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This chapter argues that the role of the National Association of Colored Women in early law-related civil rights activism should be reconceptualized to emphasize the importance of African American club women's work in pushing the boundaries of the public/private divide. These activists built private social welfare institutions to serve African Americans' communities excluded from the benefits of the emerging social welfare state—as a first step that utilized the avenues for agency presented by the political conditions of the times—and then often followed up these efforts with requests that the public institutions of the state take over or fund institutions built through private, voluntarist efforts.

The fifth chapter centers on the turn of the century when suffrage organizations began forming national visual campaigns. They debated what political women should look like. Were they respectable older leaders or young picketing activists? Caring white mothers or refined black intellectuals? In 1896, Mary Church Terrell became the first president of the National Association of Colored Women. She and the NACW articulated a vision for respectable, educated black political womanhood. Black suffragists largely relied on an often-ambivalent black press for distributing their pictures. Comparatively well-funded white suffragists of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and National American Woman Suffrage Association formed press committees to design propaganda that pictured them as beautiful, patriotic mothers, obscuring black women’s activism.

Chapter six contrasts the emphasis on idealized femininity embraced by leading white and black women with the demonstrations carried out by their militant counterparts. In the 1910s, suffragists took advantage of new halftone technology, which allowed for the printing of photographs in newspapers. Borrowing publicity tactics from labor activists and British suffragists, Alice Paul staged parades and pickets to ensure media coverage. The National American Woman Suffrage Association condemned the protests carried out by Paul and her National Woman’s Party. Public protests were often segregated too, and the National Association of Colored Women advised against participation in favor of more respectable—and safer—activism. Suffragists won support by winning over the popular press, keeping the cause in the news with dramatic protests, and mounting propaganda campaigns that transformed dominant representations of female citizens.

This chapter examines women's voluntary associations' role in mobilization. It examining the Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense, the Young Women's Christian Association, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the National Association of Colored Women, and the American Red Cross, it analyzes the way in which women activists conjoined the war emergency to their own goals of staking their claim to full citizenship, and continuing their reform agendas begun in the Progressive reform era. As they did so, white women invoked “maternalism” and emphasized the instrumental role that women played in protecting the family. African American activists similarly focused on the centrality of women citizens, but did so in the specific context of racial uplift. Their engagement in meaningful war work encouraged them to view the war – over optimistically as it turned out – as an opportunity to achieve both long-standing reform goals and an enhanced role for women in public life.

This chapter expands the intellectual geography mapped in Beyond Respectability by examining the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) as a site of Black female knowledge production. In particular, this chapter uses the work of Fannie Barrier Williams, a Chicago based clubwoman, to map many of the key intellectual interventions of the NACW as a school of social thought. Drawing on Williams’ theorization of what she calls organized anxiety, Brittney Cooper takes up and critically examines her claim that the NACW was responsible for creating “race public opinion” and, by extension, giving shape and form to an emergent Black public sphere. As a concept, organized anxiety politicizes the emotional lives of Black women and constitutes one more iteration of the ways that race women invoked embodied discourse in their public intellectual work. The chapter also examines Williams’s invocation of a discourse the author terms American peculiarity, a kind of oppositional discourse challenging claims of American exceptionalism. Finally, the chapter interrogates her concept of racial sociality, a sophisticated way to think about ideas of racial unity and social connections between African Americans of different geographic and class backgrounds. Williams was a formidable political theorist, who, through her work in the NACW, introduced a rich conceptual milieu through which to think about Black politics, Black organizations, and gender politics in the late nineteenth century.

Chapter three provides a detailed study of black and white clubwomen’s efforts to eliminate convict leasing. Central to the comparative analysis of the National Association of Colored Women and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union is their divergent approaches to the rape of black women by prison guards. This chapter engages the complexities of reform and respectability in southern women’s organizational politics in the early twentieth century.

Chapter 4 discusses Walker’s gift of political and social activism and her leveraging of the number and voices of her agents to challenge Jim Crow. In a manner reflective of leading black women’s clubs and fraternal organizations of the day, Madam Walker organized her sales agents into local clubs and a national umbrella association to legitimize beauty culture as a profession, strengthen relations between them, and enlist them in doing charity and advocacy work in their communities that would last long after her death. The National Beauty Culturists’ and Benevolent Association of Madam C. J. Walker Agents, Inc., developed a model of associationalism, ritualism, and activism that galvanized Walker agents to serve their communities and the cause of racial uplift. Through it, agents regularly donated money to black schools and other organizations, held fundraising events, organized programs, and cared for the vulnerable in their communities. Together, they sent a resolution to President Woodrow Wilson demanding legislative action against lynching. The chapter reviews Walker’s unique ability to interact with black women across class differences, as exhibited by her engagement of working-class women in her agent clubs and the elite black women of the era through the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Through these clubs and their rituals, Walker agents staked claims for themselves as respectable professionals, performed charitable works in black communities, and used their formidable numbers to speak out against lynching and Jim Crow.

This book examines the involvement of women in the fight against racism and segregation which was prevalent in the United States during the early twentieth century. While criticisms on the perceived dichotomy of the stand on racism and segregation of African Americans from the Caucasians existed, this book does not provide any suggestion of the advantage of integrationalism or black nationalism over one another, rather it looks on these two perceived different stands on race divide as a complex, rather than dichotomous, and multiple, rather that a singular, strategy; and it sees interdependent, rather than mutually exclusive, philosophies against racial discrimination. In this book, the involvement of prominent black women, their contributions and their strategies that helped define black feminist thought and curb the racial issue, is examined and analyzed. This book focuses on the political thought and activism exhibited by black women between the founding of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. Evaluation of the literary endeavors, the activism, and entrepreneurship of some of the prominent women showed that black women challenged the existing dichotomy on the stand against racial discrimination, developed the black feminist tradition, and shaped black nationalism within the feminist framework. Among the studied black women include clubwomen Margaret Murray Washington, Nannie hellen Burroughs and Mary McLeod Bethune; black women leaders Eva Bowles and Cecilia Cabaniss; entrepreneurs Madam J. Walker and A'Lelia Walker; and writers such as Amy Jacques Garvey and Jessie Fauset.