One hundred and twenty five years ago, Sarah Newton Cohron and other African-American teachers in the local segregated schools started a campaign to establish the St. Louis Colored Orphans Home.
“We should by all means look into conditions of the Colored orphans of the city,” said Julia Casey, according to the Feb. 23, 1887, minutes of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). “Do, ladies, take some action. We have left it to others long enough.”
The WCTU acted and helped to create an institution that is approaching its 125th anniversary of its opening. The Orphans Home is now known as the Annie Malone Children & Family Service Center.
The Orphans Home, which began on property bought by African-American Civil War veterans, moved to the Ville neighborhood in 1922, using funds contributed by its richest and most-famous resident at the time, Annie Malone. The home was renamed Annie Malone Children’s Home in 1946.
Changes in federal funding and state programs in the past 10 years caused Annie Malone to discontinue the traditional long-term residential home and open a short-term residential facility in a new campus of buildings it bought in 2008 at 5355 Page Blvd.
“Our demographics have expanded,” said Delsie Boyd, a city councilman in Black Jack, member of the Annie Malone board and former board chairman. “Although, we’re still in the Ville, we service the St. Louis metropolitan area and the state of Missouri as a whole.”
Individualized education
Marquita Farland’s son Leondis Clark, 14, attends Emerson Academy Therapeutic School, one of the programs on Annie Malone’s program campus on Page.
“He’s been going here about three years,” she said. “He couldn’t make it in a regular school setting, but he’s been doing pretty good here. The teachers know him. They’re patient with him.”
Students are placed at Emerson by St. Louis Public Schools for various special-education needs. A school advocate advised Farland that the suspensions were inappropriate. The advocate and Leondis’ teachers developed an IEP – individual education plan – for him and placed him at Emerson.
“Now he reads novels and does his homework,” his mother said. “His self-esteem has lifted. He’s proud of how far he came.”
Emerson’s goal is to move children back into regular schools, and Leondis expects to enter high school next year as a freshman. “He’s extremely excited about going to high school,” Farland said.
Many Emerson students come into the school from middle school and high school, said Jonathan Haynes, the school’s science teacher. “For an alternative school, we move the students kind of fast,” he said. Most students stay about a year.
Emerson Academy science and technology teacher Jonathan Haynes conducts a beautification and gardening project with the students behind the school on Page Boulevard. The raised garden plots and soil-filled tires are used to grow vegetables for the school’s kitchen. The tires are scavenged from lots in the neighborhood.
The garden project helps Haynes teach planning, plant selection and the effect of weather, climate and light conditions on plants. At harvest time, all the students got to take pumpkins home from the garden.
Respite care
“It’s all about creating positive vibes,” said Adrianne Martin, the center’s director of social services.
She stood in a room with four beds provided for girls 13 to 17, with bedspreads covered with big pink and purple polka dots. “All the bright, girly things make them feel more at home,” Martin said.
Besides the bedrooms and adjoining bathrooms, the crisis/respite facility has a kitchenette, space for private conferences, and space for kids to spread out and do their homework.
The center has space for up to 26 children age 17 and under, including up to five babies in a crib room. Children come in to the center in two ways. They may be brought by their parents or other guardians, perhaps because they are homeless or because the parent or guardian is ill or undergoing a crisis or there’s been a death in the family. Or they may be placed there by a juvenile court judge.
“We are not a lockdown facility,” said Jahara Davis, coordinator of public relations and volunteers. “The children come here voluntarily.”
If the child is brought by a parent, he or she may stay 21 to 30 days. Children under court referrals may stay only five days before going back home or into foster care.
‘A bigger family’
Leorna Lee, director of information technology and operations at the center, grew up in the Annie Malone Children’s Home in the building in the Ville, which is still the organization’s headquarters.
At one time, the Children’s Home housed up to 100 children who lived there for several months, several years or even most of their childhoods. Lee lived in the Children’s Home for 15 years until she went to college. For much of her childhood, her twin brother and their two older brothers also lived there.
“Our grandmother’s health had deteriorated, and the juvenile court placed us with the agency,” Lee said. “I just felt like I had a bigger family. We had grandparents to teach us to crochet, and to read to us. We had house parents, like you’d have at home. There were a lot of kids. I don’t remember feeling lonely.”
Lee graduated from Kirkwood High School in the court-ordered desegregation transfer program and was named Magnet Journalism Student of the Year in 1989. She graduated from Lincoln University in 1994.
Lee also took advantage of the Annie Malone Center’s Transitional Housing Program, which gives homeless young adults 18 and older a place to stay to get on their feet and move into their own apartments.
The shift to shorter stays for children in distressed families has its drawbacks, Lee said. “You get the kids in, give them a bath, a meal, a bed,” she said. “You may have
A proud history
The Annie Malone Home at 2612 Annie Malone Drive in the Ville is on the National Register of Historic Places. Standing in the vestibule and looking at a full-length portrait of its benefactress, one can almost hear the sound of children’s voices and feel the spirit of people who saw children in need and responded.
Sarah Newton Cohron took in the first orphan girl and gathered women from the WCTU and nearby African Methodist Episcopal churches to do something for the orphans.
Annie Turnbo Malone gave $10,000 in the 1920s to build a magnificent building designed by the famous architect William B. Ittner.
Teachers like Jonathan Haynes nurture the spark of learning in their students. Alumni like Leorna Lee remember their years at Annie Malone and return as adults to give back.
As retiring CEO Angela Starks says, “Everything we do, we help children move from where they were to be better. Our legacy is to tell children, no matter what their background, they are valuable and they can accomplish their goals.”
Edited for length and reprinted with permission from stlbeacon.org.
