Big Sister’s Home: Delinquent Girl Problems in Kansas City, 1919–43

With the opening of the Big Sisters home in Kansas City, Missouri, Fredericka Douglass Sprague Perry—hoped to prevent Black adolescent girls from entering state-run correctional facilities for minor offenses. Sprague Perry desired to fulfill a need or, as many Black elites saw it, to solve one of the Problems of the race. In this case, the problem was that wayward, abandoned, or otherwise neglected girls in the city needed homes, jobs, and most importantly, cultural retraining. This poster centers on two local self-help organizations, the Urban League of Kansas City, established in 1919, and the Big Sisters Home, initially founded in February 1928 and later reorganized in 1932. The poster will present a timeline of the two organizations as examples of recognized and respectable institutions, illustrate photographs of key individuals involved in these self-help organizations, present unemployment data, and highlight the numerous social programs available to adolescent girls in Kansas City. Within these two institutions, Black elites used their standing as "race leaders" to advocate for the Black community. My research aims to recover the community service work done by Black elite women like Sprague Perry and, as historian Tammy-Charelle Owens adequately posits, to read the archives "upside down and backward to find Black girls." While Black girls are often the targets for educational retraining programs, they are rarely centered in the discourse about how best to service their specific needs. The period from childhood to adulthood remains under-explored by historians. Black girls and Black girlhood are both overly policed and highly invisible in our society. While the Big Sisters home in Kansas City was an institution devoted to the visibility of the unique set of problems facing unhoused or abandoned girls in Kansas City, that visibility was contingent on their respectability.