Mabel Walker

 Educator • Civic Leader • Alpha Kappa Alpha Soror • Shreveport Institutional Memory

Mabel Doshie Lewis Walker entered the world on 28 November 1912 in Shreveport, Louisiana, the daughter of Billie Leo (or “Billie Hon”) Lewis and Doshia (Dennis) Lewis. She was raised in a large, tightly knit family documented in Shreveport’s Crawfuter Street neighborhood.

Her mother, Doshia Dennis Lewis, was herself a respected civic worker who founded a day nursery and helped establish the first public kindergarten serving Black children in Shreveport.[^2] Mabel grew up in the orbit of that educational and community leadership, absorbing the expectation that work in the world was both a calling and a duty.

By the 1930s and 1940s, Mabel had carved her own path as a teacher, musician, youth leader, and organizational officer across Caddo and Bossier Parishes. Newspaper coverage identifies her as a music director at Bossier Colored High School, jointly announcing concerts and youth programs with the school principal in 1947.[^3] She appears across civic columns as an active, visible educator whose participation in community events placed her firmly in Shreveport’s professional Black middle class.

Mabel was also a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, part of the same Shreveport cluster of early sorors identified in The Ivy Leaf lists “Mabel” among the region’s active AKA women alongside Irma Green Jackson, Mae Etta Scott, Hattie Luse Fletcher, Nannie Appleby Leech, and others.[^4] Her sorority work continued into her adult life and appears explicitly in her obituary. She became a charter member of Delta Lambda Omega in 1947.

She married Hardy W. Walker, and the couple appears together in the 1950 Federal Census, raising their daughter Thelda Walker in Shreveport.

Mabel’s public life expanded throughout the mid-century. She served as:

• A member and officer of St. Paul Methodist Church
  
  

• President of the local Women’s Society of Christian Service (W.S.C.S.)
  
  

• Secretary of the Leland College and Prator View College Alumni Associations
  
  

• Director of the United Methodist Women’s Home Mission Board
  
  

• A founder of Delta Lambda Omega Chapter of AKA (per obituary testimony, reflecting local community memory)[^7]
  
  

• Board member of the Shreveport District Finance Committee
  
  

Her obituary, published 21 February 1985 in The Shreveport Journal, is expansive—an honor reserved for women whose work spanned decades and institutions. It praises her “quiet Christian service,” her leadership across church auxiliaries, her educational contributions, and her sororal and civic commitments. It also confirms her close ties to her Lewis siblings and extended family network across Texas and Louisiana.[^7]

Mabel departed this life on 17 February 1985 in Shreveport at age 72. She was buried at Lincoln Memorial Park in Caddo Parish.[^8] Her life represents the sustaining core of mid-century Black Southern womanhood: disciplined service, institutional loyalty, deep church roots, and sororal networks that advanced education, culture, and civic leadership long before historians began tracing those lines.

She stands as one of the quiet architects of Shreveport’s Black professional class — a woman who inherited community leadership from her mother and passed it forward through her students, her church, her family, and her beloved AKA.