Irene Turner

Irene Marie Turner (November 15, 1900 – April 20, 1999) was born in Indianapolis to Charles and Georgia Turner and was one of four children. She graduated from Manual High School in 1921 and attended Indiana State Normal School before continuing her studies at Indiana University and Columbia University. In 1922, she was listed among the Indianapolis pledges of Beta Chapter of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority. By 1930, she had joined the faculty of Cheyney University of Pennsylvania in home economics, where she served for forty-one years and later became head of the department. A building, Harris-Turner Hall, was named in her honor, reflecting her long service and leadership. She had a family that included children and grandchildren. Irene Marie Turner died in Indianapolis at age ninety-eight. 

Loraine Jackson

Loraine Jackson Hill (c.1901–2000) was an Indianapolis educator and an early member of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority. She was educated in Indianapolis and attended Shortridge High School before pursuing teacher training at the Indiana State Normal School in Terre Haute, Indiana. By the early 1920s she had begun her long career with the Indianapolis Public Schools, teaching at School No. 26.

Jackson became active in the civic and professional networks of Black women educators that formed the foundation of Sigma Gamma Rho during its earliest years. In 1924 she was listed among those received into the organization during an Indianapolis initiation ceremony. Throughout the decade she participated in the social and organizational life of the sorority, including hosting meetings of affiliated clubs at her residence on West 27th Street.

Jackson devoted more than five decades to education in Indianapolis. According to her obituary, she taught 55 years at Indianapolis Public School 26. She was also a longtime member of Allen Chapel AME Church, one of the city’s historic Black congregations.

She later married Carter S. Hill and was known in later life as Loraine Jackson Hill. She died in Indianapolis at the age of ninety-nine, leaving children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Birdie Roney

Birdie Roney Carter (July 17, 1899 – January 2, 1925) was born in Mississippi to James Stevens and Cynthia Taylor who later married Joshua Roney. She was part of the Roney family of Indianapolis and was one of several siblings in the household, including Mary E. Roney, John Marion Roney, and others documented in family records. She later married Joseph Carter. She was a high achieving student and graduate from Shortridge High School in 1918. She was active in church and civic life. She died at City Hospital in Indianapolis at the age of twenty-five on January 2, 1925. 

Geneva Howard

Geneva Howard was part of the educational and social network of young Black women in Indianapolis who came of age during the early 1920s and moved through the city’s expanding pathways into higher education and professional training.

By 1921, Howard was associated with Emmerich Manual High School in Indianapolis, where she appears in the school yearbook. Her presence there places her within one of the city’s important public-school environments for Black students during a period when secondary education was opening new opportunities for African American young women.

Within a year, Howard appears in a more historically significant setting. On November 11, 1922, The Indianapolis News listed her among the Indianapolis pledges of the Beta Chapter of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority at Indiana State Normal School. Her name appears alongside Birdie Roney, Alta Roney, Edna Tucker, Irene Turner, Loraine Jackson, and Lucile Linthicum, connecting her directly to the early teacher-training and sorority network that helped shape Sigma Gamma Rho in its formative period.

Howard’s appearance in that 1922 pledge notice places her among the women linked to the Terre Haute normal-school circle at the very beginning of Sigma Gamma Rho’s chapter development. Like others in that group, she seems to have moved within an overlapping world of Indianapolis schools, teacher preparation, and Black women’s organizational life.

Although the surviving evidence currently offers only a partial view of her life, Geneva Howard clearly belonged to the cohort of educated young Black women whose school ties and professional aspirations formed the social foundation of early Sigma Gamma Rho.