Words of Fire Read Online Free

Sorosis and the New England Women’s Club were among the first of these local organizations, but they quickly proliferated throughout the country, and by 1890 the largely white General Federation of Women’s Clubs was founded as an umbrella entity. Black women’s clubs emerged not only because white women’s clubs prohibited their membership, except in New England, but because they had a unique set of issues—defending black womanhood, uplifting the masses, and improving family life, to name a few.
    Five years after the General Federation of Women’s Clubs was organized, the first national convention of black women’s clubs took place in Boston in 1895. The specific catalyst was a letter that Florence Belgarnie, an officer of the Anti-Lynching Committee in London, received from John Jacks, an American newspaper editor. Angry over Belgarnie’s antilynching activities, which had been encouraged by Ida Wells Barnett’s antilynching crusade in England, Jacks wrote her a letter defending the white South and maligning black women for their immorality. In turn, Belgarnie sent a copy of the letter to Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a black member of the largely white New England Women’s Club and founder, in 1893, of the New Era Club for black women. Later she distributed the letter to numerous black women’s clubs and called for a national conference in Boston in 1895, which resulted in the formation of the National Federation of Afro-American Women.
    When this historic gathering of black clubwomen occurred, a number of items were on the agenda—temperance, higher education, home life, morality, and education for girls and boys—however, it was also clear that black female empowerment for individual and race advancement was the overriding objective:
    ... we need to talk over not only those things which are of vital importance to us as women, but also the things that are of especial interest to us as colored women ... what we especially can do in the moral education of the race . . . our mental elevation and physical development ... how to make the most of our own ... limited opportunities ... (Women’s Era, September 1895, 2).
    An important goal of the meeting was vindicating the honor of black women and denouncing Jacks. In 1896, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was formed as a result of a merger between the Federation and Mary Church Terrell’s National League of Colored Women of Washington, D.C.
    A pivotal moment in black women’s publishing history and the coming of age politically for clubwomen occurred with the founding of Women’s
Era. In 1890, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin organized the New Era Club in Boston and initiated its journal, which eventually became the official organ of the NACW. The first issue came out March 24, 1894, and twenty-four issues were published through 1897. Since it was founded, edited, and published by suffragist Ruffin, it is not surprising to find in the publication a strong advocacy of woman suffrage, especially for black women.
    The front page of the first issue carried a portrait and feature article on the women’s rights leader Lucy Stone. The first issue also contained an article on the closing meetings of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, of which Ruffin was a member. There was also strong advocacy for black women entering the public arena in order to solve their unique problems. An awareness of the dilemma that black women faced as a result of the “double jeopardy” of race and gender is apparent throughout Women’s Era, the most significant outlet for the expression of their political views and aspirations during the Progressive era.
    In 1892, clubwoman and educator Anna Julia Cooper published A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, the first book-length feminist analysis of the condition of African Americans. Cooper was born a slave during the Civil War, in Raleigh,