The Memphis Literacy Council, parent organization of Literacy Mid-South, was established at a time when the nation had come to recognize the price that low-literacy was exacting in America.

In 1966, the U.S. Congress passed the Adult Basic Education Act in connection with President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society initiatives. The Act was designed to attack the roots of poverty, which for many citizens was directly linked to low educational attainment and low literacy skills.

Adult education programs that were focused on high school equivalency and job training already existed; the new Act emphasized literacy training for adults who lacked the most fundamental reading skills. States would administer the funding, and the new law called for widespread community input and collaboration in the project. As a result, volunteer organizations that focused on basic adult literacy proliferated in communities across the country. The organization that emerged in Memphis was the Memphis Literacy Council.

As states and local communities considered various approaches to teaching adult literacy from square one, a popular choice was the one-to-one teaching method. This method was made popular by a Congregationalist minister and missionary who was convinced that teaching people to read would not only advance Christianity but also foster world peace. His name was Frank Laubach.

Dr. Laubach’s earliest literacy work was with tribesmen in the jungles of the Philippines. While helping indigenous folks learn to read in their own language, Laubach conceived a one-to-one teaching technique of individualized instruction by volunteer tutors. He went on to create Laubach Literacy, a literacy training business. It has been estimated that Dr. Laubach was directly or indirectly responsible for as many as 100 million people learning to read.

A Memphian who followed and championed Laubach’s work was Dr. R. Paul Caudill, pastor of First Baptist Church in Memphis from 1944 to 1975. Caudill had been a high school teacher in rural Kentucky and saw the impact low levels of literacy could have on an individual’s life. He said, “It’s like being half blind. It’s like living on an island. They (people with low literacy levels) are isolated from the community that you and I take for granted.”

In his lifetime, Caudill visited more than 80 nations in the crusade for world literacy. He began supporting literacy projects early in his ministry in Memphis. Baptist women’s organizations accepted literacy as a Christian mission; Sue Stansill and Muriel Briggs were among the Baptist women leading literacy endeavors in the Memphis area during this period.

In one early local effort, a gifted and experienced city schools teacher named Pauline Hord adapted the one-to-one tutoring approach to television and became director of a literacy program on WKNO, the Memphis public television channel. A flaw in the undertaking was that television was still in its infancy and many of the people who needed training did not have televisions. A generous Memphian stepped forward and donated TVs to local community centers to encourage viewing in low-income neighborhoods.

The donor’s name: Elvis Presley.

One-to-one tutoring was the method chosen to implement basic adult literacy training in Memphis. Volunteer tutors were recruited for training, and 10-hour workshops led by certified Laubach trainers were scheduled. Among the volunteers who attended a workshop in 1972 were two pioneers in the early work of the Memphis Literacy Council: Jocelyn Rudner and Nina Katz.

A number of agencies were collaborators in these early adult literacy activities. Among them were the adult education division of Memphis City Schools; local VISTA workers (Volunteers in Service to America); Metropolitan Interfaith Association (MIFA); and the Memphis Public Library. Gid Smith of MIFA and Blake Welch, director of adult education for Memphis City Schools, played prominent roles in organizing for literacy.

Community leaders already involved in literacy efforts established the Memphis Literacy Council (MLC) in January 1974. Dr. Paul Caudill was the Council’s first chairman. The organization’s goal was to help centralize and coordinate adult literacy work in the Memphis area.

Nina Katz, already serving as a trained volunteer tutor, was named to the first Board of Directors. Jocelyn Rudner was added to the Board the next year. Both women were active locally in Hadassah, the Jewish women’s group that had long supported literacy causes.

Data testified to the need for a strong crusade for adult literacy in Memphis at the time. The 1970 census indicated there were 30,000 people over age 25 in Memphis who could not read at all, with more than 80,000 adults who had some degree of reading difficulty. The Memphis Literacy Council, with its focus on one-to-one, personal tutoring that could meet each student at his or her proficiency level, had plenty of work to do.

Three months after its founding, the Memphis Literacy Council assumed the role of coordinating training sessions in Memphis for volunteers in the one-to-one tutoring method. Fifty people attended the first MLC-facilitated class.

By the summer of that year, Memphis Literacy Council sought the help of local media in finding students for the trained tutors to teach. Nina Katz told a reporter, “Finding adult pupils willing to admit they cannot read is a challenge. We are not kidding ourselves that 30,000 people are going to come rushing out and scream, ‘Teach us!’” Local businesses, churches and civic organizations joined the effort to identify adults in need of literacy training, and soon all the trained tutors were busy.

At the end of its first fiscal year in July 1975, the Memphis Literacy Council had 220 adults enrolled in tutoring sessions. 100 were on a waiting list. Tutors had logged 11,911 volunteer hours. Nina Katz was serving as the organization’s volunteer executive director.

Later than year, Laubach Literacy announced that the Memphis Literacy Council had made great strides and was prepared to move forward without direct supervision from Laubach trainers and administrators. Only six volunteer organizations working with Laubach across the nation received such recognition.

In 1977, Nina Katz stepped down and was replaced by Jocelyn Rudner, who served for five years without salary in the executive director position. During that period, Memphis Literacy Council was an all-volunteer organization. VISTA volunteers served as office coordinators and community recruiters.

“My work with the Memphis Literacy Council was the closest I ever came to having a paying job,” said Rudner, the daughter of philanthropist Abe Plough. “I didn’t need the money, and the Literacy Council did. We were in the old Lowry School, then the old Red Cross building. We had a couple of closets for our office. But the work we were doing was important.”

The Literacy Council hired its first professional staff member in 1979 when Gay Johnston became executive director. She assumed leadership of an organization that was training approximately 350 low-literate adults each year at local churches and libraries. By the time the Memphis Literacy Council celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1984, it had two full-time employees and three part-time employees.

In the early years, Johnston worked out of a small donated space at local Red Cross offices. Whatever she couldn’t fit into her tiny office, like books and school supplies, she carried around in her station wagon. Later in her tenure, Memphis Literacy Council set up offices in the Messick Vocational Technical Center owned by Memphis City Schools.

“I met so many people whose stories were very moving,” Gay Johnston said. “They were people who wanted to be able to read for simple reasons—to get better jobs, to help their children with homework, to read their Bible. I remember one man who told me that before he learned to read, he felt like he was alive and dead at the same time. That is the power of reading.”