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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.

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 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 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.

This chapter explores the National Council of Negro Women's (NCNW) international work, focusing especially on NCNW's postwar work for human rights and its later formation of an international division in the 1970s. In 1973 Congress passed the Percy Amendment to the U.S. Foreign Service Act that pushed the U.S. government to ensure that women were beneficiaries of international development projects. In this climate, NCNW won $1.7 million dollars in funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) between 1975 and 1985. The U.S. government saw the women of the NCNW, as a black American women-led nonprofit organization, as the "natural allies" of women of African descent worldwide. With this money, the NCNW first hosted a concurrent conference for women of African descent at the International Women's Year conference in Mexico City, established an international division, and tried to create international poverty programming like it had in Mississippi.

A lifelong civil rights activist, Anna Pauline Murray’s Odyssean journey began on November 20, 1910, in Baltimore, Maryland. Murray was adopted and raised by her aunt in Durham, North Carolina. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College in 1933, one of four African American women to graduate in a class of 247. When she attempted to take up graduate studies at the University of North Carolina, her application was denied and the NAACP would not take up her case. She also applied for Harvard’s master of laws program, but she was not accepted because she was a woman. On November 14, 1963, Murray spoke at the National Council of Negro Women’s Leadership Conference held in Washington D.C. This chapter includes Murray’s speech, in which she talked about the burden carried by African American women and cited Gunnar Myrdal’s account of the myth of female contentment with disenfranchisement. She also analyzed how the plight of the African American and American families is reinforced by race, gender, and educational distributions.

Chapter Two explains how WIMS organizers Dorothy Height, a black Christian woman, and Polly Cowan, a white Jewish woman, met and developed WIMS. Following the arrest of 300 youth working on voter registration in Selma, Alabama, SNCC asked the NCNW for help. Height, Cowan, and two other women (one white and one black) traveled to Selma and met with the young people. That meeting was a success, but the two white women failed miserably at building a bridge with southern white women when their northern ways backfired. The prototype for WIMS came from this valuable lesson. This chapter discusses the Women’s Inter-organizational Committee meeting, called in response to the Selma experience, of leaders from national women’s organizations in southern cities. Here, women from Jackson, Mississippi, led by Clarie Collins Harvey, asked the NCNW to bring women to their community to act as a “ministry of presence” to reduce racial tensions.

Recognizing the limitations of Wednesdays in Mississippi's personal approach to creating racial change, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) helped WIMS re-envision itself as "Workshops in Mississippi." Workshops in Mississippi connected grassroots, local, and impoverished women with government officials and private foundations to help the women implement self help programs. Also, following NCNW's securing of tax-exempt status in May 1966 (retroactively to December 1965), it won a $300,000 Ford Foundation grant for Project Womanpower, a program to bring together black women across to the country to strengthen their community activism. Finally, NCNW created the Commission on Community Cooperation, which hosted a series of workshops in the aftermath of the 1967 Newark and Patterson rebellions. Through these workshops in the late 1960s, NCNW leadership embraced a new model of community expert as a local and/or impoverished woman who understood poverty first-hand.

This chapter examines the first summer of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW)-sponsored civil rights organization Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS). WIMS brought down forty-eight black and white, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic women from northern and Midwestern cities to personally witness and provide support for the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, sponsored by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). WIMS relied on a behind-the-scenes approach that did not publicly challenge segregation, but sought to quietly reason with local women to support civil rights activists fighting for voting rights and desegregation of schools, businesses, and other facilities. Although the strategy of personal witness proved limited, WIMS helped connect NCNW to local black activists in Mississippi who advocated for more direct action protests and planted the seeds for a later change of NCNW's direction.

This chapter examines the second and third years of Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS), an interracial, interfaith civil rights organization sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). In the summer of 1965, around fifty black and white, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic women returned to Mississippi to help with Head Start, the newly formed War on Poverty program. Despite increased activist calls for more participation and leadership from the grassroots and poor, WIMS continued to promote its elite pedigree by highlighting its members' expertise in teaching, social work, librarianship, and child development. In 1966, WIMS began to shift its focus to bridge building in the North, promoting the liberal strategy of interracial and interfaith conversations as a method to create personal change and combat racial discrimination. However, by 1966, WIMS leaders began to realize the limitations of such a strategy when they were rebuffed in both Mississippi and Boston.

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 introduction highlights how the current scholarly focus on radical women's activism often overlooks the important bridge-building activism of black moderate and middle class women such as those in the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). These black clubwomen were able to move between mainstream political and business leaders and marginalized activists who often demanded radical solutions to racism and poverty. Black middle class NCNW women not only engaged in community-focused racial uplift, but they also utilized a national network of professional and elite women to bring resources to those who could not attain them on their own. At times, the NCNW was hindered by its focus on respectability, which sometimes limited NCNW's criticism of the United States in order to build and maintain power in mainstream America.

In the fall of 1963, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) took steps to become more directly involved in the civil rights movement when Dorothy Height travelled with a small interracial team of elite clubwomen to investigate the abuse of activist children imprisoned in Selma. The team moved behind the scenes and tried to establish ties with local black and white women to better support the movement. After the Selma trip, white team member Polly Cowan developed plans to bring additional teams of interracial middle and upper class women down to the South. At a March 1964 Atlanta meeting of black and white southern clubwomen, Clarie Collins Harvey, a black businesswoman and clubwoman from Jackson, Mississippi, invited Cowan and the NCNW to provide support to civil rights efforts in Jackson. Her invitation led Cowan and Height to develop plans for Wednesdays in Mississippi to help with Freedom Summer.

Born in New York City in 1903, Kathleen Scofield Louchheim was a talented poet and Democratic activist. Louchheim became a delegate from Washington D.C. to the Democratic National Convention in 1948 and served as an alternate member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) four years later. Perhaps her biggest break came in 1953 when she was appointed Director of Women’s Activities for the DNC, a position she used to encourage women to get involved in all levels of politics. On November 17, 1961, she spoke at the National Council of Negro Women in Washington D.C. This chapter presents Louchheim’s speech, in which she talked about the interracial work that awaits American women and the “weapons” they needed in this endeavor. She also praised Robert Kennedy’s handling of civil rights despite the fact that Bob Moses and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were languishing in a jail in McComb, Mississippi.

Born in 1887 in New York City, Agnes Elizabeth Ernst Meyer lived an extraordinary life as a journalist, philanthropist, civil rights activist, wife, and mother. In 1958, Meyer and her husband Eugene established the Agnes and Eugene Meyer Fund to support professors of Barnard College, where she pursued her education. The following year, Agnes founded the Urban Service Corps, a volunteer mentoring program designed to assist school children in Washington D.C. In 1960, she founded the National Committee for the Support of the Public Schools, serving as chair until her death on September 2, 1970. On November 17, 1956, Agnes E. Meyer addressed the National Council of Negro Women in Washington D.C. This chapter presents Meyer’s speech, in which she called on the women in attendance to take a more rational approach in overcoming the racial obstacles confronting the nation. Meyer criticized racism propagated by unthinking tribalism and sought to counter it with unstinting scientific analysis leavened with humanitarianism.

Following its local workshops in the late 1960s, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) began to create self-help community programs. This chapter focuses on NCNW's programs in Mississippi--a pig bank for Fannie Lou Hamer's Sunflower County Freedom Farm; low-income home ownership (also known as Turnkey III); and childcare centers in Okolona, Ruleville, and Jackson. To fund these programs, the NCNW utilized financial support from public sources--such as the federal government--and private sources--such as foundations, businesses, and voluntary organizations. Drawing upon its new concept of grassroots expertise as well as the War on Poverty concept of "maximum feasible participation" of the poor, the NCNW recruited local civil rights women such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Unita Blackwell to lead these programs that provided black communities with much-needed food, housing, and childcare. The NCNW's efforts boosted Mississippi women's interest in the larger national organization.

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.