National Association Of Colored Women Research Articles

The formation of women`s suffrage in the USA in the XIX-XX centuries

In the scientific article, the author analyzed the issue of the formation of women’s suffrage in the United States of America. The meaning of the “conference to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of women” held in Seneca Falls in 1848 is revealed. The role of suffragettes, their complex international connections and strategies for the development of women’s rights are outlined. The achievements of Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Stuart, Francisca Anneke, Sarah Parker Remond, Stanton, Anthony, Ida Wells, Frances Harper, Churchy Terrell, Alice Paul and the social movement of abolitionists in the process of securing women’s rights, including women’s suffrage, are revealed. The importance of the founding of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, the International Women’s League, the World Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the International Council of Women, the National Association of Colored Women, the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, and the Inter-American Commission on Women is characterized. The emergence of the internationalism of women’s suffrage, the spread of feminism is analyzed. The events and consequences of the struggle for women’s suffrage in the USA are summarized. In particular, it notes that the transnational legacy of the suffrage movement is evident in the ongoing aspirations of US women for full citizenship today. Then, as now, the struggle for women’s rights is linked to global movements for human rights – for immigrant, racial, labor and feminist justice. The internationalism of the women’s suffrage movement shows us that activists and movements outside the USA, as well as a wide range of diverse international causes, were crucial to the organization of what was considered such a quintessentially American right to vote. The emergence of women’s suffrage reminds us how much we have to learn from feminist struggles around the world. We see the prospects for further scientific research in the study of women’s suffrage in the states of the EU and other countries of the world and in their comparison. A scientific article can be useful for experts, historians and students.

The ‘Organized Anxiety’ of Labour Leader Nannie Helen Burroughs

Educator and labour leader Nannie Helen Burroughs and her colleagues at the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACW) experienced ‘organized anxiety’ during the early twentieth century as they worked to establish a comprehensive labour reform movement in the United States. Burroughs’ colleague and NACW leader Fannie Barrier Williams coined the term ‘organized anxiety’ to describe Black women’s politicized emotions that fuelled their expansive organization as they worked to build a truly democratic society. NACW members, such as Burroughs, integrated their fight for labour rights into their larger movement for women’s suffrage and civil rights. Burroughs established a school and women’s organizations to challenge ideologies and institutions that confined Black women to low-wage service work and denied them full citizenship rights. In this article, I draw from Hochschild’s emotional labour theory, which brings women’s ‘invisible’ work into view, and Williams’ organized anxiety concept to examine Burroughs’ unrecognized, yet critical work of developing and leading a labour reform movement for Black women in a country that denied their very humanity.

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

"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...

Remembering Ownership in NACW Activism

Abstract This essay analyzes the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), a prominent Black women’s club founded in 1896, to illustrate how collective memory can generate new narratives regarding ownership. Specifically, I consider how the organization reimagined what it meant to own property through remembrances of Frederick Douglass’s home published in their newsletter, National Notes. The NACW repeatedly used his estate to create tropological memories that expanded, contracted, and, at times, challenged what it meant to be a Black woman in the United States. The women of this club reveal how memory can express the complexity of marginalized life, as well as contribute to the history of U.S. property rhetoric.

Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman by Sheena Harris

Reviewed by: Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman by Sheena Harris Leigh Soares Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman. By Sheena Harris. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 210. $55.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-619-3.) Building on literature that has shed new light on the lives and leadership of Black women traditionally overshadowed by the renowned "race men" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Sheena Harris has written the first scholarly biography of Margaret Murray Washington. Born enslaved in Macon, Mississippi, Washington is known most for her marriage to Booker T. Washington as he arrived at the height of his power, but here readers see how she became a prominent educator and race leader in her own right. She developed a robust curriculum for Black girls at Tuskegee Institute, promoted Black history education in Black schools across the South, and organized Black women to lead racial uplift movements in their own communities. With this biography of Margaret Washington, Harris "not only restores her to the history of HBCU administrators and club women, but also illuminates the interconnections among movements that stood against racial and gender oppression" (p. 10). [End Page 403] Drawing on a wide range of personal correspondence, public writings, and institutional records, Harris traces the life and career of Washington from her birth in 1861 to her death in 1925. The first three chapters recount Washington's childhood, her education at Fisk University, her marriage to Booker, and her pedagogical commitments as Lady Principal of Tuskegee Institute. Harris emphasizes how Washington's early experiences in the rural, impoverished South helped shape the vision of Black education she brought with her to Tuskegee—one that emphasized respectability, the professionalization of domestic labor, and the uplift of the home. Washington's commitment to industrial education, Harris explains, "was not an accommodationist view, as many critics of her husband asserted, but rather a survivalist strategy" (p. 55). The last three chapters follow Washington's club work on three scales: local (the Tuskegee Women's Club), national (including the National Association of Colored Women and the Southern Federation of Women's Clubs), and international (the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World). Washington certainly benefited from her husband's fame and influence, but she carved out a respected leadership role for herself through increasingly ambitious organizing, all in service of advancing the study of Black life, uplifting Black women and children, and fighting the spread of white supremacy. Although Harris clearly admires Washington, she does not pull punches when examining the leader's emergent elitism. "While [Washington] espoused views of cohesive [cross-class] collaborations, she herself remained exclusively separate," and most of the Black women Washington sought to uplift were excluded from membership in the numerous organizations she led (p. 144). One of the benefits of biography is the way individual experiences can provide insight into the people behind movements. In several effective passages, Harris explores the physical and emotional toll on Washington as she struggled to find a balance among her work commitments, her responsibilities as a wife and mother, and her personal well-being, highlighting the unique challenges Black women faced as they pursued public leadership. Although the narrative is at times ambivalent about the relationship between her work and the so-called Tuskegee Machine, it is clearer about Washington's connection to a wide network of Black race women rooted in the South. Harris shows Washington collaborating with other understudied reformers in the region, including Josephine Bruce, Lugenia Burns Hope, and Cornelia Bowen. Readers interested in Black women's history and educational history will appreciate this recovery of the life and career of Margaret Murray Washington. Leigh Soares Mississippi State University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Review: Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, by Martha S. Jones

Review: <i>Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All</i>, by Martha S. Jones

Social Work within the National Association of Colored Women: Clubwomen as Othermothers and Captive Maternals

Social Work within the National Association of Colored Women: Clubwomen as Othermothers and Captive Maternals

The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia by Brent Tarter, Marianne E. Julienne and Barbara C. Batson

Reviewed by: The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia by Brent Tarter, Marianne E. Julienne and Barbara C. Batson Louise M. Newman The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia. By Brent Tarter, Marianne E. Julienne, and Barbara C. Batson. (Charleston, S.C: The History Press, 2020. Pp. 206. Paper, $23.99, ISBN 978-1-4671-4419-3.) This book accompanies an excellent exhibition at the Library of Virginia to commemorate the centennial of woman suffrage (https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/wedemand/), offering a detailed account of the campaigns conducted by the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia in the early twentieth century. These campaigns have generally been overlooked by historians because they failed to get the all-male General Assembly in Virginia to reform the state constitution. By the time the Equal Suffrage League did make some progress in March 1920, the process was no longer needed because the Nineteenth Amendment went into effect (without Virginia’s ratification) later that year. Nonetheless, this account is a welcome addition to the historiography on woman suffrage because, as Sandra Gioia Treadway argues in the foreword, it highlights the “divergent opinions of white Virginia suffragists as they debated whether their goal should be an amendment to the state or to the federal constitution, [End Page 142] whether their tactics should rely on persuasion or militancy and how to address the issue of race in a state that had substantially disfranchised its black male citizens” (p. 8). Apart from two early chapters, which cover Virginia women’s political activities from 1619 through 1920, and a final chapter that examines the period after 1920, the bulk of the book focuses on the campaigns of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, an exclusively white organization founded in 1909 by about twenty Richmond women and led by Lila Hardaway Meade Valentine through 1920. The authors also attempt to document the activities of African American women, whose engagement in the suffrage movement was carried out through local affiliates of the National Association of Colored Women and the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. Due to difficulty locating records, the discussions of African American women’s activities are brief, taking up only a few pages in this 171-page narrative. However, there is an excellent section explaining the particular impediments that African American women faced when they sought to register to vote after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, as well as a frank discussion of the complex and racist ways that white suffragists responded to antisuffragists’ claims that enfranchising women would endanger white supremacy. The book is well illustrated, with photographs of individuals, parades, broadsides, pamphlet covers, signed membership forms, letters, and other ephemera. Although the authors are familiar with a scholarly literature on southern suffragism, the narrative contains no historiographical analysis but instead presents detailed evidence to document the range and extent of Virginia women’s decades-long commitment to the suffrage cause. Scholars wanting to know more about the elite white women who made up the bulk of the leadership of this movement will find useful material here—but the book seems focused on increasing appreciation among a general audience for “those women [who] deserve recognition right alongside the heroes of the American Revolution and the civil rights movement for their work to expand democracy in the state” (p. 13). Louise M. Newman University of Florida Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones

Reviewed by: Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones Monica L. Mercado (bio) Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All By Martha S. Jones. New York: Basic Books, 2020. 352 pages, illustrations, 6" x 9". $30.00 cloth, $16.99 ebook. If women's history was going to have a moment, 2020 was poised to be it. For years, women's history stakeholders looked forward to that year—now memorable for a global pandemic that disrupted even the best laid plans—to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. With one sentence ("The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex"), US suffragists celebrated victory. Women's right to vote, requiring decades of continued action by women of color and their allies to extend and secure the franchise, has long been the subject of political and social histories. In Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, historian Martha S. Jones rewrites conventional narratives of women's rights in US history by centering the work of Black women, whose expansive politics, by necessity, addressed both sexism and racism. Building on the foundational work of late suffrage historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, and published amid a wave of new books, podcasts, documentaries, museum exhibitions, and public sculpture timed to commemorate the "suffrage centennial," Vanguard is a standout volume that deserves our engagement long after 2020 is in the rearview mirror. But Vanguard is not a book about suffrage and suffragists. Those terms, Jones declares in her introduction, are "far too narrow to capture" the scope of Black women's activism (14). As the vanguard, the women Jones profiles are visionaries and volunteers, interrogating the meaning of freedom and demanding it for themselves and their communities. They joined clubs, churches, and conventions—and, as the endnotes underscore, historians still need to do a better job of acknowledging their contributions. The need for such a volume is clear, and it is personal to Jones, a native New Yorker and Johns Hopkins University professor. Movingly, Vanguard begins with a genealogy. Starting with her great-great-grandmother, Jones briefly unpacks the experiences of her ancestors, introducing us to Black women who "built power where [they] could" even when the vote was denied them (3). Club women, church women, educators, community organizers, fundraisers—each promoted a vision of "winning women's power that would serve all humanity" (8). The introduction lays the groundwork for Jones's argument that woman suffrage was only a small piece of Black women's politics; human rights, not women's rights, [End Page 427] might be a more appropriate term for the vanguard's imaginary in the wake of slavery and emancipation. If the chronological scope of Vanguard feels familiar—beginning around the time of the American Revolution and working its way toward the present—the stories Jones chooses to tell make for a fresh reworking of the history survey genre. There are familiar actors here, of course (Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell), as well as a host of new names (women like Troy, New York, speaker Elizabeth Wicks and New York City businesswoman Hester Lane). Most significantly, Jones maps out Black geographies that rarely intersect with formal suffrage organizing. The 1848 Seneca Falls convention is covered in just a handful of paragraphs, for example, enlarged with a few fascinating hints at the lives of free Black women who lived just a stone's throw from the meeting site. Instead, Vanguard takes seriously the middle decades of the nineteenth century as an era of conventions, plural. Black women attended, spoke up, and even lectured to other women and men at a host of women's rights conventions, colored conventions, and religious meetings. The founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) at the turn of the twentieth century solidified many of the networks that Black women forged in this earlier era, and shaped Black politics. "Black men...

Precursor to Women of Color Feminism

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World (ICWDR) was founded in 1922 by prominent members of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). This exclusive council, initially comprising eighteen well-educated and highly respected middle-class African American women, was actively engaged in a variety of political agendas and social reform efforts locally and nationally. Situating discrimination of African Americans across the United States into the larger context of ongoing global European and American racialized colonial oppression and imperialist interventionism, this group of women pursued a Pan-Africanist agenda promoting “racial uplift” by “undermin[ing] American racism within larger global processes of racism, imperialism, and eventually decolonization” (Materson 2009: 36). More specifically, these reformers directed their energies toward a transnational endeavor of raising the racial consciousness of women of “darker complexions” across the globe by creating reading and conversation groups. These groups would “study any question or all questions in a systematic way, relative to the darker races. No matter whether these races are races willing to be affiliated with us or not,” as member Margaret Murray put it, with the aim of fostering solidarity based on shared history as oppressed people “of the darker races” (Washington 1923).Although a majority of the founding members—women such as Mary Church Terrell; Addie W. Hunton; Mrs. Booker T. Washington, Margaret Murray Washington; Maggie L. Walker; and Mary B. Talbert—were also actively involved in other women’s rights groups such as the International Council of Women, International Alliance of Women / International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the National Association of Colored Women. As Black women they recognized the necessity and importance of a transnational forum that would highlight the shared oppressions of racialized minority women, a focus that existing women’s organizations had yet to address. Expanding W. E. B. Du Bois’s Pan-Africanist approach to include gender as a political issue and organizing strategy, the ICWDR’s members were ambitious and optimistic about the organization’s ability to unify women on a global level and to garner international support for progressive social change that would improve the disadvantaged status of African-descended women worldwide (Rief 2004: 218).Unfortunately, their membership exclusivity based on social class, along with the extensive responsibilities of council members already committed to various personal, professional, and political causes, ultimately led to the ICWDR disbanding sometime in the early 1940s.1 Nonetheless, although the organization itself faded away, the ideological principles on which it was founded acted as a “transition site between nineteenth-century strategies of racial uplift and newer global race consciousness ideas, [and] was an antecedent to the women of color feminism that would emerge in the late twentieth century” (Materson 2009: 36). The ICWDR archival piece that follows highlights how the internationalist, feminist, antiracist and decolonizing orientations of the council employed strategies that unified, advanced, and sought to address the disadvantaged condition of women of the “darker races” globally.

“Why Sit Ye Here and Die”? Counterhegemonic Histories of the Black Female Intellectual in Nineteenth-Century America

This paper examines the work and lives of black female activist intellectuals in the years before the formation of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC) in 1896. Looking deeper at arguments originally made by Maria Stewart concerning the denial of black women's ambitions and limiting potential in their working lives, the analysis employs the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, in particular his notion of the intellectual, to help reflect on the centrality of these black women in the development of an early counterhegemonic movement.

Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality: Women's Activism in Kansas City, 1870 to 1940 by K. David Hanzlick

Reviewed by: Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality: Women's Activism in Kansas City, 1870 to 1940 by K. David Hanzlick Sara Egge K. David Hanzlick, Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality: Women's Activism in Kansas City, 1870 to 1940. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018. 316 pp. $50.00 (cloth). K. David Hanzlick examines how women in Kansas City claimed the public sphere and became political agents between 1870 and 1940 in his book Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality. As the title suggests, these women did so by organizing for charity, agitating to combat evils in society, and campaigning for political rights like suffrage. While they approached this tripartite process in ways that resembled their eastern counterparts' strategies, Kansas City's women diverged in how they engaged in this activism. Hanzlick argues that Kansas City's location at the intersection of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers and along the border of one slave and one free state helped its development as a western commercial metropolis and fueled a potent political mix. Business and agricultural promise lured people to a place rife with simmering sectional antagonisms. It was this context that made unification among reformers paramount. It also encouraged women to build public reputations as reformers and leaders in their community. [End Page 190] Civic engagement and shared desire for economic growth healed divisions and established bonds of loyalty. Along with an introduction and conclusion, the book contains five chapters that detail the civic engagement that politicized women and earned them public reputations. Hanzlick's reliance upon newspapers, census records, city directories, and other primary sources in Kansas City–based archives to tell his story allows him to delve deeply into the details. Hanzlick follows "consistent Kansas Citians" and newcomers; the latter typically hailed from the northeast, came from Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religious backgrounds, and supported economic development amid dense social networks. Chapter 2 explains how many of these upper-class women joined a single relief agency, the Women's Christian Association (WCA), in the 1870s. While benevolence to the poor seemed the primary focus of the WCA, Hanzlick notes that members pursued a variety of reform activities to end other social ills like prostitution and to secure the right to vote. Over time, the membership became increasingly elite and focused solely on benevolence until a general relief agency, led by men, appeared in 1880. Kansas City's male leaders adopted an ambivalent approach to the poor from 1880 to World War I in the wake of dramatic population growth and unfettered corporate capitalism in the city. The regional hub attracted transient workers, and disagreements emerged about how to contend with such a large population of poor people. Hanzlick places these debates in a broader context in which reformers wrestled with questions about individual or structural blame. In chapter 3, he examines the male-led Board of Public Welfare, a Progressive-Era entity begun in 1910, telling the story of how these reformers struggled to discard notions that character building, rather than major structural change, was the key to eliminating poverty. Chapter 4 takes up the narrative from chapter 2, locating reform in a variety of local chapters of national organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union, General Federation of Women's Clubs, National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, Young Women's Christian Association, and Catholic Ladies' Aid Society. While these groups embraced similar reforms—such as prohibition, woman suffrage, and consent laws—they worked separately. Chapter 5 carries the narrative to the eve of World War II, finding that unlike the divisions that plagued women at the national level, women in Kansas City remained united. They sought political participation in local governance by supporting campaigns for municipal reform, engaging in party politics, and running for local offi ce. [End Page 191] Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality not only successfully traces the history of women's activism in Kansas City, but it also speaks to histories of social welfare and municipal reform that included men. Some chapters, like chapter 3, pursue questions about the development of midwestern metropolitanism more so than women's activism. Hanzlick also rightly argues that his work opens doors to further investigations and that scholars should treat his...

Desire, Dispossession, and Dreams of Social Data: Black Clubwomen’s Intellectual Thought and Aesthetics During the Progressive Era in Public Writing and Print Culture

Desire, Dispossession, and Dreams of Social Data: Black Clubwomen’s Intellectual Thought and Aesthetics During the Progressive Era in Public Writing and Print Culture Erica Richardson (bio) Carefully and conscientiously we shall study the questions, which affect the race most deeply and directly. Against the convict lease system, the Jim Crow car laws, lynchings and all other barbarities which degrade us, we shall protest with such force of logic and intensity of the soul that those who oppress us will either cease to disavow the inalienability and equality of human rights, or be ashamed to openly violate the very principles upon which this government was founded. —Mary Church Terrell, “What Role is the Educated Negro Woman to Play” (1902)1 The immorality of colored women is a theme upon which those who know little about them or those who maliciously misrepresent them love to descant. Foul aspersions upon the character of colored women are assiduously circulated by the press of certain sections and especially by the direct descendants of those who in years past were responsible for the moral degradation of their female slaves […] Dotted all over the country are charitable institutions for the aged, orphaned, and poor which have been established by colored women, just how many it is [End Page 33] difficult to state, owing to the lack of statistics bearing on the progress, possessions, and prowess of colored women. —Mary Church Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women” (1904)2 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, black middle-class women around the United States formed a series of clubs to mobilize a racial uplift reform movement. They created kindergartens and reading groups.3 They encouraged and guided the cultivation of black homes. And above all else, black clubwomen, as they came to be known, worked tirelessly to address the myriad challenges the black race faced with the rollback of civil rights following the end of Reconstruction and the steady rise of racial prejudice and antiblack violence.4 By way of introduction into this essay’s focus on the archive of black clubwomen’s public writing and print culture, I offer a reading of the two passages above by Mary Church Terrell. Terrell was one of the most influential and powerful black women’s club leaders and the first president of the national network of black clubwomen, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). In the first selection above, taken from a speech delivered to a meeting of black clubwomen, “What Role is the Educated Negro Woman to Play,” Terrell draws on a series of issues related to the social realities for black Americans. The convict lease system practically undermined the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, the Jim Crow train cars vacated the Fourteenth Amendment ensuring equal rights to blacks as citizens, and lynchings negated perhaps all of the Reconstruction amendments, threatening black death in response to any semblance of black life and equality, from voting rights to the sheer attempt at black dignity. Terrell illustrates the social and political awareness of black clubwomen, but it is her carefully crafted sentimental tone that captures my attention for it indicates an ability to refashion epistemological tools to assert black women’s authority and agency. For example, when Terrell proclaims black clubwomen’s potential to intervene “with such force of logic and intensity of the soul,” she aligns reason with spirituality, effectively combining two categories of thought and knowledge production typically regarded as mutually exclusive during the period.5 Victorian middle-class women were given province over the home, emotions, and care of the family, but rarely were they perceived as mobilizing a set of politics based on their intellectual abilities. Black women were often excluded from this cultural standard due to race. Terrell combines logic and the soul to assert black women’s ability to meet a middle-class standard and to give them greater authority to perceive, think, and reimagine black social and political life not only for the benefit of blacks but also for the substantiation of “the inalienability and equality of human rights.” And yet, as the second selection suggests, that was not enough to persuade American society to recognize what black clubwomen knew of their...

Emancipation without Equality: Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line by Thomas E. Smith

Reviewed by: Emancipation without Equality: Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line by Thomas E. Smith Andrew J. Rosa (bio) Emancipation without Equality: Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line. By Thomas E. Smith. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. Pp. 194. $90.00 cloth; $27.95 paper) In seven well-written chapters, Thomas E. Smith considers how intellectuals of African descent navigated the global color line between the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference and the 1911 Universal Races Congress. Rather than representing a lull in the history of Pan-Africanism, as is suggested in much of the literature, Emancipation without Equality credits this period for producing a generation of intellectuals that challenged racial oppression in pursuit of equal treatment and rights in the colonies and metropoles of the Atlantic world. If Euro-American powers guided the course of imperialism, then African and African-descended people represented a formidable, anti-imperialist response. Smith begins with a discussion of Pan-African thought as represented by African American intellectuals who, despite their marginalization from the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago and the 1895 Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, formed a counter-public sphere wherein they interrogated the meaning of American citizenship, condemned white vigilante terrorism, and called for greater control over the Christianizing mission in Africa. Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Alexander Crummell, and Booker T. Washington are all discussed as significant in this regard, as are a number of African American women, who, like Frances Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Anna Julia Cooper, pressed for Black inclusion in the 1893 World's Congress of Representative Women. Moving across the Atlantic in chapter two, Smith discusses the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris as a culminating moment in Pan-African protest. In addition to celebrating Euro-American imperial mastery, this venue featured the "American Negro Exhibit," which ceded space to Thomas Calloway and W. E. B. Du Bois to challenge the "Negro problem" school of thought by evidencing African American progress since slavery's abolition. This challenge carried over to the first Pan-African Conference in London, where diaspora intellectuals called [End Page 369] for the expansion of rights and equality across the Atlantic world. The ideas and platforms they put forward discredited the ideological underpinnings of the global color line and reflected the influence of positivist currents shaping anti-racist thought during this period. Smith expands his discussion on the Pan-African critique of Euro-American Christianity in chapter three by focusing on the ideas of religious intellectuals that corresponded with the African American journalist John E. Bruce. While supportive of the civilizationist project in Africa, men like George Washington Williams, Theophilus Scholes, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Mojola Agbebi were generally critical of white-led Christianity, seeing it as the handmaiden of Euro-American imperialism. They instead insisted on a more forceful embrace of political reform and a commitment to vindicating Africa from "Dark Continent" stereotypes that justified the exploitation of Black bodies globally. Emphasis on the correspondence between Africa and the United States continues in chapter four with Smith's examination of the Spanish American War and the South African (Boer) War. Both events were imbued with masculinist meanings by Pan-African intellectuals and looked upon as opportunities to advance claims for rights that essentially remain unrealized. Smith returns to the World Congress of Representative Women and the Pan-African Conference in chapter five to remind readers that, despite the masculinist nature of Pan-African discourse, women, including several of whom founded the National Association of Colored Women, engaged in advocating for rights for people of African descent. From the trans-Atlantic protests of Ida. B. Wells and Catherine Impey, to the rhetorical responses of Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Pauline Hopkins, women spoke, wrote, theorized, and organized preambles to action against the global color line. Smith concludes his examination with an analysis of the 1911 Universal Race Congress. In addition to Boas, who is credited with shifting the discourse on race from the realm of biology to culture, the Congress is discussed as significant for announcing the arrival of the Sudanese–Egyptian Duse Mohammed Ali. As founder and editor of African [End Page 370] Times and Orient...

Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper

Reviewed by: Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper Lilian Calles Barger (bio) Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. By Brittney C. Cooper. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. 208. $95.00 cloth; $19.95 paper; $14.95 ebook) Beyond Respectability by Brittney C. Cooper focuses on "race women" in the decades between 1890 and the 1970s, and challenges the view that these women built a straightjacket of respectability and a culture of dissemblance. Cooper considers the clubwomen of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), Mary Church Terrell and Fannie Barrier Williams, and identifies them as the first generation of self-consciously black women public intellectuals. Moving within the public sphere of racial uplift, they theorized the meaning and possibilities of the black woman's body and encouraged the production of race literature. They offered a challenging intersectional voice to the race men narrative expressed in the W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington ideological binary. While not denying the problems of respectability politics, Cooper reinterprets it as primarily an assertion of "undisputed dignity" challenging the long-standing white "cult of true womanhood" (p. 13). Considering the NACW as a "school of thought," providing the theoretical and political foundations for public race women, Cooper changes the focus from what black women did through the NACW to what they said (p. 16). In four lively written chapters, the author constructs an intellectual [End Page 554] genealogy and surveys the intellectual geography of race women from their speeches, essays, and memoirs. Beginning with the intellectual architects Williams and Terrell, she demonstrates how the NACW went beyond a social welfare organization to constructing ideas for addressing the "civic unknowability" of black women to claim their place as "citizen-women" (pp. 37, 43). Because they suffered social and political erasure through rape and violence, Williams sought to establish the legitimacy and public possibilities for African American women. In the club's "organized anxiety" of shared experience and consciousness of their subordinated position, these thinkers saw a deep link between discourse and embodiment in the black public sphere to which they contributed (p. 33). Through speaking, writing, and political protest Terrell, a protégé of Frederick Douglass, offered a conceptual bridge of "dignified agitation" from earlier uplift politics to the Civil Rights Movement (p. 58). Her memoir Colored Woman in a White World (1940) displays an early sustained reflection on race and gender, lived pain and pleasure, and the presence and absence of black women in the dominant narrative. By using her ability to pass as white, she confronted racial prejudice by drawing attention to her black identity and womanly body in an act of political protest. By making their historically denied bodies visible and exercising their voice Williams and Terrell asserted their public presence. The chapter that places activist and intellectual Pauli Murray within the genealogy of "race women," a concept which remains largely undefined, is less persuasive and appears discontinuous with the NACW school of thought in the previous chapters. Murray's politics were in line with a broad civil rights movement that went beyond race to gender and sex as fluid categories—a position unrecognizable to William and Terrell who asserted the dignity of black womanhood. As a multi-racial female experiencing life-long doubt about her gender identity, Murray was torn about identifying as black or as a woman. As a singular thinker who never resolved her basic identity conflict, she navigated the "disciplining forces of racial heteronormativity" to [End Page 555] engage in her distinct one-person activism of behalf of multiple social movements (p. 106). The designation "race woman" for Murray, a liberal individualist, is ill-fitting. Greater exploration of the thought of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who along with the black feminist of the 1960s challenged the race man leadership model in the final chapter, would have enriched the text. Beyond Respectability remains an important contribution to growing field of black women's intellectual history and is sure to inspire further inquiry. Cooper has done a great service in bringing to light and identifying the unrecognized intellectual contributions of the NACW school in their theorizing about the political...

"Why I Wrote the Phyllis Wheatley Pageant-Play": Mary Church Terrell's Bicentennial Activism

"Why I Wrote the Phyllis Wheatley Pageant-Play"Mary Church Terrell's Bicentennial Activism Lurana Donnels O'Malley (bio) Sometimes I joke in rehearsal, "If this was truly a period piece, I'd be in chains somewhere." —OKIERIETE ONAODOWAN Hamilton: An American Musical, the groundbreaking creation of Lin-Manuel Miranda, broke that ground in part by casting actors of color as key historical figures of the American Revolution and its aftermath. On Broadway, African American actors played three US presidents: Okieriete Onaodowan (James Madison), Daveed Diggs (Thomas Jefferson), and Christopher Jackson (George Washington).1 Jackson, however, was not the first man of African descent to portray George Washington on the American stage. More than eighty years earlier, in 1932, a black man played the role in a production that explored the relation between America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved: Mary Church Terrell's Historical Pageant-Play Based on the Life of Phyllis Wheatley.2 As critic Lyra D. Monteiro notes about Hamilton, there is "a truly damning omission in [Hamilton]: despite the proliferation of black and brown bodies onstage, not a single enslaved or free person of color exists as a character in this play."3 In contrast, the 1932 production of Terrell's script placed the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley front and center as an enslaved African American character with agency and impact. Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) was an African American educator, writer [End Page 225] suffragist, and civil rights activist. Terrell (figure 1) was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman in the United States appointed as a member of a board of education, in Washington, DC. Although Terrell was a prolific writer (the author of numerous essays and articles in addition to her autobiography), to my knowledge she wrote only two scripts, both intended as contributions to the 1932 bicentennial celebration of George Washington's birthday: a pageant about the African American soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War and a biographical pageant-play on Phillis Wheatley. The former was never staged; the latter was performed as part of the official Washington, DC, festivities for Washington's bicentennial. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Portrait of Mary Church Terrell, courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives, Howard University, Washington, DC. Terrell's stated goal for both historical pageants was to combat the negative and demeaning images of African Americans she had encountered in other plays and pageants planned for the Washington bicentennial. In Phyllis Wheatley, Terrell exposes the injustice of authentication rituals, as Wheatley is again [End Page 226] and again asked to prove the validity of her talent as a writer. Ironically, Terrell herself faced such judgment from two sides: from black critics opposed to the Washington bicentennial's representations of African Americans and from production staff and supporters who questioned the historical authenticity of her pageant-play. Although the production faced numerous obstacles and was considerably downsized from the original plans, the performance, created by a dozen artists and staff members, featured a cast of more than two hundred African Americans, most of them public school youths performing for their own community. Phyllis Wheatley was ultimately the only staged birthday bicentennial event to place African American history at center stage and in a positive light. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Engraving of Phillis Wheatley, 1773, attributed to Scipio Moorhead. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, DC. As Terrell knew, the historical Wheatley (figure 2) was not only contemporaneous with Washington but also had an unusual connection to him. In October 1775, Wheatley composed a poem in honor of General Washington and sent it to him at his headquarters in Cambridge along with a brief note; in February 1776, Washington wrote a reply to thank her for it.4 Wheatley's poem first appeared in print in the Virginia Gazette in March 1776; titled "To his Excellency [End Page 227] George Washington," the panegyric praises Washington but also requests that he be guided by the...

Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C by Treva B. Lindsey

Reviewed by: Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C by Treva B. Lindsey Alison M. Parker Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. By Treva B. Lindsey. Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History. ( Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 182. Paper, $26.00, ISBN 978–0-252–08251-1; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978–0-252–04102-0.) In Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C., Treva B. Lindsey rethinks our periodization of the New Negro movement, which usually focuses on World War I and the Great Migration. This periodization, she argues, masculinizes the New Negro movement and centers on New York City. By focusing on the Jim Crow era of the 1890s through the 1920s and border cities like Washington, D.C., Lindsey identifies as New Negro women the members of the National Association of Colored Women and other groups who aimed "to transform themselves and their communities through demanding autonomy and equality for African American women" (p. 9). A chapter on education points to the aspirational nature of "New Negro womanhood" as symbolized by the presence in the nation's capital of premier educational institutions like M Street High School and Howard University (p. 143). Howard promised equal education but was mired in sexist ideas that privileged leadership training for black men. Lucy Diggs Slowe became the university's first dean of women in 1922. She fought for black women's equality and access to leadership positions at Howard and created a women's campus with housing for female students by 1931. Slowe lived off-campus and was in a loving relationship with another black woman, the writer Mary Burrill. The New Negro women who knew them privately, Lindsey suggests, accepted a broader range of behaviors than current narrow understandings of respectability politics allow. As a key element of New Negro womanhood, black beauty culture allowed black women, as entrepreneurs and consumers, to promote themselves as modern, urban, and beautiful in the face of a hostile, dominant white culture, Lindsey argues. Black women emulated the looks of famous race women they admired, such as the political celebrity Mary Church Terrell. Lindsey incorrectly cites Terrell's autobiography as proof that black women participated in a "modern black beauty culture" in the early 1870s by adding hair pieces to achieve the popular looks of the day (p. 73). In fact, Terrell was describing the self-adornment of elite white women who patronized her mother's hair store in Memphis. Even so, Lindsey's overall point is well taken: "Bodily adornment for New Negro women of Washington … signaled the importance of self-care within a society that repeatedly denied the humanity of black women" (p. 85). A chapter on the politics of New Negro women focuses on "the Women's Suffrage March in Washington of 1913 as a specific site of inquiry" (p. 89). Black suffragists were determined to make themselves seen, in spite of white suffragist Alice Paul's racist reluctance to let them join the march. After identifying Terrell as "the face of the African American women's suffrage activism," Lindsey concludes that Terrell, twenty-two women of Howard University's Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and other black suffragists agreed to march at the end of the parade (p. 95). Lindsey's evidence is thin, as it consists [End Page 198] of Paul's "personal recollections" and the seeming absence of black women in photographs of the march (p. 103). Paul's memories are unreliable since she repeatedly made racist statements and then evaded questions regarding her comments. W. E. B. Du Bois concluded, "an order went out to segregate them [black suffragists] in the parade, but telegrams and protests poured in and eventually the colored women marched according to their State and occupation without let or hindrance" ("Along the Color Line," The Crisis, 5 [April 1913], 267). Overall, Lindsey rightly identifies these black suffragists as courageous New Negro women who took a strong public stand for full equality and citizenship. Lindsey's final chapter evocatively captures the dynamic intellectual and cultural life of the black women playwrights who gathered at writer Georgia Douglass...

“The Half Has Never Been Told”: Maritcha Lyons’ Community, Black Women Educators, the Woman’s Loyal Union, and “the Color Line” in Progressive Era Brooklyn and New York

Schoolteacher Maritcha Lyons was among the pioneering African American women who, in 1892, built one of the first women’s rights and racial justice organizations in the United States, the Woman’s Loyal Union of New York and Brooklyn (WLU). The WLU is recognized for its antilynching work in alliance with Ida B. Wells, and as an organizational springboard to the National Association of Colored Women. This essay examines struggles on “the color line” by Lyons, other WLU members, and women educators, through their community’s engagement in 1880s and 1890s Brooklyn and New York contention over school integration, and a 1903 debate on the founding of the Brooklyn Colored Young Women’s Christian Association. These women’s and their community’s battles against segregation and for separate institutions reveal lesser known aspects of WLU women’s activism, and the complexities of urban racism and Black resistance in the “Progressive Era” that witnessed Reconstruction’s dismantling, lynching, and “Jim Crow.”

A Long Dark Night: Race in America from Jim Crow to World War II by J. Michael Martinez

Reviewed by: A Long Dark Night: Race in America from Jim Crow to World War II by J. Michael Martinez Joseph R. Fitzgerald A Long Dark Night: Race in America from Jim Crow to World War II. By J. Michael Martinez. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. xii, 423. $42.00, ISBN 978-1-4422-5994-2.) In A Long Dark Night: Race in America from Jim Crow to World War II,J. Michael Martinez attempts to provide a compelling synthesis of social, economic, and political actors and events that dominated American history from the end of the Civil War through World War II. Focusing on the southern region of the nation, Martinez shows how white politicians at the state and federal levels perpetuated and expanded racist discrimination and oppression. On some topics he succeeds in relaying important information to his intended audience (undergraduate and graduate students), but generally, Martinez's narrative style and focus prevent him from achieving his goal. Much of this book concerns racial segregation, but Martinez fails to show the vast array of legal (de jure) and customary (de facto) details of Jim Crow. Few students today know just how oppressive this apartheid system was—from the cradle to the grave—so Martinez misses an opportunity to show the absurdity of white supremacist ideology. Incidentally, his consistent use of the term white supremacy should be commended. Most authors shy away from using this accurate term and opt instead to use less precise ones such as discrimination, prejudice, and racism. At the same time, Martinez could be more precise in his use of language. When discussing black people, he should use the terms black people ox African Americans instead of using the archaic terms Negro and colored. Other examples of Martinez's curious word choice are found throughout his work. For example, he labels the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator a "rag," he describes one politician as an "angry rube," and in one instance he calls white men's sexual exploitation and assaults of black women as "trysts" (pp. 25, 138, 180). There are more than a few places where it is unclear whether Martinez is conveying the attitudes and beliefs of people he is writing about or whether he is assessing and critiquing them. This lack of clarity undermines his work. One particular strength of the book (likely a result of Martinez's career as an attorney) is its history of Supreme Court decisions, especially those pertaining to the Fourteenth Amendment. Rarely has an author detailed and described these cases so clearly. Other strengths include chapters 7 ("The Great Migration") and 9 ("The Rise of a New Black Culture"), which cover black people's agency to create positive changes in their lives. Apart from those chapters, however, Martinez's book is primarily a story of prominent and/or consequential white men who made black people's lives so hard. He makes only a few references to black men's agency. Left out is any comprehensive discussion of the vast array of African American fraternal organizations, as well as the mutual aid and self-help organizations, that black men established in partnership with black women. [End Page 463] Martinez reinforces this gendered history by using masculine pronouns to generalize about white and black people, and by his decision not to include any substantive information on women—black or white. When Martinez does mention women, he generally shows them only as victims of white men who wanted to control women at all costs. There is no mention of the National Association of Colored Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, both of which organized extensively around social issues and had strong influences on American society and politics. Martinez's omission of Ida B. Wells-Barnett's research on lynching is especially glaring. Her work The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895) proved that white people used that terrorist tactic mainly to punish black men and women who had allegedly committed "offenses" against white individuals, such as fighting, arguing, and being "disrespectful," and to a lesser extent to protect white womanhood from "black brutes." On a related...

A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South by Audrey Thomas McCluskey

Reviewed by: A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South by Audrey Thomas McCluskey Mary Ellen Pethel A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South. By Audrey Thomas McCluskey. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. Pp. x, 181. $40.00, ISBN 978-1-4422-1138-4.) Arguably the most instrumental and far-reaching reformers of the New South, dozens of African American women formed a “Southern Network” to lead efforts toward racial uplift through education (p. 11). Black female teachers epitomized the tenets and goals of social activism, working within a cultural and political system where they were thrice marginalized as African American, female, and non-elite. Audrey Thomas McCluskey makes a compelling case that four women led this cadre of black women educators to forge a “forgotten sisterhood” that deserves greater memorialization and historical recognition. She also argues that these women, Lucy Craft Laney (1854–1933), Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955), Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879–1961), and Charlotte Hawkins Brown (1883–1961), were instrumental in the formation of a black middle class after Reconstruction. The sources McCluskey has consulted are wide-ranging—from letters to interviews to published works, both primary and secondary. Chapter 1 serves as the introduction, providing excellent post–Civil War context. This historical [End Page 190] moment was seized by a generation of young educated black women who founded schools, established powerful organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women, and worked with organizations such as the American Missionary Association and the National Baptist Convention. These four women were fund-raisers, advocates, and activists for their race as well as their gender. As administrators they pursued a hybrid of industrial and liberal arts education that reinforced white definitions of “female purity and domesticity,” while they also fought the oppressive injustice faced by African Americans (p. 8). McCluskey concludes, “Their activism was based in this dual reality” (p. 8). The matriarch of this “Fab Four” was Laney, founder of the Haines Institute in Augusta, Georgia, who often said, “I want to wear out, not rust out” (p. 16). Chapters 2 and 3 describe Laney as a mentor and model for all black female educators. Chapters 4 and 6 provide great insight into the lives of Bethune and Burroughs, respectively. Graduates of Bethune-Cookman College (now University) and the National Training School for Negro Women and Girls, Bethune and Burroughs emerged as self-sufficient wage earners. Chapter 7 emphasizes Brown and Bethune while discussing the networking and collegiality shared by black women who participated in this educational movement. The support of black men and of white men and women was paramount to the success of educational reforms, and McCluskey artfully connects these fascinating and complex relationships. Cumulatively, the book’s content is powerful and should initiate additional research into other schools, nonprofit (club) organizations, alumni, and black educators. However, certain sections of the book are fragmented. Specifically, Chapter 5 is purportedly about Brown and the Palmer Memorial Institute, but the majority of the chapter is just a series of alumni interviews. While interesting, these interviews would have been more effective if incorporated into the narrative about Brown’s position that “black women [were] potentially the most powerful force in solving the racial divide,” which led her to insist on decorum and propriety in addition to rigorous coursework (p. 76). A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South adds immensely to existing historiography related to gender, race, class, education, health, and social reform during the post-Reconstruction and the Progressive eras. It should be essential reading for undergraduate and graduate courses. Further scholarship about black women leaders should continue to reconnect readers to women from the past who can serve as inspiration for generations of women to come. Mary Ellen Pethel Belmont University and Harpeth Hall School Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association