Hazel D. Westray

Biographical Database of Black Women Suffragists

Biographical Sketch of Hazel D. Westray, 1888- ?

By Thomas Dublin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Binghamton University

Hazel Jackson was born in October 1888, in Orion, Virginia, the oldest of four children of Baxter and Kate Jackson. Her father was a barber. Hazel completed four years of high school in Richmond and in August 1909 she married Jobie Westray. Over the next three decades, Jobie Westray worked as a bellman, chauffeur, and doorman and the couple had four children. The census did not list an occupation for Hazel in these years.

After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Hazel Westray paid her Virginia poll tax and registered to vote on September 10, 1920. She is the second voter listed in the surviving record of "Colored Female Voters" in Richmond's first precinct for the first election in which women in Virginia could vote.

Two checks written to Hazel Westray in the banking records of Maggie Lena Walker suggest that Hazel had a bank account with the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank directed by Walker. Jobie and Hazel Westray were still living in Richmond in 1950 in a household that included Hazel's 87-year-old mother and her unmarried daughter Margaret. Several items in the Maggie Lena Walker Family Papers indicate that Margaret also was involved with Walker's widespread business network.

Sources:

"'Really and Truly a Citizen': Virginia Women Register to Vote in 1920," online at https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2020/09/16/really-and-truly-a-citizen-virginia-women-register-to-vote-in-1920/.

Federal Manuscript Censuses, for Hazel Jackson, Richmond, 1900; Hazel Westray, Richmond, 1910-1950, accessed online with Ancestry Library Edition.

Birth record for Hazel E. Jackson, 1888 and marriage record for Jobie Westray and Hazel Jackson, Richmond, VA, 1909. Accessed online with Ancestry Library Edition.