The National Association of Colored Women was established in 1896 to further the community support and political efforts of African-American women. By the 1890s, there was a thriving women’s club movement that established and maintained institutions for charity, education, health, and social uplift in African-American communities. Combining a mission to help “uplift the race” with a concern for women’s progress, such groups differed from white women’s clubs by their pointedly political agenda. Faced—like men of their communities—with racial hostility and discrimination in the segregated South and urban North, African-American women sought to find ways to address racial inequality that went beyond pleas for accommodation. The antilynching campaign of Ida B. Wells-Bar-nett, herself an ardent clubwoman, expressed for many their own instinct to challenge the system and fight back against extralegal violence. When the white press in 1895 attacked Barnett and African-American women for “having no sense of virtue and being altogether of no character,” social reformer Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin issued a call for national organization.
At that meeting, women in the Northeast formed the National Federation of African American Women under the leadership of Margaret Murray Washington. At the same time in Washington, D. C., educator Mary Church Terrell and others created the National League of Colored Women. At a national convention in Washington in 1896, the groups merged to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Taking as its motto, “Lifting as We Climb,” the organization had as its goal furthering the work of African-American women’s clubs by using their collective political clout to pressure governments and private businesses to address racial inequality. Terrell was elected the NACW’s first president in 1896.
The work of the league stretched along the lines of charitable drives, civic improvement, public education, and woman SUEERAGE campaigns. Inspired by Terrell’s words that “Self preservation demands that [we] go among the lowly, the illiterate, even the vicious, to whom [we] are bound by ties of race and sex. . . to reclaim them,” the NACW helped to organize and support African-American women’s club efforts nationwide. It recruited thousands of members with the goal of bringing women’s influence to bear on race politics. By 1914, the black women’s club movement had grown to more than 50,000 members in 28 federations and over 1,000 clubs.
The NACW strongly supported woman suffrage as an extension of its goals. Excluded at various times from the work of the National American Woman Sueerage Association due to racial prejudice, the NACW developed its own suffrage strategies and campaigns. As NACW member Adele Hunt Logan proclaimed, “If white American women with all their natural advantages need the ballot . . . how much more do black Americans, both male and female, need the strong defense of the vote to help secure their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” The NACW built support among African Americans, who demonstrated greater support for woman suffrage than in the population at large.
The NACW continued to expand its mission and activities in the years after the granting of woman suffrage in 1920. Working toward the abolition of the poll tax in the South, lobbying for the passage of an antilynching law, and maintaining its efforts in relief, education, and civic improvement, the NACW remained a major force in African-American political and social life throughout the first three decades of the 20th century.
Further reading: Paula Giddings, Where and When I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Morrow, 1984); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
World History
