18c black women leadership

1. African American Women of the
post-Reconstruction Civil Rights
Movement
1877-1900

2. • Callie House, an ex-slave and
washerwoman helped formulate the
National ex-slave Mutual Relief, Bounty,
and Pension Association, based in
Nashville, Tennessee. Claiming hundreds of
thousands of members this organization
gave birth to the reparations movement of
the 1890s, a movement demanding
restitution for the unpaid labors of
American slavery. The movement was
furiously supported by anti-racist poor
blacks, and furiously opposed by the same
class racism that had prevented Congress
from giving blacks their 40 acres and a
mule after the Civil War.

3. • Black resistance caused lynchings to spike in
the early 1890s. However, the white lynchers
justified the spike in lynchings as
corresponding to a spike in black crime.
Mississippi-born Memphis journalist Ida B
Wells recoiled from the lynching of friends
and the sheer number of lynchings during
the peak of the era in 1892, when the
number of blacks lynched in the nation
reached a whopping 255 souls. She released
a blazing pamphlet in 1892 called Southern
Horrors: Lynch law and all its phases. From a
sample of 728 lynching reports in recent
years, Wells found that only about a third of
lynching victims had “ever been charged with
rape, to say nothing of those who were
innocent of the charge”. White men were
lying about black on white rape and hiding
their own assault of black women, Wells
raged.

4. • African American scholar Anna Julia Cooper
knew that immoral constructions about
black women hindered them from fully
engaging in the burgeoning Women's Club
moral movement that cascaded across the
1890s. “I sometimes hear of a virtuous
negro woman, but the idea is absolutely
inconceivable to me,” wrote an anonymous
southern white woman in The Independent.
An Oberlin graduate and teacher, Cooper
took it upon herself to defend black
Womanhood and encourage black women's
education in A Voice from the South in
1892. Cooper explained, “She is confronted
by both a woman question and a race
problem, and is as yet an unknown or
unacknowledged factor in both.”

5. • Historian Ibram Kendi claimed, “Washington
gave wealthy whites what they wanted - a
one-man Minstrel show - and they gave him
what he wanted - a check for Tuskegee…
Dubois reinforced as much racism as he struck
down. He discounted the existence of color
discrimination, in effect blaming darker Blacks
for their disproportionate poverty.”
• What is problematic about the fact that women of
color often get less attention than men in history?
• What challenges do women of color face in
society today?

6. • Washington: Economic Self Improvement
• Dubois: Voting Rights and desegregation
• Callie House: Reparations
• Ida Wells: Federal Anti-lynching Law/ self defense
• Anna Julia Cooper: Promoted lack women’s education