No Less a Pioneer: Susie Wiseman Yergan and the Black Freedom Struggle in South Africa and the United States

Abstract

From 1922 through 1936, Susie Wiseman Yergan resided and worked in South Africa. As the coworker of Max Yergan, the first Black secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association, she generated funds, delivered speeches, and founded the Unity-Home Makers’ Club. By 1935, the organization gave birth to the largest network of women’s clubs in the Eastern Cape. In the United States, she worked to link the political and spiritual destinies of Black Americans and Black South Africans and challenged White Christians on their complicity in imperialism. She contended that freedom was a global rather than a national pursuit, intersectional, nonviolent, based in Christian principles, and interracial rather than separatist. The absence of Wiseman Yergan’s work and philosophy in the archival record and historical scholarship is emblematic of her moderate philosophical activism in a narrowed framing of the interwar Black Freedom Struggle.