Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle by Rebecca Tuuri

Abstract

Reviewed by: Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle by Rebecca Tuuri Sariah Orocu Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. By Rebecca Tuuri. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 338 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-1-4696-3890-4. When reflecting on the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the largest Black women's organization at the time often remains unheard of or forgotten. The National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) fought and struggled against racism, poverty, and sexism, alongside other influential civil rights groups and leaders. Rebecca Tuuri's book, Strategic Sisterhood, accounts for this organization as well as the accomplishments and failures of the women who led it in their fight for equal rights. Tuuri starts by discussing the early history of the Council and its activism, which focused on placing Black women in positions of power throughout society along with lobbying for racial change. The Council initially tried to recruit women from lower classes into its organization. However, college-educated sorority women were its most pronounced members, and the organization's emphasis on networking and professionalism was unrealistic and unattainable for many impoverished women. The early composition of the membership hindered the group. Since the majority of the members were of a higher economic status, they struggled to advocate effectively and support Black women who fell below the poverty line. Dorothy Height was the group's president and most influential leader. She played a major role in the inclusion of Black women in the Civil Rights movement. Height was no stranger to racial discrimination, which in turn shaped her life in academia and activism. As a child she witnessed her mother, a trained nurse, experience professional and personal constraints that Black women all over America faced. Height grew up with these frustrations, and they fueled her desire to excel. Yet, Height also experienced racial discrimination in her academic career. In 1929, she was accepted into Barnard College [End Page 269] but was denied admittance on the basis that the school's quota of two Black women had already been met. Following her denial from Barnard, Height enrolled at New York University, where her academic excellence and achievements exposed her to social and political causes and led to her involvement in activism throughout her career. Another factor that influenced Height's equal rights work was her frustration with the disregard Black women faced from male civil rights activists. Tuuri notes an important event that triggered Height's mission was her exclusion from participating or speaking at the 1963 March on Washington, even though she was the president of the NCNW, the lone female-centered organization at the time. "Height argued that women's exclusion from the March on Washington leadership," Tuuri writes, "was 'vital to awakening the women's movement'" (34). Tuuri argues that, at that particular moment, Height was not particularly forthright about the sexism that she and other Black women encountered. Instead, "she looked for an alternative strategy to circumvent these limitations. There was still plenty to be done, with or without the support of men" (34). Height applied the mindset that change could be accomplished without relying on male support to further the mission of the NCNW. Tuuri highlights the shift in the NCNW towards a more discrete, but effective, method of activism. The Council applied a strategy of eliminating racism through the moral persuasion of whites, leading to an interracial delegation within the organization. The NCNW's first major project in this regard was Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS). Initially, white and Black women from the North traveled to Mississippi and spent three days observing the Jim Crow South and making connections with southern Black women. These visits exposed the rest of the nation to what was going on in segregated Mississippi, the most racially violent state in the country with the greatest number of known lynchings. Two-thirds of the members in WIMS were white and the remaining one-third Black, and it included upper- and middle-class northern women who were Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. Tuuri examines the WIMS and NCNW strategies of cooperation across...