1 gen 1896 anni - National Association of Colored WOmen founded

Descrizione:

As in temperance work, women played central roles in patriotic movements and African American community activism. Members of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), founded in 1890, celebrated the memory of Revolutionary War heroes. Equally influential was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), founded in 1894 to extol the South’s “Lost Cause.” The UDC’s elite southern members shaped Americans’ memory of the Civil War by constructing monuments, distributing Confederate flags, and promoting school textbooks that defended the Confederacy and condemned Reconstruction. The UDC’s work helped build and maintain support for segregation and disfranchisement (see Chapter 14, “Thinking Like a Historian”).

National Association of Colored Women: An organization created in 1896 by African American women to provide community support. NACW members arranged for the care of orphans and the elderly, undertook campaigns for public health and women’s suffrage, and raised awareness of racial injustice.

African American women did not sit idle in the face of this challenge. In 1896, they created the National Association of Colored Women. Through its local clubs, black women arranged for the care of orphans, founded homes for the elderly, advocated temperance, and undertook public health campaigns. Such women shared the widespread maternalist goal of carrying domesticity into the public sphere. Journalist Victoria Earle Matthews hailed the American home as “the foundation upon which nationality rests, the pride of the citizen, and the glory of the Republic.” She and other African American women used the language of domesticity and respectability to justify their work.

One of the most radical voices among African American women was Ida B. Wells, who as a young Tennessee schoolteacher sued the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad for denying her a seat in the ladies’ car (see “Consumer Spaces”). In 1892, a white mob in Memphis invaded a grocery store owned by three of Wells’s friends, angry that it competed with a nearby white-owned store. When the black store owners defended themselves, wounding several of their attackers, all three were lynched. Grieving their deaths, Wells left Memphis and urged other African Americans to join her in boycotting the city’s white businesses. As a journalist, she launched a one-woman campaign against lynching. Wells’s investigations demolished the myth that lynchers were reacting to the crime of rape; she showed that the real cause was more often economic competition, a labor dispute, or a consensual relationship between a white woman and a black man. Settling in Chicago, Wells became an accomplished reformer, but in an era of increasing racial injustice, few whites supported her cause.

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