"For Women Only!": A Radical Message of the Black Middle Class in Kansas City

Abstract

"For Women Only!"A Radical Message of the Black Middle Class in Kansas City Elyssa Ford (bio) The Kansas City [Missouri] Call, published from 1919 to the present, has been one of the largest and most successful Black newspapers in the country. This article examines the depiction of Black women in the Call in the 1950s, a decade of significant change in Kansas City. As a midwestern crossroads, Kansas City had seen its Black population grow substantially in the previous decade as rural African Americans arrived seeking new urban opportunities. Some of these new Kansas City residents came from the Missouri countryside or from surrounding midwestern states. Others were part of the Great Migration out of the South and either planned to make Kansas City their permanent home or saw it as simply a temporary stop before moving northward to Chicago or Detroit. Regardless of their origins, the increased Black population of 1950s Kansas City read the Call at a key time in the publication's history. The civil rights movement was ramping up, and the newspaper was changing editors for the first time. Under these circumstances, the paper's depiction of Black women relied significantly on the politics of respectability.1 While the Call sometimes presented women as activists, it more frequently paralleled White newspapers in its presentation of women in more traditional roles. Stories discussed women as college students, often as beauty contest winners; featured female musicians and actresses in the entertainment section; and included women in the society and wedding pages. While these articles did not differ significantly from those in White newspapers, to present Black women as models of success and beauty was inherently radical. The Call also included the weekly feature "For Women Only!," which focused on women as wives and mothers and included recipes and cleaning tips. This corresponded with the prescribed 1950s model of womanhood and mirrored the presentation [End Page 77] of ideal womanhood that also appeared in White newspapers. Yet to present Black women and Black families as middle class challenged popular conceptions of Blackness in the era. By depicting the typical Black woman as the counterpart to a White middle-class woman, the Kansas City Call aligned with an activist agenda of civil rights and social change based on racial uplift and made a gender- and socioeconomic-based argument that was revolutionary. In the 1950s, reformers' depictions of Black women as middle class, respectable wives, mothers, and daughters was nothing new. Booker T. Washington had promoted the idea of racial uplift in the late nineteenth century. For him, a focus by African Americans on thrift, industry, hard work, and education would raise up the race and eventually lead to an expansion of their civil rights.2 Though men were often the focus of these efforts, Black women soon became leaders of the racial uplift movement, and they formed their own organizations to support this race work. Black women founded the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, and the organization focused primarily on the uplift of the Black race. After seeing Black men fail to achieve racial equality and because the voices of Black men were more limited by Jim Crow-era violence, Black women believed that it was up to them to improve the stature of all African Americans. As historian Deborah Gray White has explained, "To build the black home was to build the black nation. At the center of it all was the woman." The association believed that Black women were responsible for uplifting the race through "intellectual development and cultural refinement." By the 1940s, club women began to adjust their focus from using the moral purity of Black women to uplift the race to helping uplift the race to improve their rights as women.3 Despite this evolution, the Missouri branch of the NACW still followed the earlier tenets of the national motto, "Lifting as We Climb," by continuing to emphasize intellectual development. In 1954 the Missouri group promoted three main goals: the integration of Missouri public schools, strengthening and improving family life, and building a student aid and scholarship fund.4 Founded in 1919 by Chester A. Franklin, the Kansas City Call had likewise...