Hazel Rhea Hurst, Shrewsbury educator and neighborhood activist, dies at 96 Times Picayune July 08, 2009 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ Hazel Rhea Hurst, a longtime educator and ground-breaking neighborhood activist in East Jefferson's Shrewsbury community, died Friday at Canon Hospice. She was 96 Mrs. Hurst was born in the Southport area of Jefferson, near the New Orleans line, and moved with her family to Shrewsbury in 1921. At the time, Shrewsbury was heavily wooded, and her brothers had to cut tree branches to clear a path from the house to their jobs. Her activism started soon after she graduated in 1931 from McDonogh 35 High School, the only New Orleans area high school that black children such as she could attend in those days. While her New Orleans friends teasingly called her "little country girl" because she was from Jefferson Parish, her own neighbors began to look upon her as a leader and spokesperson for their community. In 1935, she grew weary of having to trek a half mile or more to a white man's grocery store, where all the black residents had to go to make telephone calls. She wrote letters to the phone company, and her persistence got her the first telephone in Shrewbury. She let the neighbors come to her home to use the phone, and although she protested against them paying her, they often left dimes in a brass cup next to the phone. "When the phone bill would come, I'd have more money in the cup than the bill was," Mrs. Hurst recalled in a 1998 interview. Soon, the neighbors started getting their own phone lines. In the early 1940s, she wrote to the postal service to get mail delivered in her community. "Everybody was having to go to that same grocer to get their mail," she said. "They were missing their mail. I said, 'We're going to get our own mail.' He said: 'They're not going to bring mail back there to y'all.' I said: 'I'm determined. I'm going to get it.'ยค" After Mrs. Hurst persuaded all the neighbors to cooperate, the post office started delivering to mailboxes mounted on each corner. In 1957, after Causeway Boulevard was built through the community, she wrote another letter asking that mail be delivered to people's homes; She got that, too. In the early 1960s, Mrs. Hurst gave classes on voting to the black people in her community, after getting permission from the registrar of voters. The neighbors practiced reciting the Constitution, registering to vote and voting. As late as 1998, at 86, she remained active in community improvement. She was working with local and state officials to replace a flimsy chain-link fence on the South Causeway neutral ground. Mrs. Hurst said she viewed her work as "things I had to do." Dylan Slagle/The Times Picayune In 2003, Hazel Rhea Hurst addressed fellow residents of the Shrewsbury community during a Christmas party at the community center named for her. "There was nobody else in here to do stuff like this," she said. "I'm not throwing flowers on myself, but I had to do these things." Mrs. Hurst graduated in 1933 from the Valena C. Jones Normal and Practice School in New Orleans, a state program that awarded teaching certificates. She also attended Southern and Xavier universities. She taught in Jefferson for 37 years -- 35 of them at John H. Martyn High School -- before retiring in 1972. Even after retiring, she remained committed to education. From 1988 to 2001, she encouraged neighborhood children to stay in school by offering cash awards to high school graduates who lived in Shrewsbury. Graduates with the top five grade-point averages received $50 to $300. "She's touched so many people's lives," said the Rev. Sam Lenox, who was in Mrs. Hurst's second- grade class and went on to teach with her at Martyn. One day in Lenox's First Zion Baptist Church, someone asked how many people present had been taught by Mrs. Hurst. "At least 50 people stood up," Lenox said. Mrs. Hurst was so revered in the community that the Legislature and Gov. Mike Foster approved a bill in 1997 to rename the Jefferson Community Action Program's Shrewsbury Community Center, directly across Causeway Boulevard from Hurst's house, for her. The idea came from Mrs. Hurst's friends and former students, and the officials waived a law that bans naming public buildings for a person for at least five years after death. The attention seemed to please Mrs. Hurst -- and to make her blush. Every time she opened the door to her pink, wood-frame home, she said, "I get to see my name in big bold letters staring back at me from across the street. That took some getting used to." Mrs. Hurst left no survivors. She had married a longtime friend, Holles Hurst, in 1962 at age 49, and he died three months later of a heart attack. They had no children, but her living room was filled with pictures of nieces, nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews. She was the last of her parents' nine children to die. She was an advisory board member of the Jefferson Parish Community Development Department and Community Action Program, a co-founder of the Royal Goldettes Social Aid and Pleasure Club, and a member of the First Zion Sons and Daughters Benevolent Society, the Parishwide Civic and Improvement Organization and St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church. A funeral Mass will be celebrated Saturday at 10:30 a.m. at St. Agnes Catholic Church, 3310 Jefferson Highway, Jefferson. Visitation begins at 9 a.m. Interment will be at Zion Cemetery. Dennis Mortuary is in charge of arrangements.