A Conversation with…Dr. Jeanne Morris
Changemakers exist all around us and sometimes we don’t even know it. Dr. Jeanne Morris is one of those changemakers.
She dedicated her life to education and equality in Central Illinois. Her story begins more than 90 years ago along the Sea Islands of South Carolina where she watched her mother leave early each morning to go to the one room schoolhouse to start a fire to warm and feed the children she taught.
You could say she was born to be an educator because she knew very early that it is what she wanted to do. Jeanne enrolled in college at Spelman University, a Historically Black College in Atlanta, Georgia. During the summers, she worked at white-only summer resort in New Hampshire, and that’s where she met her future husband, Charles Morris a math student who was attending Johnson C. Smith University, another HBCU. The two became inseparable and even sang as a duo during their summers together. They later married and moved to complete their doctorate programs at the University of Illinois in Urbana. The couple had two children and later moved to Bloomington-Normal to begin their careers in academia.
Charles did become a math professor at Illinois State University Jeanne became an early childhood educator and was the first Black teacher to teach at the laboratory school on the campus of ISU. The couple experienced racism in a 1960’s Bloomington-Normal that was still wrestling with the realities of segregation and limited opportunity. Finding housing for their family was hard, but once they secured a home, then they learned that Black students couldn’t stay on campus in the dorms.
The Morris’ along with some local allies and friends, pooled their resources to purchase four homes in Bloomington. These homes became safe spaces for Black students who otherwise had nowhere to live. That was the beginning of desegregated housing at Illinois State, and Dr. Jeanne Morris is still here to tell the story. Charles passed away in 2024 after more than 65 years of marriage.
When Jeanne reflects on Charles, she describes a man who was quiet yet persuasive, serious about life and deeply committed to making positive changes in his community. Jeanne remains active locally and travels the country regularly to tell her incredible story.
