Dr. Elizabeth Farrar

Dr. Elizabeth Farrar, teacher of minority students, and gifted students, died Monday, May 2, 2016.

Dr. Farrar, winner of an art contest as a child of ten, went on to teach art at Washington Elementary, Lee Elementary, Kingsport, Tennessee, Wardlaw Jr. High School, Columbia, South Carolina, as Art Supervisor, Orange County Schools, Orlando, Florida, and Rollins College Art Classes for the Community, Winter Park, Florida.

In 1960, a Civil Rights Activist, she specialized in the teaching of reading, knowing problems with reading were delaying the children of the Black Community, especially, in their education and later, in the workforce. Thereafter she taught as a special teacher of reading in Rocky Mount, NC, migrant children in the “projects” of Belle Glade, Florida, and those with problems in reading at Palm Beach Community College, Belle Glade and West Palm Beach, Florida.

In the 1990’s, when Haitian refugees arrived on the shore of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and 7,000 or so moved inward to Belle Glade looking for $1.00 a day work in the cane fields, no housing or totally inadequate housing was available to them, Dr. Farrar worked as part of a team establishing a non-profit organization, NOAH, Inc. (Neighbors Organized for Adequate Housing). She founded Building Blocks Family Centers and the Farrar Development Family Center for pre-natal education for parents, 3-6 education for their children, at the same time, encouraging parents to graduate from high school and enter the workforce.

Upon her retirement from public schools, she and her husband, The Reverend Charles B. Farrar, were chosen to be part of the first group of IFESH (International Foundation for Education and Self Help) led by Dr. Leon Sullivan of Philadelphia’s Church of the Zion. After serving at the Gambia College, The Gambia, West Africa, teaching prospective teachers child development and classroom management, Dr. Farrar, with UNICEF funding, through the School of Public Health, founded UNICEF’s Child to Child Program in the Gambia—children teaching their parents and siblings, through their posters, the prevention of the three killer diseases of young children, malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea. She and her husband, Charles, returned to the US and West Palm Beach, Florida. She, later, upon his death, moved to Atlanta, GA to be closer to her their two daughters, Helen Farrar and her partner Lauren Standish, Marion Farrar Dalgleish and her husband, Gordon Dalgleish, and their three grandchildren, Nicholas Griggs, Merrick Farrar, and Charles Sterling Dalgleish.

Having been overwhelmed by the hospitality of the Muslim Gambian people, and impressed by the leadership of many African Countries, Dr. Farrar wrote a book, hoping that her former students of the Black Community would read it and be proud of Africa and its leaders. In 2009, she published “African Leaders for Peace and Justice”.

Dr. Farrar was born in 1926 in Morganton, NC. Her parents were the Reverend James Preston Burke of Bessemer City, NC and Elizabeth Graves Burke of Yanceyville, NC. She attended University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Columbia University as an art major, then University of North Carolina at Greenville, M.A. in Elementary Education, and Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL, Ph.D. in Elementary Education.

In lieu of flowers donations can be made to UNICEF and Saint Anne’s Episcopal Church Mission Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia. The service will be held Friday, May 6, 2016 at 2 p.m. at Saint Anne’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta with a reception to follow.