Millicent "Millie" Howell

Millicent Merritt Howell died December 6, 2020 at the Neshoba County Nursing Home. She was 93 years old. Millie was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1927 to Melton Tucker Merritt and Lora Markline Merritt. She attended public school there and began college at the local junior college, now Meridian Community College. After two semesters she began studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where she graduated with a BS in Elementary Education in 1949. Following graduation, Millie taught several years at public schools in Shaw, Tucker, and Pearl River, where she met her future husband, Gerald “Boots” Howell. They married in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1950, and not long after moved to Philadelphia. Boots preceded Millie in death in 2015 (b. 1922). Ms. Howell is survived by three sons: Mark Harold Howell (Stephanie Artz), David Tucker Howell (Jan Forbes), John Gerald Howell (Diana Howell); one daughter, Shawn Elizabeth Byars (Lannie Byars); two grandsons, Casey Howell and Cassidy Howell Byars (Megan Byars), and one great-grandson, Jackson James Byars. Millie was a renowned painter, and began studying art formally in 1945 at the encouragement of her cousin Dr. William Willis, a Classics’ professor at Ole Miss. One of her first watercolors, done while still a student, was a rendering of a Minoan vase that accompanied an article published by Dr. David M. Robinson in the “American Journal of Archaeology” (January 1950). During her long career, she painted over one-hundred works, and her work, Feeling is first, was one of 43 of 400 art pieces selected for the 1978 grand opening of the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. Three others are in the museum’s permanent collection. In some fifty years of painting, she received over 50 awards, more than half top prizes. A sampling of these include awards at shows at the Brooks Memorial Gallery in Memphis, the Lauren Rogers Museum in Laurel, the Mary Buie Museum in Oxford, the Delgado Museum in New Orleans, the Edgewater Plaza in Gulfport, and the George E. Ohr Arts and Cultural Center in Biloxi. In 1995 she won the Mississippi Art Colony Lifetime Achievement Award, and is further distinguished in having won more awards there than anyone in the history of the colony (1948-present). Ms. Howell is featured in several books on Mississippi artists, including the Mississippi State History text book used throughout the 1960s, Mississippi History, by Dr. J.K. Bettersworth (then Vice-President of Mississippi State University); Of Art and Artists: Selected Reviews of the Arts in Mississippi 1955-76 by Louis Dollarhide, Art in Mississippi: 1720-1980 by Patti Carr Black, and Homer Casteel: An Artist and His Students, compiled and published by the Meridian Museum of Art. During the heyday of her artistic career, Millie was involved in attempts to improve the racial climate of her adopted home, and in 1966, she and Jeanne and Harriet DeWeese became local founders of the “Philadelphia (MS)-to-Philadelphia (PA.) Project,” dedicated to protesting past racial transgressions, and promoting hope, understanding, and brotherly love among all people. Millie, Boots, her children, and friends, were featured in several documentary films and articles about race-relations in Philadelphia, reflecting on their first-hand accounts of incidents leading up to and following Freedom Summer 1964. Some of the decisive actions she took are recorded in two books, Witness in Philadelphia by Florence Mars (1977), and We Are Not Afraid, by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray (1988). Services for Millie Howell are postponed because of the restrictions on public gatherings due the Coronavirus. Offerings of remembrance can be made to St. Francis of Assisi Church, 10701 St. Francis Drive, Philadelphia, MS 39350; or the Mississippi Art Colony, 3863 Morrison Road, Utica, MS. 39175.