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Notable people · Reformer

Jane Edna Hunter

South Carolina-born nurse and lawyer who in 1911 founded Cleveland's Phillis Wheatley Association, which became the country's largest residence for single Black women.

Born December 13, 1882, Woodburn Farm, near Pendleton
Died January 1971, Cleveland

Jane Edna Hunter
CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

At a glance

Born
December 13, 1882, Woodburn Farm, near Pendleton source
Died
January 1971, Cleveland (Cuyahoga County) (sources give January 13, 17 or 19) source
Buried
Lake View Cemetery, Cleveland (Cuyahoga County) source
Also known as
Jane Edna Harris, Jane Edna Harris Hunter, Jane E. Hunter
Education
Ferguson and Williams Academy, Abbeville, SC, to 1900
Cannon Street Hospital and Training School for Nurses, Charleston, SC, nursing
Hampton Institute, Hampton, VA, 1904, nursing training
Cleveland State University College of Law, Cleveland, OH, to 1925, law degree
Known as
Reformer
Organizations
Phillis Wheatley Association

Life story

Jane Edna Harris was born in 1882 on a plantation near Pendleton, South Carolina, to sharecropper parents. Her father died in 1892 and she began working as a domestic.

She finished at a South Carolina academy, trained as a nurse in Charleston and at Hampton Institute, and moved to Cleveland in 1905.

Seeing how few safe places Black women had to live and find work, she founded the Working Girls Association in 1911. It was renamed the Phillis Wheatley Association in 1912.

She completed an eleven-story residence in 1927, earned a law degree from Cleveland State in 1925, and won the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 1937. She retired in 1947, wrote A Nickel and a Prayer (1940), and died in Cleveland in 1971.

Ohio ties

  • Cleveland (1905-1971)
    nurse, social worker, lawyer; founder and general secretary of the Phillis Wheatley Association Cuyahoga County · source
  • Cleveland, 2265 East 40th Street and East 40th at Central Avenue (1911-1927)
    first homes of the Working Girls' Home Association / Phillis Wheatley Association Cuyahoga County · source
  • Cleveland, 4450 Cedar Avenue (1927-c. 1947)
    nine-storey Phillis Wheatley Association building she raised the money for Cuyahoga County · source

Timeline

  1. 1882 Born Jane Edna Harris on 13 December on Woodburn Farm near Pendleton, South Carolina, to sharecropper Edward Harris and Harriet Millner. source
  2. 1892 Her father died when she was about ten, and she went to work as a live-in servant. source
  3. 1900 Graduated from the Ferguson and Williams Academy in Abbeville, South Carolina. source
  4. 1905 Finished nurse training at Hampton Institute, Virginia, and moved to Cleveland, where she was one of only two Black professional nurses. source
  5. 1911 In September founded the Working Girls' Home Association with seven friends, with dues of a nickel a week, opening a boarding home on East 40th Street north of Central Avenue. source
  6. 1913 The association was incorporated in March as the Phillis Wheatley Association, named for the 18th-century poet, with both Black and white trustees. source
  7. 1917 The association bought a three-storey building for 75 residents at the northwest corner of East 40th and Central. source
  8. 1922 Wrote to Charles W. Chesnutt on 3 October thanking him for a $100 gift to the building fund. source
  9. 1925 Passed the Ohio bar examination after four years at Baldwin-Wallace Law School. source
  10. 1927 The Phillis Wheatley Association opened its nine-storey building at 4450 Cedar Avenue, with 135 dormitory rooms on the top six floors. source
  11. 1928 Robert R. Moton of Tuskegee Institute gave the keynote at the dedication of the new building. source
  12. 1930 Became chairman of the National Association of Colored Women's new Phillis Wheatley Department; by 1939 there were ten Phillis Wheatley houses, including Toledo, Oberlin, Canton and Steubenville. source
  13. 1940 Published her autobiography, A Nickel and a Prayer, probably at her own expense under the imprint Elli Kani. source
  14. 1943 Founded the Women's Civic League of Cleveland. source
  15. 1947 Reached mandatory retirement age and reluctantly resigned as general secretary, turning to the Phillis Wheatley Foundation's college scholarships. source
  16. 1970 The top six residence floors of the Cedar Avenue building closed on 31 October; they reopened in 1972 as subsidized housing for older people. source
  17. 1971 Died in Cleveland in January, leaving most of her assets to the Phillis Wheatley Foundation scholarship fund. source
  18. 2011 Rhondda Robinson Thomas of Clemson University published an annotated edition of A Nickel and a Prayer. source

What Jane is known for

  • Founded Working Girls Association (later Phillis Wheatley Association) 1911
  • Eleven-story residence completed 1927
  • A Nickel and a Prayer (1940)
  • Phillis Wheatley Association (founder)

Stories

The first door was a brothel

When Hunter arrived in Cleveland in 1905 with friends, the first house they knocked on for lodging turned out to be a brothel. As a Black woman she found it very hard to find safe housing, nursing work or decent places to spend free time; the YWCA did not take Black migrants. Her luck turned through a church connection with the office secretary of John D. Rockefeller's physician, which led to nursing jobs and patrons. The experience of how exposed young Black women were on arrival is what she built the Phillis Wheatley Association to fix.

Source

A 'Jim Crow YWCA'

Hunter's plan split Black Cleveland. Established Black clubwomen, who were pushing for integration, called the home a 'Jim Crow YWCA' and argued that southern migrants like Hunter were importing segregation. She had to win both them and white donors. Henry Sherwin of Sherwin-Williams gave money only on condition that prominent white women sit on the board. Hunter answered critics by pointing out that the YWCA would not admit more than a handful of Black women anyway, and she described her job as uniting 'the purposes and desires of my people and the policies of the white friends whose material support we sought.'

Source

Chapter 11: 'Starlight' Boyd

Hunter saw her work as a fight against organized vice and the politics that protected it. In A Nickel and a Prayer she named a whole chapter after Albert 'Starlight' Boyd, a Republican businessman she called the 'Great Mogul' of vice in Cleveland, whose Starlight Cafe on Canal Road was tavern, barbershop, pool room and political hub. She describes standing at the deathbed of his first wife, Osie, whom she said he had drawn into prostitution and then divorced. Later scholars such as Hazel Carby have criticized how closely Hunter policed her residents' private lives.

Source

Honors and things named for them

  • NAACP Spingarn Medal (1937)
  • Ohio Women's Hall of Fame (1978)
  • Jane Edna Hunter Social Services Center, Cuyahoga County
  • Jane Edna Hunter Museum at the Phillis Wheatley Center

Named for Jane Edna Hunter

  • Jane Edna Hunter Social Services Center, Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services (Cleveland, Cuyahoga County) source
  • Jane Edna Hunter Scholarship Fund, Phillis Wheatley Foundation (Cleveland, Cuyahoga County) source

Family

  • father: Edward Harris
  • mother: Harriet Milner
  • husband: Edward Hunter

Sites to know

Homes, graves, markers, museums and monuments; the numbered ones are on the map.

12
  • 1 Phillis Wheatley Association building (Emeritus House), built 1927
    4450 Cedar Avenue, Cleveland Cuyahoga County · source
  • First Phillis Wheatley home, 2265 East 40th Street (unknown)
    Cleveland Cuyahoga County · source
  • 2 Lake View Cemetery (coordinates are for the cemetery)
    12316 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland Cuyahoga County · source

Places in Ohio to see

Ohio places

Where Jane Edna Hunter was born, lived, worked and is remembered, with the ZIP code, town and county pages for each.

Myths and corrections

Things often said about Jane Edna Hunter, and what the record shows.

Often said Hunter received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal (Wikipedia says both 1937 and, as the first Black woman, 1928).

The record The NAACP's list of Spingarn medallists does not include her. The 1928 medal went to Charles W. Chesnutt, the 1937 medal to Walter White, and the first woman honoured was Mary B. Talbert in 1922. source

Often said She founded the 'Phillis Wheatley Association' in 1911.

The record She founded the Working Girls' Home Association in September 1911; the Phillis Wheatley name came with incorporation in March 1913 according to the NPS profile (the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History says the name changed later in 1911). source

Documents

Primary records: patents, letters, court and government files, nominations and old county histories, each at the archive that holds it.

Pictures

Free to use with the credit shown. Select a picture for the original and its license.

  • The Phyllis Wheatley Association building.
    The Phyllis Wheatley Association building.
    Public domain
  • A view of the Phillis Wheatley Association at 4450 Cedar Avenue, in Cleveland, Ohio. The structure, built in 1927, was d
    A view of the Phillis Wheatley Association at 4450 Cedar Avenue, in Cleveland, Ohio. The structure, built in 1...
    Christopher Busta-Peck / CC BY-SA 1.0

Further reading

Sources

Confidence. Medium: the main facts were confirmed, but some details (often an address or ZIP code) were not.

Every link goes to the original source. Profile researched 2026-10-15.

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