Dates

• Existence: 1940 - 1991

Biography

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.

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