Theressa Hoover

Fayetteville’s Most Famous Black Female Leader

Join Janet Allured for a presentation on Theressa Hoover, Fayetteville's most famous Black female leader. 

Join Janet Allured for a presentation on Theressa Hoover, Fayetteville's most famous Black female leader. 

Theressa Hoover, a Fayetteville native, was CEO of the United Methodist Women from 1968 to 1990 and the highest-level female African American executive in any mainline denomination in the country. Hoover’s family were members of St. James Methodist Church in Fayetteville.

Her many accomplishments include being the only woman for whom a Methodist church has been named (Theressa Hoover United Methodist Church in Little Rock). In the early 2000s, she moved back to Fayetteville to be with family after spending years in New York City (the site of the church’s headquarters). When she died in 2013, leading Methodists from all over the world attended her funeral held at Mount Sequoyah United Methodist Church in Fayetteville, the last church where she was active.

About Janet Allured:

Janet Allured received her Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas in 1988. In 2021 she retired as Professor of History and Women's Studies at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, left the Gulf Coast behind and moved back to Fayetteville where she was swiftly hired as adjunct professor of history at the University of Arkansas.

Allured has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles on southern women and has co-edited several volumes, including one in the University of Georgia Press’s series on southern women entitled Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times (2009). A monograph entitled Remapping Second-Wave Feminism: The Long Women's Rights Movement in Louisiana, 1950-1997 was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2016. She is currently writing several manuscripts about the work of progressive Methodist women in the South, with a particular focus on anti-racism and settlement house work. An essay about Theressa Hoover, head of United Methodist Women from 1968-1990, was recently published in an edited collection, Activism in the Name of God, by the University of Mississippi Press.

She is co-editor of a collection of biographies of southern Methodist women that is currently under review by the University Press of Florida.

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