Blanche Mae Armwood (January 23, 1890 – October 16, 1939) was an American educator, women's suffrage advocate, activist, and the first African-American woman in the state of Florida to graduate from an accredited law school.
Armwood was also the first Executive Secretary of the Tampa Urban League and a founder of five Household Industrial Arts Schools for African-American women in five different states.
[3] Her great uncle, John Armwood, was an early landowner who homesteaded 159 acres of land in Hillsborough County and served as a negotiator between the Seminole Native Americans and white settlers along the Florida frontier.
In 1913, Armwood suspended her teaching career when she married attorney Daniel Webster Perkins and relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee.
[1] Armwood's service to the community began in 1914 when the Tampa Gas Company, in conjunction with the Hillsborough County Board of Education and the Colored Ministers Alliance commissioned her to organize an industrial arts school designed to train black women in the domestic sciences.
[6] The school trained black women and girls to use then modern household gas appliances as well as other skills which would enable the students to excel in domestic service.
Later, Armwood would establish similar schools in Roanoke, Virginia; Rock Hill, South Carolina; Athens, Georgia and New Orleans, Louisiana.
[7] Between 1917 and 1920, while living in New Orleans and married to dentist John C. Beatty, Armwood received state and federal acclaim for her work in training domestic workers.
The cookbook, published during World War I, had a particularly poignant introduction, stating that: "Every pound of white flour saved is equal to a bullet in our Nation’s defense."
[3] She worked closely with anti-lynching advocate Mary McLeod Bethune, including helping to raise funds and other resources for Bethune-Cookman College and other black schools.
She earned her Juris Doctor in 1938 making her the first black female from the state of Florida to graduate from an accredited law school.