"Drill into us... the Rebel Tradition": The Contest over Southern Identity in Black and White Women's Clubs, South Carolina, 1898-1930

Abstract

IN HER MEMOIRS, MAMIE GARVIN FIELDS, AN AFRICAN AMERICAN CLUB-WOMAN from Charleston, South Carolina, relates a story about the statue of South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun that still stands in Francis Marion Square, in the center of downtown Charleston. According to Fields: At the same time that [Frederick] Douglass was preaching against slavery, John C. Calhoun was preaching for it.... Our white city fathers wanted to keep what [Calhoun] stood for alive.... [T]hey put up a life-size figure of John C. Calhoun preaching.... Blacks took that statue personally. As you passed by, here was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you, Nigger, you may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place. Fields describes how black residents threw rocks at and otherwise defaced the statue, until it had to be raised out of reach of passersby.(1) Her words indicate that at the turn of the century--almost forty years after the South's defeat in the Civil War--black and white southerners still struggled with the meaning of defeat and emancipation. Many white women turned to the Lost Cause, the movement to honor the Confederacy, in order to recapture what they believed were the glory days of the South--the antebellum South of their childhood or of their parents. African American Charlestonians, on the other hand, rejected the message of black inferiority implicit in such statues as they sought to improve their and economic conditions. They focused instead on black history, pride, and American citizenship. Recently, historians have provided excellent analyses of white southern women's clubs' participation in Progressive-era reform and black clubwomen's efforts to uplift the race through similar, but separate, welfare programs.(2) This article focuses instead on the tension between black and white elite clubwomen's attempts to tell the story of southern, and American, history. The self-education component of women's clubs--their programs in history and literature--was important because it provided an opportunity for women's edification and growth, and the content of these offerings is critical as well. A survey of the history and literature examined by South Carolina club-women reveals how their consideration of these materials shaped their understanding of what it meant to be black or white in the postbellum South. Their attention to history and literature is compelling because clubwomen did more than simply study within the confines of the club. Through educational outreach and support for community libraries, they also attempted to transmit to children and the general public the ideals of southern, American, and racial identity that they celebrated. What is significant about black and white clubwomen in South Carolina, therefore, is not only their progressive behavior as reformers but also their ability to fuse history and identity construction with reform Their program of building southern identity through the study of southern history and literature--their cultural work--shaped the New South as much as their social work. Furthermore, their literary agenda is evident in their reform agenda: the welfare programs that white clubwomen built and lobbied for were for whites only, and white clubwomen in South Carolina did not embrace the interracial work that church women in the 1920s would promote. At the same time and without state aid, black clubwomen used their own resources to fund welfare programs for blacks. Ultimately, the racial underpinnings of the history that black and white clubwomen read, studied, and repeated, made white women part of the effort to create a culture of segregation in the New South as black women fought to combat that culture. In the late nineteenth century, building on an earlier tradition of charity through church and benevolence societies, vast numbers of black and white women across the nation began to participate in a myriad of women's organizations, including the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), church missionary societies, and woman suffrage associations. …