Sadie Harvey

Sadie Elizabeth Harvey Odom (1924–20 Oct. 1994) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the youngest daughter of Burwell Towns “B. T.” Harvey Jr. and Mae Wynn Harvey.  Educated in the laboratory schools on the Atlanta University campus, she finished high school at fifteen and graduated cum laude from Morris Brown College at nineteen, where she helped found Gamma Gamma Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, and was initiated on 5 January 1942. During World War II she lived in the Hampton, Virginia, area, worked in an aeronautical engineering laboratory at a U.S. Air Force base, and became a documented charter member of the Gamma Upsilon Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, as confirmed by contemporary newspaper accounts and Ivy Leaf.  On 26 October 1947, she married Vernon A. Odom in the Morehouse College Chapel, and in 1953, they settled in Akron, Ohio, after periods in Des Moines, Iowa, and Louisville, Kentucky. In Akron, she worked for about ten years as a medical technologist, directing the blood bank at St. Thomas Hospital, and volunteered extensively in sickle-cell and diabetes screening programs. She was active in the Akron Community Service Center and Urban League, serving as president of the National Urban League’s Quarter Century Club, and was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha’s Zeta Theta Omega Chapter, the NAACP (life member), the Century Club of the United Negro College Fund, and the American Cancer Society. A long-time member of Wesley Temple A.M.E. Zion Church and later Arlington Church of God, she supervised Sunday School at Wesley Temple in the late 1970s and later served on the board of Arlington Housing Options Plus Elderly Services. She died in Akron after a long illness and was buried at Greenlawn Cemetery; survivors included her husband, son Vernon Odom Jr., a daughter, her sisters Ethel Harvey Georges and Jeanette Harvey Hamme, and other relatives.