She was born Je'Nelle Alfred on November 19, 1949, and raised in Lafayette. She came up through Holy Rosary Institute, studied at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and was part of Southern Consumers Cooperative from its early years under its founder, Father A.J. McKnight.
Her platform was KJCB 770 AM, the city's Black-owned station. She rose to general manager and chief administrative officer, and every morning she hosted The Open Line, where politics, policy, and the business of the community were put on the air and the community called in to answer. For a generation of listeners, she was where the truth got told. She became the first African American woman to receive the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters Gold Mic Award.
Off the air, she built institutions. She organized Lafayette's first Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parade. She served as president of the Lafayette NAACP. In 2003 she co-founded the Greater Southwest Louisiana Black Chamber of Commerce with Bishop Roy Winbush and Don Cravins Sr. to put economic power in the hands of Black entrepreneurs.
She invested in young people as hard as she pushed for their parents. She founded Young, Gifted & Black, Future Shock, the Heritage Community Marching Band, and the Heritage School of the Arts.
In 1993 she started a Thanksgiving celebration for the city's elders. In its first 25 years it served more than 15,000 free meals, and it still fills the Martin Luther King Recreation Center every November. In the mid-2000s she started the African American Heritage Parade down Willow Street. In 2014 she chartered the African American Heritage Foundation to hold it all together.
She retired from KJCB in 2016 and returned to the airwaves anyway. In her final year she began a quilt honoring Acadiana's African American leaders. She died on November 10, 2018, at 68. The quilters finished it the next year, and it has since hung at Ochsner University Hospital, City-Parish Hall, and the Hilliard Art Museum.
Her brother George Alfred and her daughter Maisha Chargois Drexler lead the Foundation today. The parade, the gala, and Senior Citizens Thank You Day all still run, and every one of them started with her.
30+years of Senior Citizen Day
15,000+free meals served to elders
22Heritage Parades and counting
1stAfrican American woman to win the LAB Gold Mic
