A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America by Darlene Clark Hine & Kathleen Thompson

Author:Darlene Clark Hine & Kathleen Thompson [Hine, Darlene Clark & Thompson, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: History, United States, Biography & Autobiography, Cultural Heritage, African American Women
ISBN: 9780307568229
Google: D514t4eNcssC
Publisher: Broadway Books
Published: 1998-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

LIFTING AS WE CLIMB

The term “woman’s club” usually conjures visions of sweet-faced ladies in flowered hats sipping tea, usually because they have nothing better to do with their time on a weekday afternoon. This image has never been particularly accurate, even of white women’s clubs. With regard to black women’s clubs it could hardly be further from the truth—except, probably, for the flowered hats. The thousands of organizations black women formed to promote the welfare of their community were a very different proposition. In the late nineteenth century, the black community was faced with poverty, illiteracy, and discrimination on a massive scale. When black women found that white governmental agencies and other organizations had no intention of providing services to the communities in which they lived and worked, they stepped into the void. It was a monumental task.

One city might have ten women’s organizations, another twelve or thirteen. In Richmond, Virginia, there were twenty-five “female benevolent orders,” the most historically significant being the Independent Order of St. Luke. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, these organizations went in two enormously important, and very different, directions. The Order of St. Luke and others like it became instruments for economic self-determination, while still others grew into the influential black women’s club movement. Out of both of these came women of great power.

Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., were the centers of what would eventually become the national black women’s club movement. Along with Philadelphia and, to a lesser degree, some southern cities, these three were the homes of the black elite. Here, in conservatively affluent homes, lived the daughters and granddaughters of families that had been free for generations, building modest fortunes. Here were wives of respectable black working men—barbers, porters, postal workers. And here, too, were the dressmakers and hairdressers who made up such a significant proportion of the black entrepreneurial class.

In Washington, these women gathered at the Bethel Literary and Historical Society to hear the great women leaders and speakers of the day, including Mary Ann Shadd Cary, temperance lecturer Hallie Q. Brown, and educator Anna Julia Cooper. In 1892, members of the Bethel group joined with others in Washington to form the Colored Woman’s League of Washington, D.C. That same year, a group of New York’s black women leaders honored Ida B. Wells-Barnett at a testimonial dinner. Out of that meeting came two important clubs—the Woman’s Loyal Union and the Woman’s Era Club of Boston, founded by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin. Within a few years after the founding of these clubs, two events, involving exclusion and slander, led to the formation of the national black women’s club movement.

In the early 1890s, the United States proclaimed that it would host a world’s fair, the biggest, most spectacular one ever. Almost immediately, white feminist Susan B. Anthony set to work. Determined that the fair would include representation for women, she brought a group of socially acceptable feminists together with a group of influential Washington ladies in a parlor of the Riggs House in Washington, D.

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