Zonita Jeffreys Owens

Zonita Stewart Jeffreys Owens (June 8, 1908 – April 1981) was an American educator in Chicago and Hawai'i, and an American Red Cross volunteer. As a young woman she was active in the YWCA.

Zonita Stewart Jeffreys was from Chicago, the daughter of Isham Jeffreys and Mary M. Jeffreys.^[1] Her father was a chiropodist born in the British West Indies.^[2] She trained as a teacher at Chicago Normal College^[3] and in 1929 earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Michigan.^[4][5] She was a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.^[6][7][8] She and her mother drove to Los Angeles in 1932, to be spectators at the Summer Olympics there.^[9] In 1936, she earned a master's degree at University of Chicago, with a thesis on the Chicago press coverage of the early labor movement.^[10]

Owens taught school in Chicago in the 1930s.^[4] She was active in the YWCA in Chicago,^[11][12][13] as a publicity chair and publication editor, and she represented Chicago's Black YWCAs at national conferences in 1937 and 1938.^[14][15]

From 1947 to 1948, Owens taught social studies at Waialua High School in Hawai'i,^[16][17] She also taught adult citizenship classes and gave career guidance in Oahu.^[18][19][20] She joined the Red Cross Gray Lady Service in 1949, and won awards for hundreds of hours volunteering at veterans' hospitals in Detroit and Chicago in the 1950s.^[21][22] In her later years, she was active in the West Woodlawn Improvement Organization, a citizens' group concerned with their Chicago neighborhood's upkeep.^[23]

Jeffreys married pediatrician Nolan A. Owens in 1935,^[4] but they rarely lived in the same city during their marriage, and they divorced in 1941.^[24] She died in 1981, in Chicago, aged 72 years.^[25] A paper she wrote about her work in Hawai'i is included in the Romanzo Adams Social Research Laboratory (RASRL) Collection at the University of Hawai'i.^[16]