yet?: The Golden Age of American Family Vacations (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008).

31. George Ray, head of household, widowed, with Harvey Ray listed as eleven years old and "at school," Palestine Township, Cooper County, Mo., U.S. Census, 1900, enumeration district 54, 6-B, www.ancestry.com (accessed August 23, 2014). Sources have documented the intention of Arkansas extension administrators to have H. C. Ray work with farm-owning families: Zellar, "H. C. Ray and Racial Politics," 434-35; and Whayne, "I Have Been through Fire," 178-79. For more on black land- owning families, see Debra A. Reid and Evan P. Bennett, Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule (Gaines- ville: University Press of Florida, 2014), and for a state-level study that puts extension work into the context of black communities, see Reid, Reaping a Greater Harvest. I address specific instances of the success that black women had in commissioners' courts in Texas; Whayne provides an example of Mary J. McCain, the agent in Mississippi County, and the interest the quorum court showed her in 1925 (Whayne, "I Have Been through Fire," 173-74).

32. The residents of Maumelle have made no impression on researchers except for the association with early Negro extension work. More needs to be known about the families in the community in 1915, what if any relationship they had to Harvey or Mary Ray, and what their economic assets really were. U.S. Census, 1920, manuscript returns, Maumelle Township, Pulaski County, Ark.

33. Mary Ray, "The Community Fair: A Factor in the Negro Work," 1916, pt. 4: "The Part Women Are Taking in Community Organization Work in Arkansas," appended to Annual Narrative and Statistical Report, 1916, Arkansas; and Mary Ray, "Report on Home Demonstration Work among the Colored Women and Girls for the Year 1918," appended to Annual Narrative and Statistical Report, 1918, Arkansas, both RG 33, NASW.

34. Zellar, "H. C. Ray and Racial Politics," 433; O. A. Rogers Jr., "The Elaine Race Riots of 1919," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 19, no. 2 (Summer 1960): 142-50; Lee E. Williams and Lee E. Williams II, Anatomy of Four Race Riots: Racial Conflict in Knoxville, Elaine (Arkansas), Tulsa, and Chicago, 1919-1921 (Hattiesburg: Hattiesburg University and College Press of Mississippi, 1972); Whayne, "I Have Been through Fire," 177. Note that Whayne identified the district agent as Hiram C. Ray.

35. For descriptions of the girls picking tomatoes, see Ray, "High Points in Home Demonstra- tion Work in Arkansas," appended to Annual Narrative and Statistical Report, 1922, Arkansas, RG 33, NASW.

36. Mary Ray, Annual Narrative and Statistical Report, 1922, Arkansas, RG 33, NASW. 37. Mary Ray, Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports, 1918-1927,1928 (prepared by Jennie Lou

Woodard), 1929-1934, Arkansas, RG 33, NASW. For brief excerpts from Ray's annual reports, see Hill, A Splendid Piece of Work, 1920 report, 48, 86; 1921 report, 55; 1922 report, 35-37, 41, 42; 1926 report, 87; 1927 report, 138. The quote comes from Ray, "Negro Home Demonstration Work," in Annual Narrative and Statistical Report, 1921, section on "work rooms," 2.

38. Photographs of 1923 events appear in Mary L. Ray, Narrative Report of County Extension Workers included in the Annual Report of County Extension Workers, December i, 1923, to No- vember 30,1924, Arkansas, RG 33, NASW. Photographs published in Annual Report July i, 1923, to June 30, 1924 include livestock judging, 47; and constructing a poultry house and canning beef,

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2<5o D E B R A A . R E I D

48. See also "Negro Agents Conducting a Community Demonstration in Canning a Whole Beef," Extension Cooperator (November-December 1925): 2. The caption in Annie Latimer's narrative report (January i-November 30,1923) for Faulkner County read: "Cooperative Work in the Bethel Community. View A: Serving lunch after l/2 days [sic] hard work. 25 men, women and girls took part in erecting this poultry house which we completed in one day." The same image was published in Annual Report July i, 1923, to June 30,1924,48, with the caption "Negro workers are interested in bet- ter poultry. Negro agents helping build a model poultry house along accepted lines" (Records of the Extension Service, RG 33, NASW). Mary Ray's peers in other states described community canning demonstrations in their reports, and they stressed the cooperative nature of the programs, which depended on the collaboration of male and female agents and their club members (Reid, Reaping a Greater Harvest, 68-78). For the quotation, see T. Roy Reid's annual narrative report, July i, 1923, to June 30,1924, with field observations from December i, 1923, through November 30,1924, con- clusion to "Negro Home Demonstration Work," in Annual Report July i, 1923, to June 30,1924, 49.

39. For information on the movable school, with a photograph of home demonstration agent Woodard, agricultural agent C. C. Hardaway, and the truck, see Jennie Lou Woodard, "Annual Re- port of Moveable School Extension Agent, A: Statistical Section, January i, 1929, to November 30, 1929"; and Woodard, "Narrative Report of County Extension Workers, Section B: Arkansas, Janu- ary 8,1929, to November 30,1929," both RG 33, NASW, especially "The Effectiveness of the Moveable School in the Future," 21.

40. Forty-Third Anniversary Exercises, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Programme, Commencement Day, May 22,1924; "Florida's Woman Supervisor: Miss Julia A. Miller of Arkansas Gets Appointment," Modern Farmer i, no. i (March i, 1929): i.

41. "Negro Work," Extension Cooperator (July 1926): 4. This coverage warrants attention because it is one of the only mentions, by name, of a black home demonstration agent in the white-centric publication, and it featured Julia Miller, who became H. C. Ray's second wife. While Mary Ray did not share her personal background in public information, Miller appeared in several published sources in several states.

42. "Florida's Woman Supervisor," i. Miller was headquartered at Florida A&M College, Talla- hassee. For more on home demonstration work in Florida, see Cotton, Lamplighters; and Kelly A. Minor, "'Justifiable Pride': Negotiation and Collaboration in Florida African American Extension," in Reid and Bennett, Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule, 205-28, quotes from Miller's 1931 report, 226n4, 228n22.

43. Brooks, "Touch the Bottom and Lift," 98. Julia Miller remained in Oklahoma even after she married H. C. Ray in 1935 and after they had children. See the entry in the 1940 manuscript Census return for Harvey C. Ray, head of household, with his wife, Julia M. Ray (U.S. Census, 1940, Popu- lation Schedule, Langston, Okla.).

44. Mary L. Ray Death Certificate; Oskar Klotz, "Chronic Interstitial Nephritis and Arterioscle- rosis," American Journal of the Medical Sciences 150, no. 6 (December 1915): 827-34.

45. The words Fannie Mae Boone used to eulogize Mary Ray appear in slightly different form in Rev. Abner C. Kirk, History of the Churches of the Beaver Baptist Association from 1809-1860 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: W S. Haven, 1860), 34: "GEORGE i. M I L E S was a native of Pennsylvania. He was one of four brothers, Baptist ministers. He was at one time agent of the P. B. S. Convention. He re- moved to the West, where he died. 'Go to the grave, at noon from labor cease, Rest on thy sheaves, thy harvest task is done; Come from the heat of battle, and in peace, Soldier go home, with thee the fight is won.'"

46. Mary L. Ray Death Certificate.

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Mary L. Ray 261

47. Public records identified to date provide four more years for Mary's birth: 1876 per the 1900

manuscript Census return; 1879 per the 1910 manuscript Census return; an implied birth year of

1889 per the 1920 manuscript Census return, given her age of thirty-one years; and, last, an implied

birth year of 1898 per the 1930 manuscript Census return, given her age of thirty-two years. Obvi-

ously someone other than Mary could have provided her age to Census enumerators, but only

a lack of knowledge, poor enumeration, or purposeful obfuscation explains the inconsistency of

birth year and age over the years. Her death certificate stated a birth year of 1880 and her age in the

mid-fifties, not the mid-thirties. Mary may have adjusted her birth year to be closer in age to the

people she most associated with, and this continued as she met and then married a younger man

(Harvey Cincinnatus Ray was born on February 2,1889, and died on April 24,1965). See "Services

for H. C. Ray to Be Today." He is buried in Oakland-Fraternal Cemetery, Little Rock.

48. Hogan, "History," 139-40.

49. "Farm Demonstration Work," part of Ray's 1935 annual narrative report. H. C. Ray was re-

tired by 1957 when his and Julia's third child, Gloria Ray, enrolled in Little Rock Central High

School. See "Gloria Cecelia Ray Karlmark," in Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture, http://

www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?search=i8centryID=726.

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