National Association of Colored Women (NACW)
Founded by Mary Church Terrell in 1896, the NACW rose to national prominence as affiliated groups proliferated across the country, making NACW the largest federation of Black women’s clubs. As an emerging Black public sphere, NACW structured national debates about the major problems confronting the race and encouraged local affiliates to experiment with innovative mechanisms to addressing them. Supplementing work already conducted in churches and religious groups, NACW offered a secular organizational structure that explicitly advanced women’s leadership at national and local levels, while advocating equality and demonstrating the enormous talent of African Americans as capable citizens.
"Lifting as we climb." the slogan of the NACW became the motto for Black women activism in the late 19th century. Black women organized clubs, schools, and social movements in the face of growing white intimidation and violence following the abandonment of Reconstruction in 1876. Although denied political rights, Black women created diverse institutions, generated positive images of their communities, and sought to reshape public perceptions of African Americans within and beyond the United States.
National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution. "Smithsonian Learning Lab Resource: Pin for the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs." Smithsonian Learning Lab. January 1, 2020. Accessed February 15, 2023.
Early Black Women Feminists
- Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)Truth was an American abolitionist and women’s rights activist born into slavery.
- Harriet Tubman (ca.1820-1913)Known as the “Moses of her people,” Tubman was enslaved, escaped, and helped others gain their freedom as a “conductor" of the Underground Railroad.
- Francis Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)Harper the first African American woman to publish a short story, but she was also an influential abolitionist, suffragist, and reformer that co-founded the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.
- Lucy Craft Laney (1854-1933)Laney founded Haines Institute for Industrial and Normal Education. a school for Black children, and served as its principal for 50 years.
- Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964)Cooper was a writer, teacher, and activist who championed education for African Americans and women. In 1924, she received her PhD from the Sorbonne, University of Paris.
- Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954)Terrell was an African American activist who championed racial equality and women’s suffrage. She founded the National Association of Colored Women.
- Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955)Bethune was one of the most important black educators, civil and women’s rights leaders and government officials of the twentieth century.
- Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961)In 1909 Burroughs opened the National Training School for Women and Girls, a private single-sex boarding school in Washington D.C. . She received financial assistance from the National Baptist Convention and its Women’s Auxiliary. She remained a lifelong Baptist and very active in the church’s social circles.
Publications on or by the early Black Women Leaders
Bacon, Margaret Hope. “‘One Great Bundle of Humanity’: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911).” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113, no. 1 (1989): 21–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20092281.
Taylor, Traki L. “'Womanhood Glorified': Nannie Helen Burroughs and the National Training School for Women and Girls, Inc., 1909-1961,” The Journal of African American History 87 (2002): 390-402.
Terrell, Mary Church, 1863-1954. A Colored Woman in the White World (1940).
Williams-Way, Gloria Taylor. “Lucy Craft Laney, the Mother of the Children of the People: Educator, Reformer, Social Activist.” ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1998.
Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by
A monumental biography of one of the most important black women of the nineteenth century. Sojourner Truth first gained prominence at an 1851 Akron, Ohio, women's rights conference, saying, "Dat man over dar say dat woman needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches. . . . Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles . . . and ar'n't I a woman?" Sojourner Truth: ex-slave and fiery abolitionist, figure of imposing physique, riveting preacher and spellbinding singer who dazzled listeners with her wit and originality. Straight-talking and unsentimental, Truth became a national symbol for strong black women--indeed, for all strong women. Like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, she is regarded as a radical of immense and enduring influence; yet, unlike them, what is remembered of her consists more of myth than of personality. Now, in a masterful blend of scholarship and sympathetic understanding, eminent black historian Nell Irvin Painter goes beyond the myths, words, and photographs to uncover the life of a complex woman who was born into slavery and died a legend. Inspired by religion, Truth transformed herself from a domestic servant named Isabella into an itinerant pentecostal preacher; her words of empowerment have inspired black women and poor people the world over to this day. As an abolitionist and a feminist, Truth defied the notion that slaves were male and women were white, expounding a fact that still bears repeating: among blacks there are women; among women, there are blacks. No one who heard her speak ever forgot Sojourner Truth, the power and pathos of her voice, and the intelligence of her message. No one who reads Painter's groundbreaking biography will forget this landmark figure and the story of her courageous life. Photographs
Call Number: Douglass E185.97.T8P35 1996ISBN: 9780393317084
Harriet, the Moses of her People by
n 1869, Sarah Hopkins Bradford published Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. Though often disjointed, this account presented to the public a legendary figure of the Underground Railroad. In 1886, Bradford substantially rewrote the biography at the request of Tubman, who hoped its sales would raise enough funds for the building of a hospital for old and disabled colored people. This second edition, Harriet, the Moses of Her People, provided little new information, but arranged the jumbled narrative of Scenes in chronological order, providing a clearer account.
Call Number: RUonlineISBN: 1469607832
Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction by
Vivian M. May explores the theoretical and political contributions of Anna Julia Cooper, a renowned Black feminist scholar, educator and activist whose ideas deserve far more attention than they have received. Drawing on Africana and feminist theory, May places Cooper's theorizing in its historical contexts and offers new ways to interpret the evolution of Cooper's visionary politics, subversive methodology, and defiant philosophical outlook. Rejecting notions that Cooper was an elitist duped by dominant ideologies, May contends that Cooper's ambiguity, code-switching, and irony should be understood as strategies of a radical methodology of dissent. May shows how across six decades of work, Cooper traced history's silences and delineated the workings of power and inequality in an array of contexts, from science to literature, economics to popular culture, religion to the law, education to social work, and from the political to the personal. May emphasizes that Cooper eschewed all forms of mastery and called for critical consciousness and collective action on the part of marginalized people at home and abroad. She concludes that in using a border-crossing, intersectional approach, Cooper successfully argues for theorizing from experience, develops inclusive methods of liberation, and crafts a vision of a fundamentally egalitarian social imaginary.
Call Number: Douglass HQ1190.M383 2007ISBN: 9780415956420
A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman from the South by
Published in 1892, A Voice from the South is the only book published by one of the most prominent African American women scholars and educators of her era. Born a slave, Anna Julia Haywood Cooper would go on to become the fourth African American woman to earn a doctoral degree. Cooper became a prominent member of the black community in Washington, D.C., serving as principal at M Street High School, during which time she wrote A Voice from the South. In it, she engages a variety of issues, including women's rights, racial progress, segregation, and the education of black women. Cooper also discusses a number of authors and their representations of African Americans, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albion Tourgee, George Washington Cable, William Dean Howells, and Maurice Thompson, reaching the conclusion that an accurate depiction had yet to be written. A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings classic works from the digital library of Documenting the American South back into print. DocSouth Books uses the latest digital technologies to make these works available in paperback and e-book formats. Each book contains a short summary and is otherwise unaltered from the original publication. DocSouth Books provide affordable and easily accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.
Call Number: RUonlineISBN: 9781469633312Publication Date: 2017 (Orignally published in 1892)
Mary Mcleod Bethune and Black Women's Political Activism by
Mary McLeod Bethune was a significant figure in American political history. She devoted her life to advancing equal social, economic, and political rights for blacks. She distinguished herself by creating lasting institutions that trained black women for visible and expanding public leadership roles. Few have been as effective in the development of women's leadership for group advancement. Despite her accomplishments, the means, techniques, and actions Bethune employed in fighting for equality have been widely misinterpreted. Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women's Political Activism seeks to remedy the misconceptions surrounding this important political figure. Joyce A. Hanson shows that the choices Bethune made often appear contradictory, unless one understands that she was a transitional figure with one foot in the nineteenth century and the other in the twentieth. Bethune, who lived from 1875 to 1955, struggled to reconcile her nineteenth-century notions of women's moral superiority with the changing political realities of the twentieth century. She used two conceptually distinct levels of activism--one nonconfrontational and designed to slowly undermine systemic racism, the other openly confrontational and designed to challenge the most overt discrimination--in her efforts to achieve equality. Hanson uses a wide range of never- or little-used primary sources and adds a significant dimension to the historical discussion of black women's organizations by such scholars as Elsa Barkley Brown, Sharon Harley, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. The book extends the current debate about black women's political activism in recent work by Stephanie Shaw, Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. Examining the historical evolution of African American women's activism in the critical period between 1920 and 1950, a time previously characterized as "doldrums" for both feminist and civil rights activity, Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women's Political Activism is important for understanding the centrality of black women to the political fight for social, economic, and racial justice.
Call Number: Dana E185.97.B34H36 2003. & RUonlineISBN: 9780826214515Publication Date: 2003-03-14
