When the United States entered World War I in 1917, it was poorly prepared for the challenges ahead. Training a large army required military camps with adequate housing and supplies. To address this need, President Woodrow Wilson commissioned Army General John J. Pershing, Commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), to construct thirty training camps and cantonments across the country, including Camp Shelby.
Okolona Industrial School was founded by Wallace Aaron Battle in 1902, citing the size of Mississippi’s Black population and the high rate of illiteracy as the catalysts for his decision. The school was located in northeastern Mississippi and provided industrial and teacher training for Black residents of the state. Battle structured the school after Booker T. Washington’s curriculum at the Tuskegee Institute.
On December 28, 1894, Burnita Shelton Matthews was born into an educated, civic-minded family, in Copiah County, Mississippi. Although she aspired from a very young age to pursue a legal career, her father insisted that she pursue the study and teaching of music which he believed was a more ladylike profession. Following her marriage to Percy A. Matthews, she taught music for a short while in Georgia before moving to Washington, D.C. to accept a job with the Veterans Administration. She strategically chose to live and work in Washington, D.C.
Burnita Shelton was one of six children, and the only daughter, born on December 28, 1894, to Burnell Shelton and Lora Drew (Barlow) Shelton. She was part of an educated, civic-minded family. Her mother was a graduate of Whitworth College, a boarding school for young women in Brookhaven, Mississippi, and her father was a planter, cattleman, and also an elected official serving at various times as sheriff and tax collector of Copiah County and as the clerk of the chancery court.