About Pomona Valley Section, NCNW

Executive Board

  • Jamie Lindsay -- President

  • Autumn Washington – 1st Vice President

  • Sherie Rodgers – 2nd Vice President

  • Rakiyah Wilson – 3rd Vice President/MSJ Youth & Collegiate 

  • Linda Ursery-Fleming – Treasurer

  • Janet Betton – Financial Secretary

  • Victoria Rasshan – Assistant Financial Secretary

  • Regina Wilson – Recording Secretary

  • Linda Wright-Lee – Corresponding Secretary

  • Shirley Butler-Hughes – Historian

  • Natalie Shiras – Chaplain 

Local History

On December 7, 1985, Jeanette Ellis scheduled a meeting of 13 women to discuss the idea of organizing a section of the National Council of Negro Women in the city and valley of Pomona. After two hours of discussion, the group decided to bring this idea into reality. During the next meeting, held on December 15, 1985, at Macedonia Baptist Church, Pomona, California twenty-three women joined the organization. By April 1986 fifty paid members existed. The Pomona Valley Section-National Council of Negro Women was charted in May 1986.

Biography of Dr. Dorothy Height

Dr. Dorothy Height was born in Richmond, Virginia on March 24, 1912. Dorothy Height was a civil rights and women's rights activist who worked on improving the circumstances and opportunities for African-American Women.  

Dr. Heights earned her master’s degree in psychology at New York University. At the age of 25, she began a career as a civil rights activist when she joined the National Council of Negro Women.  She fought for equal rights for both African Americans and women. In 1944 she joined the national staff of the YMCA.  She also served as national president of Delta Sigma Theta, Inc. from 1946 to 1957.

In 1957, Dr. Heights was named president of the National Council of Negro Women.  During the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, she organized "Wednesdays in Mississippi", which brought together black and white women from the North and South to create a dialogue of understanding.  American leaders regularly took her counsel, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dr. Height also encouraged President Dwight D. Eisenhower to desegregate schools and President Lyndon B. Johnson to appoint African-American women to positions in government.

Dr. Height served on a number of committees, including as a consultant on African affairs to the Secretary of State, the President's Committee on the Employment of the Handicapped, and the President's Committee on the Status of Women.

The numerous honors bestowed upon her include the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1994) and on her 92nd birthday President George W. Bush presented her the Congressional Gold Medal (2004), the highest civilian and most distinguished award presented by the United States Congress. 

Dr. Heights, at the age of 95, was an honored guest, seated on stage, at the inauguration of President Barack Obama on January 20, 2009.  She died a year later on April 20, 2010, in Washington, D.C.

Why NCNW still uses the word “Negro”

NCNW's name reflects collective pride in our heritage and in the roots of our organization founded in 1935, a time when to be a Negro was understood to be part of a movement toward the educational upliftment and economic advancement of our people.

Our continuing use of the name (which ultimately includes all Black people) despite innumerable iterations in nomenclature for American people of African descent, the word reflects the awareness that what we call ourselves at any given moment is less important than who we are and where we stand on the continuum of time, in the context of our heritage, and in the development of our people.

For more information on NCNW, Please visit NCNW's National webpage

Tribute of Mona Sparks Johnson