(Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of stories highlighting recipients of this year’s Inspiring: Women Awards luncheon. Read more here.)
What started as a request from a handful of female students for equal time with their teacher at a single Richmond County school in the 1960s has grown to impact thousands of young women directly and innumerable people tangentially.
When Rosa T. Beard created the Rocket Club for the boys she taught at AR Johnson, the girls wanted a club of their own, so she formed the Rosa T. Beard Debutante Club.
Decades later, her daughter, The Rev. Cheryl Beard carries on her mother’s legacy by heading the nonprofit which brings teenage girls together for community service, professional development, spiritual enrichment and relationship building and culminates in a formal spring cotillion.
“I was 2 when the club started,” said Cheryl Beard, whose mother died in 2010 after passing the torch to her. Beard received the Inspiring: Legacy award at the Sept. 24 Inspiring: Women Awards. “I don’t know a time when it wasn’t around.”
She and her older sisters grew up surrounded by her mother’s students and the club. When they were small, they would be at AR Johnson after school got out, playing in the hallways while their mother finished her day.
Many of those students would later thank Cheryl Beard for lending her mother to them, but her mother’s involvement in their lives never took away from the lives of her own children.
“It was part of having a mom who was very engaged with her career and her students,” she said.
Her mother was also involved in the community and when she formed the club, her students also became involved in the community. Volunteerism is a key component in the Rosa T. Beard Debutante Club today with members participating in many events including the annual James Brown turkey and toy giveaways at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The clubs’ members became more than her mother’s students; they were like Cheryl Beard’s brothers and sisters. Some of Rocket Club members would pick her up from school and when her father died, the debutante club members helped write “thank you” notes.
When she was a teenager, Cheryl Beard was part of the club and had her debut at the annual cotillion.
“Russell Joel Brown was my escort,” she said in a March 2025 article at Augusta Good News. “He was talented. He could dance. He was tall. He was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the experience of him being my escort.”
But Rosa T. Beard was busy behind-the-scenes that night making sure everything ran according to schedule. She missed her daughter’s curtsey and introduction that night, but the photographer captured that moment in time.
After graduating from the Academy of Richmond County, Cheryl Beard left for Fisk University in Nashville. While her sisters followed in their mother’s footsteps professionally, Beard didn’t want to become a schoolteacher. A classroom would’ve been too confining, she said.
She pursued a career in city planning.
“I thought that was the way to save the world. City planning is more about physical space and planning,” said Beard, who was more interested in the social science of city planning. “I wrote my master’s thesis on social planning ”
She spent 13 years with city planning in Memphis, Tennessee, but ministry and working with teenagers called to her.
“I got really deep into mission work,” she said. “We adopted a public housing community, and I really dove into working with children and their families. That awakened something in me.
She spent 12 years as the director of the Urban Youth Initiative in Memphis and worked with two different churches in Memphis.
In 2009, her mother asked Cheryl to be her presence in the organization. She didn’t need to move back, but be there for the important events such as Christmas and cotillion.
Cheryl Beard said she always planned to return to her hometown.
In 2010, the club’s director told her she was planning to retire in a few years.
“She said, ‘when are you going to come back to lead the organization?’ It didn’t take me by surprise for some reason,” she said. “That happened a few months before (her mother) died.”
Beard took over during the 2014-2015 club year.
She said her career, and life experiences laid the foundation for the work she’s doing now.
“God has a way of designing, orchestrating our lives,” she said. “It’s been an interesting journey.”
Following in her mother’s footsteps has been an honor for her, she said.
“I was honored that she would ask. I was her youngest daughter. For me it was an
affirmation of what she saw in me, in the work I was already doing,” she said.
Charmain Z. Brackett, the publisher of Augusta Good News and Inspiring: Women of Augusta, has covered Augusta’s news for more than 35 years. She’s won multiple Georgia Press Association awards, is the recipient of the 2018 Greater Augusta Arts Council’s media award and was named best local writer by readers of Augusta Magazine in 2024 and 2025. Reach her at charmain@augustagoodnews.com. Sign up for the newsletter here
