Words of Fire (5 page)

Five years after the General Federation of Women's Clubs was organized, the first national convention of black women's clubs took place in Boston in 1895. The specific catalyst was a letter that Florence Belgarnie, an officer of the Anti-Lynching Committee in London, received from John Jacks, an American newspaper editor. Angry over Belgarnie's antilynching activities, which had been encouraged by Ida Wells Barnett's antilynching crusade in England, Jacks wrote her a letter defending the white South and maligning black women for their immorality. In turn, Belgarnie sent a copy of the letter to Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a black member of the largely white New England Women's Club and founder, in 1893, of the New Era Club for black women. Later she distributed the letter to numerous black women's clubs and called for a national conference in Boston in 1895, which resulted in the formation of the National Federation of Afro-American Women.

When this historic gathering of black clubwomen occurred, a number of items were on the agenda—temperance, higher education, home life, morality, and education for girls and boys—however, it was also clear that black female empowerment for individual and race advancement was the overriding objective:

An important goal of the meeting was vindicating the honor of black women and denouncing Jacks. In 1896, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was formed as a result of a merger between the Federation and Mary Church Terrell's National League of Colored Women of Washington, D.C.

A pivotal moment in black women's publishing history and the coming of age politically for clubwomen occurred with the founding of
Women's
Era. In 1890, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin organized the New Era Club in Boston and initiated its journal, which eventually became the official organ of the NACW. The first issue came out March 24, 1894, and twenty-four issues were published through 1897. Since it was founded, edited, and published by suffragist Ruffin, it is not surprising to find in the publication a strong advocacy of woman suffrage, especially for black women.

The front page of the first issue carried a portrait and feature article on the women's rights leader Lucy Stone. The first issue also contained an article on the closing meetings of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, of which Ruffin was a member. There was also strong advocacy for black women entering the public arena in order to solve their unique problems. An awareness of the dilemma that black women faced as a result of the “double jeopardy” of race and gender is apparent throughout
Women's Era,
the most significant outlet for the expression of their political views and aspirations during the Progressive era.

In 1892, clubwoman and educator Anna Julia Cooper published
A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South,
the first book-length feminist analysis of the condition of African Americans. Cooper was born a slave during the Civil War, in Raleigh, North Carolina. At the age of eight, she attended St. Augustine's Normal School and eventually became a teacher there. An early manifestation of her sensitivity to sexism was her protesting female students' exclusion from Greek classes, which were only open to male theology students. She boldly appealed to the principal and was finally granted permission to enroll as the lone female. Her experiences with respect to male privilege at St. Augustine awakened in her a sensitivity to the urgent need for gender equality in the educational arena.

Cooper's collection of essays, many of which were speeches delivered to black organizations, is also a progressive discussion of the oppressed status of black women. Not content with simply describing their plight, she argued that black women needed to speak out for themselves and stop allowing others, including black men, to speak for them. Commenting on black women's unique status, she advanced the argument of “double jeopardy,” since black women experienced both gender and race problems.

A strong advocate for black women's liberation, Cooper was especially concerned about the accessibility of higher education for black women. She also felt that elevating the status of black women would uplift the entire black race, a persistent theme in the writings of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell (the first president of NACW), both of whom consistently espoused feminist ideas in their speeches and articles. Cooper was critical of black men who were unsupportive of black female equality, and she frequently spoke at black male gatherings about the importance of women in the struggle for racial uplift. In fact, she believed that women, because of their special qualities and moral values, should be in the forefront
of the fight for racial equality. Though she was aware of the double burden of race and gender which was particular to black women, she also felt that black women shared many problems with black males, because of racial oppression, that white women did not share with their men. Cooper also analyzed relationships between black men and women and the problematic nature of those retationships—an analysis that links her to contemporary black feminists.

The next generation of clubwomen would continue and expand the work that Ruffin and Cooper initiated. NACW member Nannie Burroughs (1879-1961), who had Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper for teachers and role models at M Street High School in Washington, D.C., worked for the race and for women within a religious context. One of the founders of the Women's Convention, an auxiliary group of the National Baptist Convention and the largest membership organization of black women in the United States, she attended the founding meeting in 1900 in Richmond, Virginia, and spoke when she was only twenty-one on “How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping.” This feminist critique of sexism within the church catapulted her into national prominence.
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A strong advocate for woman suffrage, she also criticized the church for failing to assist in the political development of women, and argued in the
Crisis
(August 1915), the official organ for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that the vote would enable women to fight male dominance. In 1909, she founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C., which stressed industrial education because she wanted to prepare black women for employment in areas that were open to them.

A few years later, in 1914, the outbreak of World War I precipitated a number of advocacy efforts for the many working women who were leaving domestic service in the South for jobs in northern industry. These included the founding of the Women Wage Earners Association in Washington, D.C., by clubwomen such as Mary Church Terrell and Julia F. Coleman, and efforts to unionize black women workers. After the War ended in 1918, black women found themselves in desperate straits economically given their loss of jobs after the men returned home from Europe. Nannie Burroughs's concern for the plight of black working-class women, particularly domestic servants, resulted in her organizing the National Association of Wage Earners, in 1920. Her intense feelings of racial pride were also manifested in her rejection of white standards of beauty, and she accused her sisters of “color phobia” if they used hair straighteners and skin bleachers. After the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1919, she worked with the NACW to mobilize black women voters and in 1924 became president of the National League of Republican Colored Women.

During this same period, the International Council of Women of the
Darker Races (which sometimes met in Washington, D.C., at Nannie Burroughs's school) was spawned by the racial uplift impulses and the international educational projects of the black women's club movement. Organized by several club women in 1924, most notably Margaret Murray Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Woman's Club and President of NACW from 1914-1918, its purpose was to study the history of peoples of color throughout the world and disseminate knowledge about them for the purpose of engendering racial pride. Study groups, which were called Committees of Seven, were also formed to infuse public school curricula with material on blacks (a precursor of Black Studies) and other people of color and field trips were organized to gain firsthand experience of other cultures.

The council also studied the situation of women and children of color internationally. Like Cooper, who mentioned Muslim harems and the Chinese practice of foot binding on the first page of
A Voice from the South,
council members were aware of the differential experiences of women because of their travel to international conferences. Washington taught a course at Tuskegee Institute on the condition and status of women throughout the world. The Pan-African Congress, which stressed the unity of all African peoples, was organized in 1919 in Paris by William E. B. Du Bois, a strong supporter of black women's liberation. Cooper, who spoke on “The Negro Problem in America,” was one of only two black women to address this international gathering of people of African descent. The council also cosponsored with the Chicago Women's Club a fund-raising activity to support Pan-Africanist feminist Adelaide Casely-Hayford's efforts to build a school in Sierra Leone. She was married to a prominent Ghanaian lawyer who edited
Gold Coast Leader,
a leading Pan-Africanist publication. This work of the council is reminiscent of more recent attempts by black feminist activists to learn about and establish linkages with women of color internationally and to struggle for the elimination of sexism and racism globally. In 1960, for example, African American women attended the First Conference of African Women and Women of African Descent held in Accra, Ghana, in July 1960.

A frequently overlooked aspect of black women's activism during this period, especially within the context of Pan-Africanism or nationalism, was their battle against gender oppression, though black liberation would be their major priority. In 1925, Elise McDougald, Harlem teacher and journalist, discussed the economic plight of a particular class of African American Women. She also acknowledged that black women's “feminist efforts are directed chiefly toward the realization of the equality of the races, the sex struggle assuming a subordinate place” (McDougald, “The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation”
Survey Graphic
L111 [October 1924—March 1925].) This granting of greater
urgency to racial concerns was predictable given the pervasiveness of white supremacy.

The feminist-Pan-Africanist views of Amy Jacques Garvey (1896-1973), Marcus Garvey's second wife, are especially important to consider during this period because of their potential impact on thousands of working class urban blacks involved with the most powerful nationalist organization in the United States—the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which her husband founded in Jamaica in 1914 with his first wife, Amy Ashwood.
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As a young man, Marcus was outraged by the exploitation of blacks in the Caribbean. A trip to London in 1912 brought him in contact with Africans who inspired him to struggle against colonialism. When he returned to Jamaica, he organized the UNIA for the promotion of racial solidarity and self-determination among African peoples throughout the world. From the beginning, women were crucial in the hierarchy of the organization, and women's issues were discussed, among them the question of whether a woman's intellect was as highly developed as a man's. Scholars of the Garvey movement also agree that a distinguishing characteristic of the UNIA was the opportunity it provided for black women's political development.

As editor from 1924-1927 of the Women's Page of the
Negro World,
the UNIA's weekly newspaper, Amy Jacques Garvey wrote passionately in “Our Women and What They Think” about the evils of imperialism, racism, capitalism, and the interlocking race, class, and gender oppression that black and other women experienced globally, particularly in colonial contexts. She believed the women's movement was one of the most significant struggles in human history, and that the emancipation of women was imperative. She called for women to participate in all spheres of public life despite their important duties as wives and mothers. She also felt that women were central to the success of black liberation struggles both in the United States and abroad, and she urged them to struggle against imperialist domination as well as their own oppression within their communities.

Echoing Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia Cooper, she espoused a feminist vision of the world in which women would set things right: “You [men] had your day at the helm of the world, and a pretty mess you have made of it... and perhaps women's rule will usher in the era of real brotherhood, when national and racial lines will disappear, leaving mankind in peace and harmony one with another” (Garvey,
Negro World,
1926, 5). She also had a special warning for black men: “... watch your step! Ethiopia's queens will reign again and her Amazons protect her shores and people. Strengthen your shaking knees and move forward, or we will displace you and lead on to victory and glory” (Lerner, 579). Concerned about the status of women globally, particularly in Asia and Africa, she applauded Egyptian women's removal of the veil and women's political
gains in India, Russia, and China. A “training ground for black feminists of the 1930s,” both in the United States and Jamaica (Lewis and Bryan, 82), the UNIA deserves a place in the history of black feminism in the diaspora.

Despite the decline in black fertility rates since the turn of the century, advocating for birth control was another black feminist agenda item during the 1920s and 1930s.
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It is important to point out that the covert use among slave women of contraceptives and abortifacients was perhaps the earliest manifestation of black women's exercising reproductive freedom, a major demand of contemporary feminists. Having fewer children was a deliberate choice of some women to enhance their family's standard of living as well as a strategy espoused in the black press for ensuring the community's economic well-being, particularly during the Depression. Black women also had a feminist perspective on excessive childbearing, linking it to burdensome physical and mental problems, and were also concerned about sterilization abuse. On a national level, Margaret Sanger, prominent white birth control crusader, launched a major campaign in 1915 to legalize the dissemination of information about birth control methods and founded the American Birth Control League in 1921.
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The Women's Political Association of Harlem, founded in 1918 and concerned about all aspects of black women's leadership, was the first black organization to advocate birth control, though numerous birth control clinics appeared nationwide in the black community from 1925-1945. The Association also supported Sanger's desire to establish a birth control clinic in Harlem. In September 1919 Sanger's
Birth Control Review
published a special issue on “The New Emancipation: The Negroes' Need for Birth Control, as Seen by Themselves.” This issue included the work of black women writers—a feminist play by Mary Burrill,
They That Sit in Darkness,
which dramatizes the tragedy of too many children, and a short story, “The Closing Door,” by Angelina Weld Grimke, the niece of the white Grimke sisters who were famous feminist-abolitionists.