Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  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.6 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), Ma
rcus 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.7 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.8 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 1921.9 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.

  The two most important civil rights organizations in the black community—the National Urban League and the NAACP—supported the use of birth control because they believed that smaller families were more viable economically. This issue sparked controversy, however, within certain circles as nationalist concerns about racial extinction and traditional male views about women’s primary role as mothers clashed with feminist demands for sexual autonomy among black women. There was a range of attitudes among black leaders on this issue. Marcus Garvey felt that contraceptives were retarding the growth of the race. Sociologist and Pan-Africanist William E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, argued in “The Damnation of Women” (1925) that women must be free to choose motherhood, and he repeated this progressive stance in “Black Folks and Birth Control” in the June 1932 issue of Birth Control Review.

  Concern for black working women also fueled black women’s activism during the 1940s and the aftermath of World War II. Because of the labor shortage with men at war, thousands of black women left the rural South again and migrated to the North for better jobs in industry. The promise of a better life remained elusive, however, since they were relegated to the most menial, hazardous, low-paying factory jobs. Poor living conditions in crowded urban settings, job discrimination, the absence of child care facilities, and segregated, substandard housing produced a climate ripe for agitation.

  One of the most radical voices during this era was Claudia Jones, whose family had migrated to Harlem from Trinidad in 1924. Economic hardship during the Depression caused her to drop out of school and get a factory job. At age eighteen, she joined the Young Communist League along with many other working-class Harlemites during the 1930s. During the 1940s, she became one of the most outspoken black Communists on the issue of women’s rights; in a 1947 issue of Political Affairs, a Communist Party journal, she argued that black women, “as workers, as Negroes, and as women,” were “the most oppressed stratum of the whole population” (Jones, 4). In her passionate analysis of the situation of black women historically, the plight of the contemporary worker, and the struggles of militant “Negro women” for peace, civil rights, and economic justice, she anticipated a sophisticated black feminist discourse which was a generation away. Though she applauded women in organizations such as the National Association of Negro Women and trade unionists, she chastised the latter for being insensitive to the misery and urgent needs of domestic workers who were unprotected by labor legislation. She also made an insightful connection between the sexist treatment of black domestics and the dehumanizing treatment of black women in general. Reminiscent of Cooper and other nineteenth-century black women feminist-abolitionists, she exposed the racism of white women and reminded them that it was in their own selfinterest to work for black women’s liberation “inasmuch as the super exploitation and oppression of Negro women tends to depress the standards of all women” (Jones, 12). Her prophetic call for the women’s movement to embrace an antiracist agenda anticipated similar pleas by black feminists two generations later. “A developing consciousness on the woman question today ... must not fail to recognize that the Negro question ... is prior to, and not equal to, the woman question; that only to the extent that we fight all chauvinist expressions and actions as regards the Negro people, and [the] right for the full equality of the Negro people, can women as a whole advance their struggle for equal rights” (Jones, 15).

  In the 1960s, black feminist struggle came to the forefront in a more sustained manner an
d among a larger group, mainly as a result of the failure of the Civil Rights and women’s rights movements to address the particular concerns of black women. Heightened consciousness about the confluence of racism and sexism in their lives was one result of their experiences with male chauvinism within the Civil Rights movement. In her autobiography, The Trumpet Sounds (1964), Anna Arnold Hedgeman describes her feelings about the male-dominant civil rights leadership and her experiences as the only woman on the planning committee for the 1963 March on Washington. When she discovered the omission of women as speakers on the program, she was appalled and wrote a letter to director A. Philip Randolph in which she alluded to black women’s important roles in the Civil Rights movement. She also argued that “since the ‘Big Six’ [civil rights leaders] [had] not given women the quality of participation which they [had] earned through the years,” (Hedgeman, 179), it was even more imperative that black women be allowed to speak. The outcome, according to Hedgeman, was that on the day of the March the wives of the civil rights leaders and a few other black women were asked to sit on the dais, Daisy Bates was asked to say a few words, and Rosa Parks was presented, but didn’t speak. Hedgeman’s response that historic day was one of disappointment: “We grinned, some of us, as we recognized anew that Negro women are second-class citizens in the same way that white women are in our culture” (Hedgeman, 180).