The Spade and Fork Garden Club of Jackson, Mississippi

In 1956 — the year Medgar and Myrlie Evers bought a home in Elraine, a middle-class African American subdivision in Jackson, Mississippi — women in the neighborhood founded the Spade and Fork Garden Club. Elraine had been under development only since 1955, and the club quickly became part of its social fabric.

Garden clubs and African American communities

Women's garden clubs arose in the late 1800s as community groups that supported women's civic involvement and knowledge of plants. As Americans moved to the suburbs in the mid-1900s, garden clubs boomed; like most organizations of the time, they were largely segregated by race.

For African Americans, many of whom had moved from rural areas to cities and suburbs, garden clubs had particular importance. They fostered connection to nature, beautified neighborhoods, offered mutual aid and social support, and took up causes such as voting rights and food justice. In Jackson's growing Black middle class, they helped people build social ties, share practical know-how and improve their surroundings.

The club's work

The Spade and Fork fit squarely in this tradition. Its members promoted food gardening, yard care, fellowship and mutual aid. They decorated the neighborhood for holidays, threw parties, gathered gifts for new babies, and with other groups made Thanksgiving and Christmas food baskets and brought flowers to hospitalized veterans.

The club belonged to the citywide Jackson Garden Club Council, which linked it to other African American garden clubs, and its members often won recognition in the council's annual Christmas decorating contest. In 1956 the council gave the Evers family a prize for their lawn display, which, a 1957 newspaper reported, drew visitors from across the city and beyond; in later years some of their neighbors won awards too.

In 1957 Myrlie Evers was the club's treasurer, and the poet and author Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander was its president. Looking back in 2023, Myrlie Evers-Williams recalled that the members hoped to give their families the best living conditions they could and to build pride in Elraine. In a deeply unequal society, gardening gave African American women a way to shape their surroundings, show their investment in their homes and find refuge from oppression, and well-tended gardens and lawns expressed aspirations to middle-class life and equal citizenship.

The club was also a place to experiment, learn and share. Members built a library of books on gardening and flower arranging, wrote a gardening handbook and invited guest speakers. Women led the club, but men took part too, doing much of the planting and landscaping.

Sources

• National Park Service, Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument: "Spade and Fork Garden Club," citing a 2023 interview with Myrlie Evers-Williams, whose words are paraphrased. The source's clipping from a 1957 newspaper is not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.