Women’s Club Movement Attacks Social and Racial Injustice

MARY WHITE OVINGTON, Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder (1932–1933)

The disruptions and unrest industrialization brought as the price for cheap goods and enormous profits inspired women reformers to unite in clubs to define and study social problems. The women’s club movement drew on earlier female reform activities, expanding their maternal roles into the public sphere. Mary White Ovington, cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was a white woman from New York whose family had long supported progressive social causes including women’s rights and civil rights for African Americans. In a series of reminiscences published in the Baltimore Afro-American in the early 1930s, Ovington honored the work of African American women in advancing the cause of racial justice and social progress.

I have written of my work at the NAACP as Branch Director. It led to my speaking before a number of branches, but I did not go far afield until 1920. That year I was invited to attend the annual conference of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) at Denver, Colorado. If I went, my expenses would have to be paid by our Association, so it was arranged that I should do a considerable amount of Branch work on my way to Denver and on my return.

I felt quite professional starting out, not only with the usual suitcase, but also with a briefcase and a typewriter.…

It so happens that I have many friends in the library world and I went to the public library at Omaha to meet one of them. As usual, I found her interested in my work. I think that the Negro does not see the library as a public center as much as he might. Librarians want to please their public and they always welcome the intelligent reader of books. The careful reader would be amazed to know how much careless reading there is, a book taken out, skimmed for a possible thrill, never finished. The demand for fiction in such excess of anything else is disheartening. When, therefore, a colored person comes to the library and asks what recent accessions there have been on the Negro or on race prejudice (two subjects one must be up on), it is a pleasure to the librarian to help him. Many librarians will put the Crisis on their shelves. More than the school, the library could be used to put the race problem before the country. For the more the Negroes take out good books, the more they will be bought.

At Kansas City, Missouri, and at Kansas City, Kansas, I found Mrs. Cook and Mrs. Dwiggan among the unforgettable women who have been loyal to the NAACP. They had many engagements for me to fill, and when I reached Denver I was ready to go to a hotel and rest before the National Association of Colored Women opened its session.

Resting, with me, included taking a walk. I thought I would start to find my way about the city and I walked to the Negro section and back. The altitude hit me on the head! The remainder of the day was spent resting, quite literally. I wish someone would explain why the altitude in the Rockies is more difficult to endure than the altitude in Switzerland.

Mrs. Mary Talbert was the president of the National at that time and opened the session with her usual dignity and sincerity. She was then engaged in the prodigious and successful work of saving the Frederick Douglass home. I had the honor of knowing Mrs. Talbert and of visiting her at Buffalo in her old-fashioned home, and I want to pay tribute to one of the most intelligent workers with whom I have ever cooperated. She worked untiringly for the NACW. She worked for the NAACP investigating jim crow1 conditions in Texas, starting branches, and encouraging those already existing. When James Weldon Johnson became secretary, she organized a woman’s auxiliary that made possible his great work against lynching.

The women turned in, not hundreds, but thousands of dollars. They made possible our spectacular page in the New York Times headed “The Shame of America.” They aroused their public to give us money. Mrs. Talbert worked to her physical limit. But her spirit refused to recognize this limit and she ended her life through zeal for service.

My readers know a great deal more about the National Association of Colored Women than I do. Some know it from the inside with its discouragements and jealousies. I saw it at its best, but, making all allowance for the optimism of reports, I was profoundly moved by the character and amount of work done. My impressions, as a white woman conversant with social work, may be of interest.

Two existing women’s organizations formed the NACW, one of them, the National Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. Perhaps because this was a New England movement, the National Federation was the name in my mind when I went to Denver and I expected to meet with women’s clubs somewhat similar to the clubs among whites with which I was familiar.

My mother joined the Brooklyn Woman’s Club when I started, and when only one other woman’s club could claim priority, Sorosis, of New York. These clubs were frankly cultural. Women had few opportunities then for education and the club was intended to keep up their reading and study, to give them something beside the daily household round. My generation, that had more opportunity for education, looked down on these clubs and made fun of the papers that discussed Roman history in half an hour or covered the field of painting in one session. Clubs like this, I do not doubt, were in the National Federation of New England and in Washington and other cities. But the National Association of Colored Women, as I met with it, was not working along cultural lines but along social service lines. It was starting kindergartens and day nurseries and looking after old people. And it was raising money, in nickels and dimes and quarters, but to an astonishing amount. I never saw anything like it before, and I have never seen anything like it since.

Their motto was, “Lifting as We Climb.” Not kicking down the ladder as soon as a slight social eminence was reached, but helping up the one below. The work was given its first impetus nearly thirty years ago by a white physician who wrote an insulting article in which he made the statement that there was not a chaste colored woman in the United States over sixteen.

Some Negro club women met, drew up a strong statement to the country, and then all came together determined to begin service for those young girls of whom this indictment was true. They met at Washington. Frederick Douglass was there. Among the many prominent women was Mrs. Ruffin of Boston; Mrs. Hunton, then a young bride; and, of course, one who has always fought for colored women, Mary Church Terrell. Mrs. Terrell was elected the first president of the National Association of Colored Women.

I listened at Denver to the reports from all sections of the country. In the North, the National’s work supplemented the work of organizing charity and of the city and state. In the South, the Negro had to do pretty much everything. What money the city or county or state appropriated for the poor, the sick, the delinquent, was appropriated for the white. Only the courts were busy with the Negro, sending the young boy to the chain gang, the girl to execution, as in the case already mentioned of Virginia Christian. So, the Negro women went to work and out of their scanty means provided old people’s homes, opened day nurseries, started work among delinquents.

As I sat and listened, I was thankful that the NAACP existed, pounding away as it did on the issue of full citizenship. But I was glad that the women were doing what they could before these rights were won. Their accomplishments were many. Their work was not always up to the standard, but they had little money and must do the best with that [sic] they had. They were all volunteers, and the desire for position, the only reward that can be given a volunteer, was obvious. The greatest menace, common in all volunteer organizations, was the tendency of some workers to grow inactive after the positions they desired were won. But by and large they were hard workers, generous givers.

I wish their story might be written someday and given to the world. Negro work built up by some individual has been frequently featured. Individual Negroes have been honored, but the white world, and white women especially, have no appreciation of the amount of social service work that colored women, without wealth or leisure, have accomplished.

I made my little speech at Denver and was warmly received. I left, grateful for this opportunity. I went as far north as St. Paul and Minneapolis on my return trip, and, when at length I sat down at my desk, I felt that the New Yorker was provincial as well as Sinclair Lewis’s hero of Main Street. There still is diversity in this country if we want to find it. But who wants diversity, anyway? Many are the Americans who ask for fried eggs and cornbeef hash at a Paris restaurant.

Mary White Ovington, Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder, ed. Ralph E. Luker (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1995), 94–98.

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