3.3.24
A Century of Team Renfrow
By Dr. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant (Dr. B), Monique Shore ’90, Evie Caperton ’25, Libby Eggert ’25, Hemlock Stanier ’25
Team Renfrow is a decades-long collaboration between members of Grinnell College and the town. It has brought needed visibility and recognition to Mrs. Edith Renfrow Smith ’37, the College’s first Black alumna who was born, raised, and educated in Grinnell, as well as to other African Americans who have called Grinnell home since 1854.
Mrs. Renfrow Smith’s mother, Eva Pearl Craig Renfrow (1875-1962) is Team Renfrow’s charter member. Mama Renfrow was far-seeing woman who insisted that each of her six children earn their college degree. It was her nurturing that enabled the young Edith Renfrow to “recruit myself” to Grinnell College in 1933. Understanding the importance of her youngest daughter’s accomplishment, Mama Renfrow enlisted a local photographer and longtime friend to capture the moment and record it for the future. For almost 90 years, the Renfrow family has preserved the only picture of the 22-year-old Edith Renfrow proudly standing in her regalia on commencement day, June 7, 1937.
Also appreciating the importance of Edith Renfrow’s groundbreaking was her education professor Milton Wittler, who penned a feature article about her for the higher education edition of the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, in August 1937, just two months after her historic graduation.
More recently, Team Renfrow includes Stuart Yeager ’82. Beginning in his senior year and continuing through his second year of law school, the American Studies major and Afro-American Studies concentrator researched and wrote The Black experience at Grinnell College through collected oral history and documents, 1863–1954 (1984). In addition to his meticulous archival work, Yeager conducted oral histories with 28 living African American alumni, including Mrs. Renfrow Smith. His work reveals that during her college study (1933–1937), Edith Renfrow was the sole Black student on campus among several hundred peers and that she was the third African American woman to matriculate at the College over its first century of existence.
As a groundbreaker and proud alumna, Mrs. Renfrow Smith has long recruited others to Grinnell College. Alphanette White Price ’57 (1935–2010) was a little girl when her mother worked with Mrs. Renfrow Smith at the YWCA in Chicago in the late 1930s. In 2007 White Price spearheaded the dedication of the Edith Renfrow Smith ’37 Student Art Gallery in the Joe Rosenfield Center and formally recognized the legacy in which she and many others have walked.
Team Renfrow also recognizes Dr. Dan Kaiser, emeritus professor of history, who authored Grinnell stories: African Americans of early Grinnell (2020). His book presents detailed portraits of overlooked Black citizens of the town, including members of Mrs. Renfrow Smith’s extended family, whose own Grinnell roots date back to the 1880s.
Over the last three years, Team Renfrow has involved student researchers and produced public history. Dr. Tiya Miles of Harvard University champions public history for bringing erased people into visibility and making their stories accessible to broad audiences. While deeply informed by the methods and ethics of scholarly work, public history is also a purposeful intervention into its absences and oversights. As members of the summer 2023 research edition of Team Renfrow, we describe our individual contributions to the making and sharing of knowledge about African Americans in Grinnell.
A website – Dr. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant (Dr. B). Mrs. Renfrow Smith is her family’s historian, a responsibility passed down to her by her mother. In addition to the multiple life history interviews she has given to me and other town and campus Grinnellians, Mrs. Renfrow Smith has generously shared family records with us, including over 150 photos (several dating to the late 19th century) and a set of letters and artifacts. Drawing on these images and her words, in 2021 I worked with Digital Liberal Arts Specialist Tierney Steelberg to design and launch a visually driven biographical website of the elder, Through the eyes of a groundbreaker: Living history with Edith Renfrow Smith.
A children’s book – Monique McLay Shore ’90. Working closely with Mrs. Renfrow Smith and her daughter Miss Alice Frances Smith, I have written a children’s book titled No One is Better Than You: Edith Renfrow Smith and the Power of a Mother’s Words (2024; illustrated by Erica L. Butler). It is available for purchase through the Pioneer Bookstore and extends my efforts to document the extended family’s story and its deep Grinnell roots on the Drake Community Library website.
A RABGRAI cooling station – Libby Eggert ’25. Motivated by our public history focus, I saw an opportunity to tie our research efforts with the 50th Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa [RAGBRAI] in July 2023. As RAGBRAI brings 30,000+ riders through small towns, I proposed that Team Renfrow host a rest station. In addition to offering cool drinks and popsicles in Drake Library, we featured a slideshow about the Renfrow family history and answered questions about our different research projects. Doing so, we introduced Mrs. Edith Renfrow Smith to people from all over Iowa and the country (we even met a doctor from Sweden), taking another step in correcting a narrative that has historically left her behind. In Fall 2023, I was a Vivero Digital Fellow with Dr. B and completed a story map focused on the elder’s detailed recollections and photographs of her girlhood in Grinnell.
A cemetery map and walk – Evie Caperton ’25. Over the summer, I focused on mapping the presence of African Americans in Hazelwood Cemetery, and the stories we uncovered there reflected deeply forged networks of kinship among early Black Grinnellians who made this town their lasting home. I also learned that their stories would remain much less visible, if not for the county recorder’s office and the fifth generation Smith Funeral Home, both of which graciously extended access to their records. Such networks of care deeply informed my research about Edward Delaney (1786–1861), Grinnell’s first Black resident and the narrative I shared during the Grinnell Historical Society’s annual cemetery walk in September 2023.
An illustrated family tree – Hemlock Stanier ’25. For me, visuals express the many elements of the Renfrow family’s history in a way that just words cannot. As a result, I hand drew an illustrated family tree to depict the three branches (the Renfrows, Lucases and Craigs) of Mrs. Renfrow Smith’s extended family. I included a sketch of Mrs. Renfrow Smith’s childhood home at 411 1st Avenue and key photos, as well as highlighted the names which repeat across the generations. My Illustrated Family Tree has become a helpful tool for sharing information about Mrs. Renfrow Smith’s extended family and its mid-19th century roots in central Iowa. Through this experience, I learned that art plays an integral role in public history. In Fall 2023, I worked with Dr. B to research the matrilineage of Mrs. Renfrow Smith, and from my findings, I stitched the key journeys in her family’s migration from Newberry, South Carolina to Grinnell, Iowa on craft paper.
Conclusion
Our work on Team Renfrow continues. Understanding Mrs. Edith Renfrow Smith’s groundbreaking and the Black histories and legacies that made it possible informs the telling of new and needed stories about the two Grinnells – the town and the campus – which she fiercely claims as her home.