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Epilogue Mrs. Z : Lady Maverick, 1960s—2010 Old Clubs, New Clubs From the mid-1960s and onward, after Malone and Rose Hayzel went to college , graduated, found jobs, and married, Zin and Gerry Zimmerman enjoyed their “empty nest.” These busy years were filled with Mrs. Geraldyne Zimmerman’s activities, which, ironically, had increased after the children left. She remained active in her As You Like It women’s bridge club and her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, becoming a lifetime member of the latter. In 1964, Zimmerman and her friends successfully established an Orangeburg chapter of Links, Incorporated, a national nonprofit organization for women of color committed to enhancing their communities culturally, socially, and benevolently.1 After years of assisting her mother in her youth, Geraldyne Zimmerman decided to join Orangeburg’s oldest Black women’s civic club, the Sunlight Club. It was a club of elite women founded by her mother, Hayzel, and a few other women on June 29, 1909, two years before Geraldyne’s birth. The youth club Zimmerman had founded earlier, the Thirteen Twenty, had slowly phased itself out as its members grew up and left for college. But this did not subtract from Geraldyne’s continued interest in working with young people. She remained steadfast in her interest to keep young females socially engaged.2 Based on the Sunlight Club model, Mrs. Zimmerman wanted to organize high school girls into an organization with the same mission as the old club. Hence, she founded a junior civic organization of the Sunlight Club. The new club’s first members were the remaining female members who were still active Mrs. Z: Lady Maverick, 1960s–2010 116 in the waning Thirteen Twenty. Geraldyne wanted to name the new club after the civic worker, Helen Wilkinson Sheffield, in honor of her ongoing work among youth. Sheffield was the daughter of State A&M’s former president, Robert S. Wilkinson, and Marian Birnie Wilkinson, one of the founders of the Sunlight Club and later president of the South Carolina Federation of Colored Women.3 At the time, Helen Sheffield, like both her mother Marian Wilkinson and Sarah B. Henderson, was an active Sunlight Club member who focused unselfishly on socially engaging Orangeburg’s less fortunate youth. Geraldyne had one of the high school members to seek permission from Sheffield to use her name for their new club. The gracious Helen Sheffield accepted the honor and the Helen Sheffield Girls Club was officially born in 1963. The club’s mission was to prepare high school girls for a life of community service work, and its members were from “preferred social backgrounds” only. A few years later, Gerry and some other women founded the Sarah B. Henderson Club at State A&M, a junior civic club of the Sunlight Club. Named after a woman who was very active in working with young females at State A&M, the Sara B. Henderson Club was by invitation only. Unlike the members of other female social clubs, Henderson clubwomen were groomed and committed to do civic work in the larger Black community. The idea was that once the Helen Sheffield girls entered college, they would go on to become members of the Sarah B. Henderson Club. Upon their graduation from college, they were eligible to become members of the Sunlight Club, Orangeburg’s elite Black women’s civic club. However, while some of these young female graduates remained in Orangeburg and became active with the Sunlight Club, many others chose to relocate and move to other cities and states. From working many years with both these high school and college girls, they affectionately started referring to Mrs. Zimmerman as “Mrs. Z,” a term of endearment still used today. A few years before the founding of the Helen Sheffield Girls Club, Helen Wilkinson Sheffield herself had attempted to organize Orangeburg’s young Black girls into its first Black chapter of the Girl Scouts of America but failed. This failure resulted from Sheffield’s recruitment efforts being narrowly focused on girls from Orangeburg’s Black elite and middle-class families. However, most of the scouts grew older and left Orangeburg to attend private high schools in other cities or states. As a result of Sheffield not recruiting girl scouts from the general Black population, her existing chapter was unable to sustain its weaning membership and eventually folded. After successfully igniting the Black chapter of the Boys Scouts in Orangeburg when Malone was very young, Mrs. Z decided to focus her efforts on [3.135.205.146] Project...

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