Combining Forces: Unity in National, State, and City Colored Women’s Clubs

National Organizations

Founded in 1896, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs better known as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) united elite and middle-class black women from across the country, combining smaller organizations of women’s clubs to pool resources and to increase their influence as a unified body of organizers and activists. Its motto “Lifting as we climb” demonstrated the organization’s commitment to both improving the material conditions and treatment of the United States’ impoverished black population and working towards political and social rights for themselves as black women deeply familiar with their subordination due to their race and gender. Mary Church Terrell served as its first president. In August of 1916, it appears that Eartha M. M. White engaged with the NACW’s leadership, attending its 10^th biennial meeting in Baltimore, Maryland from which she obtained a program. By 1916, educator Margaret Murray Washington, also known as Mrs. Booker T. Washington in this program, was the 5^th president of the NACW. Other national figures like Mary B. Talbert, vice president of the NACW at the time, and Mary McCleod Bethune appear in the program as well. The event was a display of the wide variety of skills among black clubwomen. They performed music, directed pageants, delivered speeches, and debated in discussion panels alongside the more formal proceedings of managing the organization conducted by the officers of the NACW.

The national scope of the NACW gave its meeting a national scope in the range of its discussed topics. Black clubwomen discussed the state of their clubs and issues related to specific material needs facing African Americans around the country, like the status of black rural workers, child welfare, and the education of young girls. Discussion of important social and political movements of early 20^th century America appeared through the conference. One discussion focused on activism within the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement or the W.C.T.U. promoting prohibition. Many black clubwomen supported prohibition and collaborated with the W.C.T.U. or even joined it. However, they faced discrimination and segregation within the southern chapters of the organization. White W.C.T.U. members also often blamed black members and their black communities for failures to win elections prohibiting alcohol. The evening session on August 10^th, 1916 was exclusively dedicated to the “civic responsibility” of black women and discussing women’s suffrage. The fight for women’s suffrage also could be unwelcome for black women as white southern suffragists influenced national leadership and some rhetoric supporting women’s right to vote scapegoated black Americans. These discussion panels served as a place for black women to strategize navigating spaces and movements dominated by powerful white women and to debate the benefits of doing so.

As bourgeois black women, they were also concerned with “uplift” and “race improvement.” Two entire sessions in the program were dedicated to these topics. While the NACW considered the NAACP one of the “National Organizations of Uplift” that attended, that category was not exclusive to civil rights activism. “Uplift” could mean raising the standard of living for black communities in the U.S. but also possessed connotations related to bourgeois standards of behavior that both the white and black middle class adopted. Some presentations illustrated the impulse among black clubwomen to alleviate the worst of poverty from among the communities they served. However, the immoral peril of the urban environment and the single woman living alone presented another obstacle to equality in the eyes of respectable clubwomen. The presentation “Raising the Moral Status of the Race” demonstrated how, accepting the standards and accusations of moral inferiority of the white bourgeois, elite black women perceived their responsibility as moral race leaders like their male counterparts. Such efforts helped build the elite construction of respectable black womanhood, a public figure who maintained certain standards of charity, service, and morality. While contemplating the meanings of their racial and gender identities, these clubwomen continued their regular club activities. The NACW offered opportunities to explore the meaning and limits of black women’s influence and authority on the national and smaller levels.