The University of Iowa Libraries

Billie Davis Lloyd was a prominent Davenport social worker and community activist. She was born in Centerville, Iowa, in 1940 and moved to Muscatine, Iowa, as a small child. Lloyd settled in Davenport, Iowa, an area with a larger population of African Americans, to raise her own family.

During the course of her work, Lloyd was the first African-American woman to become a district supervisor for Job Service of Iowa through her position as supervisor of the Waterloo district, she was a program specialist for the Council on Children at Risk, and she was the executive director of the Quad Cities Conference on Black Families, an annual conference which Lloyd established in 1979. Lloyd also wrote a newspaper column for a community newspaper, The Common Bond. She was appointed by Governor Robert Ray to the Iowa Commission on the Status of Women and by Governor Terry Branstad to the Iowa Board of Corrections to help set up the new Department of Corrections in the State of Iowa. Lloyd was the originator of the neighborhood youth movement, Progressive Alliance for Leadership, Inc. (PALS) in the Quad Cities which was a social and educational group in which young African-American boys could interact with adult mentors.

Lloyd was a member of the Black Social Workers of America, the Iowa Association of Personnel in Employment Services, United Sisters, and The Waterloo chapter of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) among many other group affiliations. She was posthumously awarded the Cecile Cooper Community Award from the Davenport Human Rights Commission.

Lloyd died of cancer in 1991.

The Billie D. Lloyd papers date from 1957 to 1995 and measure 2.5 linear inches. The papers are arranged in three series: Personal activities, Professional activities, and Photographs.

The Personal activities series (1957-1991 and undated) contains a small amount of biographical information about Lloyd, newspaper clippings, including one article she wrote in 1985 concerning her upbringing and experiences as one of the only African Americans in Muscatine, Iowa, and tributes to Lloyd written by family and friends after her death.

The bulk of the collection is contained in the Professional activities series (1975-1995 and undated) in the form of the conference records of the Quad Cities Conference on Black Families. Programs, newspaper clippings, and other information about the conferences are included with the collection. This series includes newspaper clippings of Lloyd's columns from The Common Bond.

The Photographs series (1979-1982 and undated) consists of photographs from the Quad Cities Conferences on Black Families from 1979 to 1982. One undated photograph of Lloyd in her college-graduation cap and gown is here also.

Alternate Extent Statement: One videocassette [V103]
One audiocassette [AC358]
Photographs in box 1.

Access: The papers are open for research.

Use: Copyright has been transferred to the University of Iowa.

Acquisition: The papers (donor no. 382) were donated by Aldeen Davis in 1996.

Preferred Citation: Billie D. Lloyd papers, Iowa Women's Archives, The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City.

Repository:	Iowa Women's Archives
Address:	100 Main Library University of Iowa Libraries Iowa City, IA 52242
Phone:	319-335-5068
Curator:	Kären Mason
Email:	lib-women@uiowa.edu
Website:	http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/iwa

This collection is indexed under the following subject terms.

Personal Names:
Lloyd, Billie D., 1940-1991

Corporate Names:
Quad Cities Conference on Black Families

Dates:
20th century

Topics:
Families, Black
African American women
Social service

Occupations:
Social workers
Community activists

Geographic Names:
Quad Cities (Ill. and Iowa)
Muscatine (Iowa)

Genre/Form of Materials:
Archives
Personal papers
Photographs
Video recordings
Sound recordings

Browse:
African American Women in Iowa