Juno Frankie Pierce

Juno Frankie Seay Pierce, also known as Frankie Pierce or J. Frankie Pierce (c. 1864 – 1954), was an African American educator and suffragist. Pierce opened the Tennessee Vocational School for Colored Girls in 1923, and she served as its superintendent until 1939. The school continued to operate until 1979. and located in Nashville. After the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, giving women the right to vote throughout the nation, the Tennessee General Assembly passed a bill creating the Tennessee Vocational School for Colored Girls on April 7, 1921. The school served 35 students from across Tennessee in its opening years but grew after that. Dr. Mattie E. Coleman followed Pierce as superintendent and served until her death in 1942.

Suffrage movement Frankie Pierce and Mattie E. Coleman, an African-American physician and leading feminist in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, were among Tennessee's most active black suffragists. They helped to get 2,500 black women to vote in the 1919 Nashville municipal elections, the city's first election in which black women were eligible to vote. But the black women's clubs worked with white women's clubs on various social issues, and these connections fostered an alliance in Nashville on suffrage. The black women's clubs had worked with the white suffrage organizations to get out the vote in the 1919 municipal elections.

Catherine Kenny, Chair of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage League, was impressed with Frankie Pierce's organizational skills and invited her to address the first convention of the Tennessee League of Women Voters, held in the Tennessee Capitol in May 1920. This address of a black woman to several hundred white women in the Tennessee Capitol is called by Elaine Weiss "a taboo-breaking experiment in political cooperation".

In her address, Frankie Pierce asked, "What will the Negro woman do with the vote?...Yes, we will stand by the white women. We are optimistic because we have faith in the best white women of the country, of Nashville. We are going to make you proud of us, because we are going to help you help us and yourselves." She continued, "We are interested in the same moral uplift of the community in which we live as you are... We are asking only one thing—a square deal." The platform she offered these white women was a state vocational school, a child welfare department of the state, and more room in state schools.” The League adopted the school as part of its legislative agenda and lobbied extensively for it.

Anita Goodstein calls the black women’s offer of cooperation with white suffragists in return for specific benefits a “rare alliance” and observes that it happened only in Nashville. She credits Frankie Pierce, Mattie E. Coleman, and Catherine Kenny for their boldness.

Personal life She married Clement J. Pierce and moved with him to Paris, Texas.

Legacy The Frankie J. Pierce lecture series was organized by Tennessee women including State Senator Thelma Harper and Representative Lettie Galloway to celebrate African-American women's history.