Alice Leflore says she wants to do positive things for the Baptist Town community and Greenwood, and she believes the Baptist Town Community Center has made a difference.
Since opening in 2015, the facility on McCain Street has hosted art programs, job training, exercise classes and other activities and has been rented for family events. Leflore, president of the Baptist Town Community Development board, says organizers are planning events for 2017 and are aiming to provide choices for all ages, including seniors.
“It’s not just for people in Baptist Town,” she said. “It’s not just for the people who live right next door to us but the city in general.”
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Leflore, 49, was born in Greenwood. After her parents divorced, she lived with her mother, Esther Harrington Leflore Jordan, throughout elementary and high school and occasionally stayed with her father, Charlie Leflore, who is now deceased. Her mother worked at Baldwin Piano and Organ Co., where she was finance secretary for the union; her father was a painter and Army veteran who trained many other painters.
“We were taught to be active, to know what’s going on around us, by both our parents,” said Leflore, who has three sisters.
Leflore, who still lives in the family house on McConnell Street in Baptist Town, remembers the neighborhood as a “village” type of environment in which people looked out for each other. Adults also didn’t hesitate to correct their neighbors’ children and alert those children’s parents when they’d misbehaved — and it’s still that way today, she said. Some of the people there are lifetime residents, and others left and returned, but they stay connected to each other.
“We pretty much know who our neighbors are,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the neighborhood who just doesn’t know anybody in the neighborhood.”
After graduating from Leflore County High School in 1985, she entered cosmetology school. The following year, she completed the program at Grenada Beauty College, which is now named Grenada Academy of Hair Design. She worked as a correctional officer at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman from 1992 to 2003 and at Delta Correctional Facility from 2005 to 2007. Her other jobs over the years have included work as a hairstylist at Regis Styling Salon and SmartStyle, a cashier at Shell and a night auditor at the Hampton Inn. Since 2013, she has been an independent hairstylist, offering her services in customers’ homes.
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Leflore first became involved with the Baptist Town Community Organization, as Baptist Town Community Development was known then, after attending a meeting during Sheriel Perkins’ mayoral administration. She heard other residents voice some of the same concerns about the neighborhood that she had. One of the ideas discussed at that time was a community center that could offer programs for people of all ages, races and economic categories in Greenwood.
Leflore said Baptist Town residents have to defend themselves against negative perceptions, including “the general ideas that we’re a bunch of unemployed thieves, drug dealers, drug addicts.” In truth, when a group of students from Harvard University did a survey of Baptist Town for a community project, they found that more than 70 percent of the people there had college degrees, she said.
“We needed to do something positive, so we can get that negative stigma wiped off of us,” she said.
The big break came when people involved with the 2010 production of the movie “The Help,” which contains scenes filmed in Baptist Town, offered to contribute money for a community center. Before that, “we really had no idea where our funding would come from, even to just get a building — whether it was built from the ground or what,” Leflore said.
The building on McCain Street was purchased from Pauline Pearson-Stamps, who now serves on the center’s board.
Before Leflore started with the Baptist Town Community Organization, she had never served on any kind of board, let alone as president of one. But others had confidence in her.
“I came to a meeting, and they said, ‘Well, looks like we have our president,’ so somebody nominated (me), and I said OK,” she recalled.
The first thing she did was to ask God for the wisdom and strength to do the job. Since then, the work has been challenging and humbling at times but also has been satisfying.
“Of course, without God, we can’t do anything,” she said. “But God has been really great to us in the center and placing people to help us along the way.”
Sherron Wright is treasurer of the board, and the other three members are Robert Benford, Emily Roush-Elliott and Pearson-Stamps.
Leflore modestly describes herself as a “reluctant leader” who is just willing to help where she is needed.
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Leflore, who is divorced, has two adult children. Her son, Kristopher Leflore, lives in Lithonia, Georgia, with his wife and three children; her daughter, Ecila Banks, lives in Greenwood. Alice Leflore said she had thought about moving to Georgia but opted to stay in Greenwood to be near her mother.
“She’s very active,” Leflore said. “She definitely loves life, loves living, loves the fact that she’s 71 and still can get around and do stuff.”
Leflore’s work with the community center keeps her busy, but she also enjoys reading and spending time outdoors. She is a member of Greater Harvest Worship Center, where she is an usher and assistant Sunday school secretary and performs a variety of other tasks. She said the church’s pastor, Bishop Earnest Miller, and his wife, Virginia, are “wonderful examples of integrity and being godly.”
She also is saving money to return to Mississippi Valley State University, where she studied criminal justice for a time, and she hopes to own a salon and spa someday.
She said the center and its organizers have encountered both naysayers and cheerleaders, but in general people in the neighborhood are pleased with what they’re doing.
“It’s here to stay, and it will flourish,” she said. “We were asked by God to do this.”
• Contact David Monroe at 581-7236 or dmonroe@gwcommonwealth.com.
