Thomasena Stokes-Marshall
Elevating a lifelong mission to protect and serve her community

There may not be a monument to her yet, but Thomasena Stokes-Marshall has raised new monuments in the Lowcountry and has assumed monumental undertakings, as evidenced from her numerous nominations for the Readers’ Choice award.

The Charleston native retired to the Lowcountry in 1993 after 24 years as a New York City policewoman and detective. But, as many beneficiaries of her caring have learned, retired isn’t the correct word for Stokes-Marshall’s attitude. Upon her return, she focused her efforts in protecting and serving her community in new ways. “Anyone who knows me will say I’m aggressive,” she says. “I have no trouble stepping in when I see a need.”

In addition to serving on the Mount Pleasant Town Council (the first African American to do so), she has worked on the boards of numerous nonprofits, including Bridge of Hope, Creative Spark Center for the Arts, East Cooper Habitat for Humanity, the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival, the International African American Museum, and the Coastal Community Foundation.

Stokes-Marshall credits her community-minded nature to her religious convictions and the influence of her disciplinarian father, Irving Stokes; her late mother, Rebecca Stokes; and her aunt, the late Mary B. Snipe-Russell, her family’s first college graduate and a teacher in Charleston County public schools for 35 years. “I’m not too proud or too afraid to beg,” she has said of fundraising for the community. And she often donates straight from her pocket—usually when others aren’t looking.

“Have you ever known a person that literally lights up a room when she walks in?” wrote Russell Horres in his nomination. “Her signature is a beautiful, contagious smile that brings back smiles from friends and strangers alike. But Tommie is not about just making people feel good; she is all about doing good for her community.”

That community includes Nakia Wigfall,
a sweetgrass basket maker and leader of the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival Association who notes, “Thoma­sena fights hard to help protect and preserve our Gullah/Geechee neighborhoods and the materials used to make sweetgrass baskets.” Stokes-Marshall was instrumental in creating the festival and steering it; in establishing the Winnowing Hands statue to sweetgrass basket makers on Highway 17; in securing the Sweet­grass Pavilion in Mount Pleasant’s forthcoming waterfront park; and in seeing to the designation of basketmaking as the state craft. She is also a staunch protector of the natural environment and the lifestyles and traditions that depend on it.

“When I help someone, it eases something in me,” she says. “If I didn’t do it, what good would I be?”

—Harlan Greene