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Martha Louise Morrow Foxx


Martha Louise Morrow Foxx (October 9, 1902 – 1975) was a pioneering educator of the blind in Mississippi. Her techniques and leadership are credited with guiding the Mississippi Blind School for Negroes towards integration, embodied by the creation of the Mississippi School for the Blind for both African American and whites in 1950.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, an eye disease left Foxx partially blind as a child. She entered the Raleigh School for the Blind as a young child, until her family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania when Foxx was eleven. There she was enrolled in the Overbrook School for the Blind, later beginning college at Temple University. After her first year she moved to Piney Woods, Mississippi to begin her career. In the summers after starting there she completed her college at the West Virginia State College, University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Hampton Institute, where she received her bachelor's degree.

Foxx was instrumental in founding the Mississippi Blind School for Negroes on the Piney Woods School campus in April 1929. Initially called the "house mistress," she was later entitled the principal of the school.

In 1945, Helen Keller visited the Piney Woods School and appeared before the state legislature to appeal for funding. In 1950 the new Mississippi School for the Blind for both white and African American students was completed and moved to its new location on Capers Street in Jackson, Mississippi where Foxx was the principal.


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