As a young girl, Eloise Culmer Whitten watched her favorite aunt suffer and toil as an unwed mother. As a teen, she witnessed a 22-year-old married friend die giving birth to an unplanned third child.
"I was furious and talked to my mother," Whitten recalled. "She said possibly if birth control had been available, she wouldn't have died."
The cruelty and injustices Whitten witnessed fired her passion for a lifetime of righting wrongs. Whitten has routed racism, fought for women's reproductive rights, given unwed teen mothers a support system, and helped secure good homes for parentless black children in Detroit. And all this she did without remuneration.
"Here is a woman who has devoted her life to doing very good and very important work, and she hasn't gotten a dime for it," said Whitten's friend and retired social services administrator Dorothy Kispert. "I don't know of any other person who has done it with the discipline, the zeal and the motivation she has put into her volunteerism."
Perhaps Whitten's most important legacy was establishing two longstanding Detroit non-profit agencies: the Lula Belle Stewart Center for teenage mothers and Homes for Black Children, which aids adoptions in the black community. Whitten helped craft the agencies after heading a Detroit United Community Services (now United Way) committee in the mid-1960s looking into teen pregnancies and families in crisis.
Today, the two agencies have combined budgets of more than $5 million -- most of which comes from federal grants, state contracts and the United Way. The 34-year-old Lula Belle Stewart Center helps more than 400 teens each year cope with the demands of motherhood while continuing their education. And since its inception in 1969, Homes for Black Children has facilitated more than 1,700 adoptions.
Whitten has made sure the agencies remain strong, even donating her own money for things like scholarships at Lula Belle, where she serves on the advisory council.
"She has been a blessing," said Edna Walker, Lula Belle's director. "She's out there giving herself and her resources so that the lives of these young people will be better."
Audrean Williams, 54, was one of the first young mothers to get assistance from Lula Belle. Today, she's an instructor at the International Academy of Design and Technology in Detroit and a Lula Belle board member.
"They just offered all kinds of services that were needed," Williams said. "It helped with my self-confidence, knowing I could persevere and overcome challenges."
Whitten grew up in Philadelphia on the eve of World War II and during the infancy of the Civil Rights movement. Her leadership skills were evident as a college student at Temple University, where she headed the NAACP chapter. In 1950, she led protests that stopped the Red Cross's practice of using racial designations on donated blood.
She moved to Detroit with her husband in 1956, and soon joined the local Planned Parenthood board, pushing to open branches in poor communities.
Gov. George Romney appointed Whitten to the state's Social Welfare Commission in 1963. There, she fought for the dignity of those on public assistance, halting the Department of Social Services' practice of investigating welfare recipients in the middle of the night and securing disadvantaged women's right to birth control.
Whitten credits her parents, natives of Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas, for her life's work.
"My father taught me about the need for education, the need to be dependable and persistent and to reach for the stars," Whitten said. "My mother taught me my activism."
Whitten earned a bachelor's degree from Temple University and a master's from the University of Pennsylvania. Her husband, Dr. Charles F. Whitten, is a physician who developed national programs for sickle cell awareness. He was recognized as a Michiganian of the Year in 2002. They are the parents of two grown daughters.
"She has done so much for the Detroit community," said Walker. "She really goes to bat for any issue to right any wrong that's being done to people."
Kara G. Morrison
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