Spilman, Johnetta Webb, 1888-1982

Johnetta Webb Spilman (1888-1982) was born in Chowan County and educated at Elm Creek Academy in Chowan County, Franklin Institute in Franklin, Virginia, and Strayer's Business College in Baltimore, Maryland. After completing her education, she taught in her own business school and then became assistant treasurer of East Carolina Teachers College, where her husband John Barham Spilman (whom she married in 1917) was business manager. Mrs. Spilman became active in the North Carolina Democratic party as a precinct chairman in 1924; she ran as a candidate for the North Carolina Senate in 1932. Her first state-wide duties included coordinating activities of Democratic women in the 1936 Clyde R. Hoey gubernatorial campaign and assuming the vice-chairmanship of the North Carolina Democratic party in August 1936. After Governor Hoey's election, he appointed Mrs. Spilman to the North Carolina Unemployment Compensation Commission; she was, until her resignation in 1941 (when she again ran for the office of state senator), the only full-time female Unemployment Compensation Commissioner in the United States. Mrs. Spilman subsequently served as manager of the Greenville (N.C.) Employment Security Commission (1942-1944), assistant director of the 1950 Census for the First Congressional District, executive director of the Pitt County Tuberculosis Association (1950-1957), director of theNorth Carolina Mental Health Association (1957-1968), director of the Greenville Council on Aging, and member of the Governor's Council for the Aging. Late in life, Spilman was a deacon at Memorial Baptist Church in Greenville, N.C. She died in 1982.