Toni Bullock, born Lessie Maye Harris in North Carolina, studied at North Carolina State College. She joined the Negro Women’s Army Corps at the beginning of World War II and served as a radio operator. She learned embalming at the New England Institute of Embalming and Anatomy, the only black woman in her class and the youngest African American woman to obtain a state license. Despite neighborhood opposition, she and her husband Adolphus established a funeral home in a fashionable area on Washington Street, which served people of color. The couple went on to own the Bullock Funeral Homes for forty years.
