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Racial divisions shaped the women’s suffrage movement and inflected much of the journalism that helped suffragists collectively imagine women as political beings, persuade others that women should be directly involved in electoral politics, and secure the vote through ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. These racial divisions proved tragic. If the Nineteenth Amendment ever promised a new era of racial democracy in America, that promise was lost when white suffragists abandoned the citizenship aspirations of black women (and men) in the South to the forces of white supremacy. Henry Grady’s New South ideology veiled coordinated efforts across the Southern states to thwart black political power and institute the “solid South” of white supremacy. In 1920, Mary McLeod Bethune helped lead black Floridians in a voter registration drive—a bold effort to claim black civil rights promised in both the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. The result was violent voter intimidation across the state and a massacre of black citizens in Ocoee.

The travelers—in the past—enjoyed the markets, visited the ladies of the harems, ventured into the baths, and looked onward up the Nile where they were to travel.Cairo, although overwhelming, was—and is—the highlight of any visit to Egypt. Although, of course, much has changed since many of these accounts were written, it has for centuries been a great throbbing city—but, like most cities, a city both with much beauty and excitement and much poverty and hardship.

This book chronicles the struggles of African American women in gaining access to formal education and presents the philosophies of influential black women academics. This book aims to investigate the history of black women in higher education, to interpret the historic relationship between cultural identity and education, and to demonstrate how the struggles of these women on gaining access to education can inspire contemporary educators to modify the academy into a tool that will serve as a catalyst for social equity and opportunity. In this book, the discussion traces the history of the educational struggles of black women wherein they demanded a niche in the academy as students and asserted their voices as educators whereby, despite the challenges and barriers posed by violence, oppressive campus policies and discrimination, they made a significant contribution in the modification and transformation of higher education in the United States. This book examines the lives of Anna Julia Cooper who was born enslaved yet earned a degree from the Sorbonne University and Mary McLeod Bethune who founded the Bethune-Cookman College. These two women exposed the hypocrisy in American notions of democracy and discredited European notions of intellectual superiority. They also worked for the assertion of equality in access to education wherein they contended that education is an inviolable right of all individuals in a democracy. Their philosophies as well brought a question on how human and civil rights were intertwined with education, scholarly research, pedagogy, and community service.

This chapter focuses on research, which is one of the cores of higher education that raises questions of interest on scholarly agenda, curricular focus, pedagogical practice, and responsibilities to communities. This chapter focuses on the contributions of Cooper and Bethune on the definition and modification of research. Although both exhibited parallelism in their ideas of research, knowledge creation, and meaning because of their cultural identities, both also illustrated nuances that separated one from the other. This chapter discusses Cooper's rational approach to research, wherein she argues the logic of faith in God and Bethune's metaphysical research approach, and she claims to have visions and powers from her ancestors.

This chapter discusses the relationship that exists between education and community service. Amidst several existing notions on the means of learning, for the black women educators, the function of education is directly tied to community service. However, some of them do not see service and education in the same manner. Rather, for them, there exists an innate and reciprocal relationship between education, community service, and social justice. This chapter focuses on the identified link between education and advocacy which most black women educational leaders acknowledge. This chapter once again discusses the definition of Cooper and Bethune on service. For Cooper, earning education was a form of service wherein she believes those who earned the privilege of learning owed their gains to the community. Bethune meanwhile believes that community service and social responsibility were the core tenets of higher education. For her, everyone has a communal responsibility, however it is the duty of the middle class to uplift the underprivileged masses. Pragmatism and national progressivism that were prevailing in African American education are discussed as well.

This chapter outlines the stand of the three most prominent clubwomen on the issue of separation and integration movements and strategies on racism. These three women are Margaret Murray Washington, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Mary McLeod Bethune. They all played important roles in forwarding pan-African and civil rights during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter examines the contributions of these women in the national black women's club. Particular attention is given to their works and activities as clubwomen during the 1920s. The chapter also looks into their insistence to choose the elements of integrationationalism and black nationalism while forwarding their pan-Africanist stand which laid and cemented the foundations of black nationalist feminist thought.

This chapter narrates Regina's romances and culminates in her marriage. Regina, like many young women in New York City, had a dating life that was complicated, diverse, and mysterious. She had more than one fiancé, a long distance relationship, a possible affair with a Jewish writer, and a secret lover—the author of a “Dear Reggie” letter who may have been the one she truly loved though her family disapproved of the liaison. During the early years of her marriage, Regina was involved with the local Rho chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, an African American sorority, and served as the president. Famous past and present members of the sorority include Lena Horne, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary Church Terrell, Barbara Jordan, Judith Jamison, Wilma Rudolph, and Nikki Giovanni, among others.

This chapter traces the histories of Afro-Cuban encounters with African Americans after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and narrates the story of Ramiro de la Cuesta, an alumnus of Bethune–Cookman College and a product of Afro-Cuban and African American linkages during the prerevolutionary era. It uses reflections on interviews conducted in Havana to meditate on the meaning of Afro-diasporic encounters in the past, present, and future. The chapter notes that De la Cuesta's experience highlights a bygone era that might have increasing relevance to a new epoch of Cuban–U.S. relations that could be on the horizon.

During the Great Depression, as Terrell campaigned for the Herbert Hoover and the Republican National Committee (RNC), Terrell found it increasingly difficult to gain support for the Party of Lincoln among black voters. As he campaigned by a second term, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, especially, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, were gaining the trust of more African American voters as they saw some relief from New Deal policies. Several black Republican women joined the Democratic Party, including Mary McLeod Bethune, who became a member of FDR’s administration. Terrell’s political loyalties during the 1930s were complicated and often contradictory. She joined Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, lobbying Congress for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Terrell worked, too, with the Communist Party-affiliated International Labor Defense to help free the Scottsboro Nine. Yet she remained committed to the GOP. Her partisan politics even momentarily intersected with those of white Republicans.

Most scholarship on China’s foreign relations during WWII has focused on US-China relations. While this volume breaks fundamentally with that tradition, Diana Lary demonstrates that even a small country such as Canada had a role to play. Individual Canadians such as Norman Bethune were at work in China during WWII, as did missionaries, diplomats, and journalists, while Chinese living in Canada, such as Quan Louie became significant public figures there. In developing a China policy, Canada also moved away from Britain.

A renowned educator, founder of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), and leader of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet, Mary McLeod Bethune is one of the century’s most famous African American women. This essay traces the trajectory of Bethune’s internationalism. In an era dominated by W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, Bethune preached a vision of human rights that was deeply informed by her lifelong mission to better the lives of black women. When the Cold War descended, Bethune remade her internationalism to walk the tightrope of Cold War civil rights. Foregrounding Bethune reveals a black internationalist sphere in which women played a central role and where debates over global conceptions of “full and equal freedom” redefined the quest for equality that shaped American political development in the twentieth century.

Born on July 10, 1875, in Mayesville, South Carolina, Mary McLeod Bethune is one of the most important educators and political leaders of her time. Aside from education, Bethune was also very active in politics. She was involved in a variety of organizations, from the Florida Federation of Colored Women and the NAACP to the Association of American Colleges, the National Urban League, the League of Women, and the Women’s Army for National Defense. In 1935, Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women, a nonprofit group designed to unite disparate black women’s groups throughout America. In 1954, less than one month after the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Bethune delivered a speech in which she argued that America has discovered a new freedom with the ruling—a freedom that she has been cultivating for five decades. This chapter reproduces Bethune’s speech.

Born on August 9, 1883, in Washington D.C., Daisy Adams Lampkin was a lifelong activist, organizer, and fundraiser. Dubbed “Mrs. NAACP,” Lampkin began her career in social justice as a suffragist, joining the Negro Women’s Equal Franchise Federation, later renamed the Lucy Stone League. She was also a charter member of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) and a board member of the National Association of Colored Women. In 1935, she was appointed a national field secretary of the NAACP and joined its Board of Directors in 1947. On November 9, 1955, Lampkin delivered a speech at the annual convention of the NCNW in Washington D.C. This chapter reproduces Lampkin’s speech, in which she eulogized Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the NCNW in 1935. Lampkin used the eulogy as a celebration of black women and their achievements.

This chapter examines the anti-apartheid politics of the Washington-based National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Outlining the organization’s broader commitment to black international politics, it shows how its leadership worked with the State Department as it ought to expand its international activities in this era. As such, the chapter demonstrates how black liberals adapted to the climate of the Cold War when attempting to challenge colonialism overseas. Finally, by tracing the involvement of the NCNW with the African Children’s Feeding Scheme initiative, the chapter documents how highly gendered representations of the African family worked to promote a diasporic consciousness among African Americans. During the 1950s, images of the oppressed African mother, the poor and malnourished African child, and the African family in need of protection were deliberately employed as gendered motifs around which black women could build international alliances.

This chapter takes seriously the concept of Christian brotherhood, which emerged in the early civil rights years as a family language with the potential to undermine hierarchies involving racial difference. Brotherhood (and sometimes sisterhood) became a crucial idea for reformers hoping to get deeper inside human relationships than legal solutions to problems of discrimination seemed to promise. The chapter presents short intellectual studies of individual reformers who used the concept of brotherhood.

This chapter explores the first three decades of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). In 1935, educator, clubwoman, and politician Mary McLeod Bethune founded the NCNW as an organization of black women's organizations to create a united lobbying voice. By utilizing a strategy of broker politics, the NCNW opened up professional opportunities for black women and lobbied for civil rights legislation. NCNW women also enforced strict standards of respectability as they sought such power. While the NCNW claimed to speak on behalf of all black women, a majority of its membership came from black sororities. This college-based membership, as well as the council's focus on black professionalization, meant that many working class women viewed the organization as elitist and uninterested in their concerns. However, beginning in the mid 1950s and continuing through the 1960s, the NCNW became more significantly involved in civil rights and the needs of the poor.

In the late 1960s, the National Council of Negro Women's (NCNW) poverty programs in Mississippi, drew interest to the organization. The NCNW tried to use this enthusiasm to help build its membership in the 1970s. In hopes of building its direct membership, the NCNW tried to push members of its affiliate organizations to become NCNW direct members as well. It also created more local sections at this time. In addition to building its membership, the NCNW continued to sponsor black self help by founding the Women's Center for Education and Career Advancement, sponsoring Operation Sisters United to help girls deemed at risk of delinquency, and advocating for reformed federal food policies. The NCNW's poverty programming also bolstered its reputation as a national organization that could work both with politicians, professionals, and other formal leaders and with working class and radical women.

This chapter discusses Graecismus, a grammar composed in verse by Eberhard of Béthune around 1212. The Graecismus complements the Doctrinale of Alexander of Villa Dei in many ways and is devoted primarily to differentiae (words that need to be distinguished from each other). It uses the system of the parts of speech to bring some order into the cumbersome nature of these terms and advocates a return to the study of Latin words and their meanings in the tradition of Donatus. Graecismus's grammatical teachings on figures and tropes make it closely associated with the contemporary genre of the ars poetriae.