“THE MOST INTERESTING GIRL OF THIS COUNTRY IS THE COLORED GIRL:”
GIRLS AND RACIAL UPLIFT IN GREAT MIGRATION CHICAGO, 1899-1950
BY
MARCIA CHATELAIN
A.B., UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA, 2001
B.J., UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA 2001
A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2003
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE
DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATON
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND
MAY 2008
 Copyright 2008 by Marcia Chatelain
This dissertation by Marcia Chatelain is accepted in its present form by the Department
of American Civilization as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy.
Date______________ _______________________________________
Mari Jo Buhle, Advisor
Recommended to the Graduate Council
Date______________ _______________________________________
Matthew Garcia, Reader
Date______________ _______________________________________
James T. Campbell, Reader
Approved by the Graduate School
Date______________ _______________________________________
Sheila Bonde, Dean
iii
VITA
Marcia Chatelain was born on November 2, 1979 in Chicago, Illinois. She was educated
at Catholic schools in the city. She attended the University of Missouri-Columbia on a
George C. Brooks Minority Scholarship and earned degrees in Magazine Journalism and
Religious Studies in 2001. As an undergraduate, she was awarded a Harry S. Truman
Scholarship for public service. After college, she worked as Resident Truman Scholar at
the Scholarship Foundation.
In 2003, she earned an A.M. from Brown University in American Civilization. While
studying at Brown, she taught two undergraduate seminars, “Our Schools, Our Selves:
Narratives on Power, Identity and Education” and “Beyond Sugar and Spice: Girls of
Color in America.” She spent her last year of graduate school as a Dissertation Fellow at
the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Department of Black Studies. In 2007, she
began a position at the University of Oklahoma-Norman’s Honors College as the Reach
for Excellence Assistant Professor of African-American Studies.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As with any labor of love, the recipient of all the support and encouragement is often
afraid to leave out important people and moments in the development of the project. So,
I embark on saying thank you, knowing that my gratitude may never be fully expressed
and hoping that I have not excluded anyone in this dedication. First and foremost, I thank
my mother for all the sacrifices and good choices she made in my development. My
mom, Mecthilde Boyer, always reminded me that with God’s grace and the sweat of the
brow, all things are possible and most things enjoyable. My father, a life long learner,
also taught me how far hard work can get you. My brother and sister, Ronald and
Regine, for the endless bragging about me, picking up the check because I didn’t have a
job, and big bear hugs when I needed a reminder of all I had inside of me to endure
preliminary exams, stress-induced headaches, and dissertation chapters. My familial
thank yous also extend to my extensive network of aunts, uncles, and cousins who travel
far distances, physically and emotionally, to celebrate me.
I am grateful for my committee for all the criticism doled out, the letters sent out and
the e-mails written with attention to encouraging me and keeping me on track. Working
with Mari Jo Buhle was one of the crowning moments for me at Brown, and her
professionalism and attention to scholarship will guide me throughout my career. James
Campbell’s seminars were invaluable in teaching me how to teach and to think on my
toes. And my dear friend-mentor-colleague Matt Garcia made sure that I toughed out the
hard times and gave myself a break when the work was piling up and the job market was
wearing me out.
My friends have been an endless source of laughter and love from the first day I
decided to give this Ph.D. thing a try. My Missouri friends Mark, Anitra, Mike and Brad,
Andrew, and Jamila saw my potential when I was afraid of it. Special gratitude goes to
Beth Pickens, my best friend who guided me through the book and life learning in
college. She taught me that I have something to say, and because of that I had things I
just had to do and share. My advisors at the University of Missouri-Columbia were
invaluable in tracking me toward graduate education, especially Drs. Jill Raitt, Vicky
Curby, Rick Hardy, and Mrs. Sue Crowley. My leadership was also developed by the
kind strength of Women’s Center director Laura Hacquard, who always encouraged me
to speak up and out, and often. I thank the entire city of Columbia for raising the activist
in me.
My graduate school crew was also there to pick up the pieces after many crackups,
breakups, and screw ups in my five years at Brown. To my dear friends Drs. Stephanie
Larrieux, Angela Howell, Muna Meky, Vanessa Bobb Toney (MD/Ph.D.), Jade Carter,
Sarita Jackson and the other women of color who are blazing trails big and small to make
the academic community more inclusive and interesting. I’d also like to acknowledge the
help of Yalies Drs. Kimberley Brown and Erin Chapman for assistance in my job search
and the general search for meaning. Brown also brought me soul friends Hentyle Yapp,
who helped me in my human process, as well as my academic one, and Izetta Mobeley,
who always set an example of poise and grace under pressure. My Truman Scholarship
v
community also reminded me that teaching is an act of public service, namely Matthew
Baugh, Wendi Adelson, Alan Schoenfeld and Dan Korobkin—a few lawyers with very
big hearts.
This dissertation literally would have been impossible to complete without the
kindness and support of my family at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,
especially Drs. Matthew Garcia and Evelyn Hu-DeHart and all the dissertation fellows,
support staff, and work-study students. Ethnic Studies was also the site of my two
seminars at Brown, and the students of ET 19 and ET 15 were a pure joy to work for and
with in learning. And to the wonderful women of BL 191BF at the University of
California-Santa Barbara for being open to new ideas and caring enough about girls to
take a class about them. My Truman connections were kept fresh with opportunities to
help students with applications, provided by Dean Linda Dunleavy in the Dean’s
Fellowship Office, thanks Linda. And my dear friend and old boss Louis Blair provided
me with my first job and healthy doses of criticism and encouragement (and a fine bottle
of port to celebrate with).
Financial support is key to this kind of undertaking, and I was able to accelerate my
graduate school experience with support from the Truman Scholarship Foundation,
monies from the CSREA and a generous Dissertation Completion Fellowship at the
University of California-Santa Barbara. The Department of Black Studies provided me
with the necessary space, financial support and perfect weather to complete my project. I
shared the honor of the ABD fellowship with a great friend, Sean Greene of the
University of Pennsylvania, who provided wonderful breaks from researching and
writing. Dr. Claudine Michel, the department chair, and Raphaella Nau, the department
manager, supported me and provided some friendly Haitian hospitality when I needed it.
Also Drs. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Ingrid Banks set good examples of professionalism,
balanced with warmth, and their feedback on my job talk made all the difference when I
entered the murky territory of job-seeking. My summers were spent teaching at the
Missouri Scholars Academy with such wonderful people as Daryl Hemenway, Ryan
Moore, Kate Virotsko, Steve Ornes, Chris Young, Shannon Ferguson and Trevor Taylor,
who looked beyond the conventions of secondary education to provide Missouri’s
talented and gifted students real world skills.
The librarians and staff of the Chicago Historical Society, the University of IllinoisChicago Special Collections, the University of Chicago Regenstein Special Collections
Library, the Schomburg Center for Black Life and Culture in Harlem, the University of
California Library System did an amazing job of supporting my research. I would also
like to give special thanks to the CampFire USA organization’s Chicago office for giving
me carte blanche to conduct research in their offices. This project would never have been
completed without the help of Wayne Lin, a first rate copy-editor and consummate
professional.
My project, all of my ambitions and all my hope for the power of change at all levels
is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Vanessa Kolpak, whose spirit cheered me
on when she was no longer on Earth to do so.
vi
My final thank you goes to my dear companion on this ride, my husband Mark
Yapelli. Thanks for taking a chance on me, on Oklahoma, on this strange thing called an
academic life, for all the jokes about bears, a chicken named Cuddles, and spoiled 16year-olds. And the million and one disastrous trips to the Los Angeles Airport. Thanks,
honey, for everything.
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: “I Will Thank You with All my Heart” 1
Chapter 1: The Amanda Smith Industrial School for Girls 34
Chapter 2: The Moorish Science Temple of America 97
Chapter 3: The Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. 156
Chapter 4: The Camp Fire Girls of America 216
Conclusion
247
Bibliography 256
viii
INTRODUCTION: “I WILL THANK YOU WITH ALL MY HEART…”
A Letter from Selma
On May 19, 1917, a teenage girl in Selma, Alabama wrote a letter to one of the
most powerful and influential African-American men in Chicago. The seventeen-year-old
Alabaman sent her heartfelt plea to the Chicago Defender, the nation’s most circulated
Black newspaper at the time. She addressed her letter to the newspaper’s iconic editor,
Robert Abbott, also a Southerner. The girl wrote:
Dear Sir: I am a reader of the Chicago Defender. I think it is one of the Most
Wonderful Papers (sic) of our race printed. Sirs I am writeing (sic) to see if You
(sic) all will please get me a job. And Sir I can wash dishes, wash, iron, nursing
(sic), work in groceries and dry good stores. Just any of these I can do. Sir, who
so ever you get the job from, please tell them to send me a ticket and I will pay
them When I get their, as I have not got enough money to pay my way. I am a girl
of 17 years old and in the 8 grade (sic) at Knox Academy School, But on account
of not having money enough I had to stop school. Sir I will thank you all with all
my heart. May God Bless you all. Please answer in return mail.1
The letter writer’s request expresses the complex set of emotions that led to one of
the most important moments in African-American history—the Great Migration. In the
years between World War I and World War II, African-Americans throughout the South
participated in a massive movement from the lands that symbolized slavery to northern
cities, which promised many new freedoms. The thirteen-year span between 1917 and
1930 marked the largest movement of African-Americans in U.S. history, when more
than one million Black Southerners migrated to the North. Approximately 10% of the
Southern Black population relocated during this period. By 1920, 1.5 million AfricanAmericans became official city dwellers, with large concentrations of Blacks in New
1
Emmett J. Scott, “Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916-1918,” Journal of Negro History 4, no. 3 (July
1919), 317.
1
2
York City, Philadelphia, and Abbot’s adopted home—Chicago. The Migration continued
into the 1940s, when the demand for wartime workers increased alongside the need for
wartime supplies and machinery. As these Northern industries flourished, the
agricultural world of the South was unraveling for African-American workers. The
advent of the cotton picker and the boll weevil’s agricultural reign of terror reduced the
need for Black, unskilled labor in the South. The changing economic conditions
propelled people to migrate, which yielded major changes in African-American life.
The Selma girl’s letter was one of thousands that poured into the Defender’s
South Side Chicago office during the Great Migration. The newspaper played a pivotal
role in convincing Southerners to move up North and try to make a fresh start in Chicago.
Migrants knew of the wonders of Chicago before they even stepped foot on Prairie State
soil. The Defender seduced, enticed and cajoled Southern readers with stories of the
glorious city. Abbot worked closely with employment recruiters and Black business
owners who stood to profit from an increase in African-American consumers; they
encouraged members of the race to board trains and buses, and implored them to turn
their backs on the undignified life of the Jim Crow South. Chicago was the ‘promised
land,’ at least in the pages of the Defender. Chicago meant higher wages. Chicago
meant Black-owned businesses and amusements. Chicago meant freedom. The realities
of urban life proved far more complicated, restrictive, and disorienting.
The Great Migration changed the racial, social and political landscapes of the
North, and historians of African-Americans in the United States have approached the
movement from various angles. In fact, historians are still engaged in conversations
about the Migration’s significance for African-American people and U.S. urban culture
3
and politics. Scholars of labor movements have tackled how migrants shaped Chicago’s
industries and organized to break the color barriers within unions and guilds. Religious
historians often point to the development of African-American churches and worship
styles that accommodated the migrants’ weary souls. Cultural and literary critics have
dissected the creative representations of the movement—from the vibrant tones of Jacob
Lawrence’s migration paintings to Richard Wright’s sharp edged novels and essays. In
the past two decades, texts such as James Grossman’s Land of Hope: Chicago Black
Southerners and the Great Migrations, Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land: The
Black Great Migration and How it Changed America and Farrah Griffin’s Who Set You
Flowin’?: The African-American Great Migration Narrative add texture to our
understandings of migrant experiences. By focusing on personal narratives, artistic
legacies and creating links between the Migration and contemporary issues, such as urban
blight and reverse migration, these works have highlighted the complexities of the exodus
from the South.2 This body of work is quite rich, yet there are still elements and
dimensions of the Migration open for further investigations and inquiries.
The Most Interesting Girl of this Country is the Colored Girl: Girls and Racial
Uplift in Great Migration Chicago focuses on important social changes during the
Migration through the lens of racial uplift outreach toward girls. Racial uplift, as defined
by various historians of African-American life and culture, refers to ideologies, programs
and services initiated by middle-class African-Americans to educate and acculturate
lower-class African-Americans. During this period of urbanization, racial uplift usually
2
James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), Nicholas Lemann, The Great Black Migration and How It Changed
America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), and Farrah Griffin, Who Set You Flowin’? The AfricanAmerican Migration Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
4
operated on two levels: as socio-political action on the behalf of migrants and the
indigent, and as an ideological means of reifying Black social class lines and distinctions.
My research pays careful attention to the variety of forces that informed the creation of
racial uplift programs for African-American girls in Chicago, revealing the complicated
relationships between seemingly disparate and divided groups—men and women,
intellectuals and activists, Blacks and Whites. This project infuses new questions about
racial uplift in the context of the Migration era. The term racial uplift often describes the
activities and politics of the African-American middle-class, and is a generally accepted
way of speaking about African-American activism. Yet, there is little research that
discusses racial uplift as it pertains to specific communities and subsets of AfricanAmerican people. Research by Kevin Gaines, Stephanie Shaw, Jacqueline Moore and
others have primarily focused on the different social and political mechanisms that
created and promoted uplift thinking and activism, and they have used specific people
and initiatives to deconstruct racial uplift in broad terms. This study uses those
foundational studies in an attempt to reveal a more nuanced understanding of the outlets
for racial uplift during periods of African-American disenfranchisement, while
foregrounding the experiences of girls and teenage women. Gaines’s definition of racial
uplift as the “emphasis on self-help, racial solidarity, temperance, thrift, chastity, social
purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth,” serves as a guide for my
discussion of racial uplift and the formation of African-American girlhood in the Great
Migration era.3
3
Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century
(Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 4. See also Stephanie Shaw, “Black Club
Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women” in Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma
King, and Linda Reed, eds., We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women’s History
5
This dissertation seeks to broaden historical and intellectual understandings of the
circumstances of girls and teenage women like the letter writer from Selma, who lived
during the Great Migration and longed to taste the sweetness of the milk-and-honey
hopes of the North. The dissertation also explores the dynamic relationship between
African-American girls experiencing Great Migration-era Chicago and women’s racial
uplift work inside and outside of African-American organizations. Equally important to
understanding girls’ organization is a careful treatment of the women who found ways to
expand girls’ worlds and improve their chances for educational, economic, political and
social success.
Through the analysis of four distinct types of institutions—an industrial school, a
religious organization, a program of a national sorority and a national recreation group, I
explore how specific girls’ programs and research on girls reflected African-American
women’s anxieties about urbanization, the struggle to socialize Chicago’s growing
Southern population to the city and the various assertions of the right to lead and protect
colored girls’ from harm. Sometimes, these organizations were able to contribute to the
growing discourses on African-American girls, help to elevate the public images of these
girls and enter debates about girls’ value to their communities and the larger world. The
dissertation is also an attempt to contribute to what historian of African-American
childhoods Wilma King calls, “a void…in the general literature about African-American
children in a historical perspective.”4
(Brooklyn: Carlson Publish, 1995), and Jacqueline Moore, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois and the
Struggle for Racial Uplift (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2003).
4
Wilma King, African-American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives from Slavery to Civil Rights (New
York: Palgrave-McMillan, 2005), 4.
6
For the purpose of this project, I have defined girls and teenage women as females
19-years old and younger who were unmarried, subject to the authority of parents or
guardians, under the jurisdiction of juvenile courts and other youth-focused supervisors,
and eligible to participate in programs geared toward girls and teenage women.
Considering the term ‘girl’ was often used to describe African-American women in
derisive ways, particularly in the domestic workplace, I was careful in the researching of
this project to try to verify that anecdotes, articles and other texts indeed were speaking
about a female younger than 20 years old.
Girls’ Studies and Race
This project uses an interdisciplinary approach, and relies heavily on the
precedents set by African-American women’s history and the emerging field of girls’
studies. Girls’ studies rest at the intersection of women’s studies, and children and
childhood studies. This growing area of interest uses the language of feminist
scholarship and advocates a critical analysis of age. Girls’ studies posit that, despite the
fact that girls are often marginalized by sexism and ageism, they still find strategies to
play important roles in their respective communities and cultures. Scholars in the area of
girls’ studies often seek out spaces where girls exercise their own political will, agency
and personal choices. Girls’ studies research also examines how girls serve important
symbolic functions, reflecting the values, anxieties and fears of the nation and the world.
Women’s history has become increasingly more attentive to girls’ history with the
establishment of girls’ studies as its own subfield in the past decade. Canadian and
British scholars in the mid-to-late 1990s began publishing essays and articles examining
7
ideas of girlhood and popular culture; girls’ studies quickly gained footing among U.S.
academics. In 2006, girls’ studies’ scholars were formally represented at the National
Women’s Studies Association Meeting in Chicago, hosting a special ‘embedded’
conference within the larger gathering. The following year, the University of MissouriKansas City’s Women’s Studies Department announced that they would offer a special
research certificate in girls’ studies, the first of its kind in the United States. The program
reflects girls’ studies interdisciplinary orientation as it challenges students “to utilize
gender and age to examine girls’ lives and girlhood from historical, psychological,
anthropological, religious and rhetorical perspectives.”5
In its nascent years, girls’ studies scholarship focused primarily on the consumer
habits of and media consumption by mostly White, middle-class girls. Girls’ studies
scholars engaged media analysis and criticism, as well as feminist theory, to develop
scholarship on how girls interacted with both material culture and hegemonic ideas of
girlhood, innocence and social belonging. One significant text, an edited volume in girls’
studies, Seven Going on Seventeen: Tween Studies in the Culture of Girlhood, deals
primarily with popular culture, including articles on Cabbage Patch Dolls, the marketing
of Disney ‘tween’ films, and an ethnography of girls at a shopping mall.6 As girls’
studies scholarship grows, more historians of girls of color are enhancing earlier
scholarship by including the experiences of marginalized communities within the frames
of the field. The monograph Sexual Reckoning: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age, by
5
University of Missouri-Kansas City, “Certificate in Girls’ Studies,” University of Missouri-Kansas City
Women’s and Gender Studies Program, http://cas.umkc.edu/wgs/gilrs_studies_certificate.html.
6
See Claudia Mitchell, Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, eds., Seven Going on Seventeen: Tween Studies in the
Culture of Girlhood (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005).
8
Susan Cahn, represents the trajectory of girls’ studies in evaluating how White and Black
girls shaped Southern cultural and social politics from the Jim Crow era to the Civil
Rights Movement.7 More histories of girls of color are needed to bring new
understandings of how race, sex and age work in tandem to inform girls’ lives and shape
societal standards and norms for girls.
Girls and Race in the United States
Historians of girls in the United States often ground their work in the evolution of
ideologies on children and childhood. In the early nineteenth century, White middleclass notions of the family emphasized the role of the community as a partner with the
family to help develop morally upright children who would one day grow up to serve the
nation. During this time, perceptions of childhood shifted, so that children were no
longer adults-in-waiting; rather their status as children meant they were in the midst of a
distinct, sentimentalized life stage. As middle-class Whites celebrated the child and
devoted institutions for his or her spiritual, physical, educational and emotional
wellbeing, girlhood took on deeper and more important meanings.8 Girlhood became
more rigidly associated with purity, cleanliness and innocence. The preoccupation with
girls and their virtues in the United States coincided with a spirit of reform and social
7
See Susan Cahn, Sexual Reckoning: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007). Other foundational texts in girls’ studies include Marion de Ras and Mieke Lumberg, eds.
Girls, Girlhood and Girls’ Studies in Transition (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1993), Pooja Makhajani,
Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America (New York: Seal Press, 2004), and Sherrie A.
Inness, Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century American Girls’ Culture (New York: New York
University Press, 1998).
8
For an interesting analysis of U.S. childhood culture, see Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of
American Childhood (Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2004). Mintz argues that
childhood is indeed a great American myth, and he argues that class has determined which children
participated in the sentimentalities of childhood. He also argues that few children were truly protected
from the social, political and economic circumstances of their parents.
9
hygiene. This marriage of ideals yielded entire systems of protection and codes of
conduct for and around girls. The Progressive Movement helped institutionalize attitudes
about girls through the establishment of maternity homes, girls’ orphanages, all-girl
schools, and by the agitation for the passage of age-of-consent laws and White slavery
legislation.9
While Northern activists were ensuring safety for all White girls in burgeoning
industrial cities of the future, the South was using the past to set its agenda on protecting
White girls and women. In the South, long after the end of slavery, the protection of both
White girls and White women was often the justification for lynching and racial violence
against African-American men. One representation of this panic about African-American
men defiling the White female body in all her virtue is in the controversial and racist film
about Reconstruction, Birth of a Nation (1915). Throughout D.W. Griffith’s cinematic
version of Reconstruction, African-American men stalked and threatened White girls and
women. In one famous scene, Flora, a White teenager, commits suicide out of fear of the
Black menacing would-be rapist, Gus.10
Organizations and ideologies that coalesced around the protection of White girls
survived well into the 1940s and 1950s, when the pressures of the Cold War and the
heralding of ‘normalcy’ helped rationalize and maintain the strictures on White girlhood.
The feminist movements of the late 1950s through the 1980s helped to alleviate idealized
notions of White girlhood. Second wave feminists challenged gender stereotyping and
advocated educational opportunities for girls. Yet, contemporary media representations
9
For more on these Progressive era reform movements, see Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women
and Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Robyn Muncy,
Creating a Female Dominion of Reform, 1890-1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
10
The Birth of a Nation, film, directed by D.W. Griffith (Los Angeles: Epoch Films, 1915).
10
of young, White girls as objects of beauty and innocence reveal the pervasive legacy of
pre-feminist movement depictions of White girls needing ‘protection.’
Considering the history of White girls as exalted objects, where do AfricanAmerican girls fit into this long history? When race is added to the equation of girls’
roles in the United States, the calculus of racism complicates notions of girls’ moral
elevation and symbolic usefulness to the nation. While African-American women were
systematically denied membership in the ‘cult of true womanhood’ during bondage and
decades afterward, African-American girls were also denied the comforts and veils of
innocent girlhood. African-American girls were not included in the age-of-consent
campaigns designed to protect (White) virginity and reduce sexual exploitation. The
negative stereotypes of African-American female sexuality shaped what girls could
expect from the power structure. African-American girls could not rely on their age to
garner sympathy or protection. In her work on juvenile delinquency and adolescent
sexuality, historian Mary Odem notes that Victorian notions toward African-American
girls characterized them as “dark, unruly, and promiscuous.”11 Odem cites a Kentucky
Congressman who reported that, according to doctors, African-American girls mature
earlier than their White peers (menstruating three years earlier) and desire to be raped.
He added that in one case an African-American woman “had been a prostitute since her
eleventh year!”12
In addition to sexual stereotyping, African-American girls, like their mothers and
fathers, were (and still are) subject to racist violence. When Klan nightriders came
11
Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United
States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 32-33.
12
Ibid, 33.
11
through Southern towns, girls lived in fear too. As African-American adults had to
exchange their dignity for their livelihoods as sharecroppers and domestics, their children
were also forced to live under the humiliation of Jim Crow codes. As a result, AfricanAmerican girls were not allowed to indulge in the protection, albeit sexist and limiting,
offered to White girls. Nor could they revel in the U.S. obsession with virginal and
exceptional girlhood. Girlhood and its special trappings were essentially racialized as
White. African-American girls were merely Black women who had yet to come into
adulthood.
African-American girls, although unprotected by the White, racist power
structure, did have advocates in a number of places. As my research discovers, AfricanAmericans—from the elite circles of women’s clubs to the social science laboratories of
colleges and universities to the makeshift, storefront churches of Black communities—
cared about their girls. This dissertation uncovers the people and institutions that
believed in African-American girls’ potential, needed girls for their political and social
projects and trained girls to become leaders of their people. As historian Ruth Feldstein
observes in her work on race and motherhood, “Black women…were simply excluded
from dominant assumptions about “good” women and from celebrations of motherhood
by virtue of their race and class.”13 Although excluded from being labeled good, AfricanAmerican women still continued to do good works for girls. The desire to be good or to
be simply considered good may have been a motivation for African-American women to
take on the challenges of working with African-American girls.
13
Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 5.
12
Although historians have not given a great deal of attention to African-American
girls as historical actors, African-American women’s history provides helpful theoretical
frames for analyzing girls, gender and the Great Migration. Historian Darlene Clark
Hine’s framework for understanding migrant women during Migration foregrounds two
important psychological reactions to racism and sexism: Dissemblance and expressions
of interiority. Hine defines dissemblance as “the behavior and attitudes of Black women
that create the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of
their inner lives and selves from their oppressors.”14 Interiority is the accompanying
response, in which African-American women wove a delicate shroud of secrecy around
themselves in order to indulge in acts of self-possession and deal with the psychic pains
of sexual abuse and exploitation.
Although Hine locates this behavior within adult African-American women, these
behaviors and responses were ‘passed down’ to African-American girls, who were also
the targets of sexual advances and racism. One migrant woman discovered that one of
the many consequences of sending her children to integrated schools in the North was
constant interrogation from White teachers about her family. Linsdey Billups migrated to
Indianapolis and found, “when our children went into those White schools, them White
people wanted to know everything about them, their mamas and daddies and what was
goin’ on in they home, even if nothing appeared to be wrong.”15 In order to shield their
children from the embarrassment of questions, mothers often instructed their children to
14
Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4
(Summer 1989): 912.
15
Valerie Grim, “From the Yazoo Mississippi Delta to the Urban Communities of the Midwest:
Conversations with Rural African-American Women,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22, no. 1
(2001): 133.
13
keep private matters to themselves, and in turn, they taught their children how to shield
themselves from the criticisms of Whites.
My research considers Hine’s assessment of African-American women’s behavior
and responses to shifts in their economic and social worlds, and I identify the places in
which African-American women instructed girls on racism and sexism through uplift
work and high expectations for their behavior and industriousness. African-American
women, both explicitly and tacitly, demonstrated dissemblance in their leadership
strategies, their rhetoric surrounding girls’ development and the work they undertook.
Girls learned about self-preservation and survival on two levels—first, as they
experienced the racism and sexism and ageism of their daily lives in the limited labor
market and educational opportunities. Second, girls learned about these strategies of selfpossession through the rhetoric and social programming provided by African-American
organizations. By emphasizing rigid morals, high ideals and somewhat impossible
standards, girl-centered racial uplift projects modeled dissemblance for their audiences.
For the historian of African-American women, these shrouds of privacy present
challenges in research. This unwillingness to disclose personal information, Hine argues,
coupled with African-American women’s discomfort with making their personal writings
available upon their deaths, limits the projects historians can undertake. As with any
field of history, the historian must make sense of the pieces left behind and may never
truly solve the entire puzzle. Similarly, African-American girls have left very few
footprints in the archival records and annals of their community histories. Yet, due to the
superb recordkeeping and publications of African-Americans in Chicago, we are allowed
a few glimpses into girls’ lives in a Great Migration hub.
14
Historians of girls, as opposed to girlhood, regardless of race, are often faced with
distinct challenges. Girlhood as a subject of inquiry can be researched by examining
theories on childhood, investigating school practices and curriculum, and analyzing
developmental biology and psychology discourses. Yet, girls present a number of issues
for the historians. Girls experience their own girlhood as a stage of life; it is not a fixed
category. Girls do not bequeath material to research institutions, and material on
juveniles is often classified or redacted to protect their identities. African-American girls
present an even greater challenge. African-American women may have discouraged their
daughters, nieces and protégés in social programs from disclosing information. AfricanAmerican girls also lagged behind their White and immigrant counterparts in literacy,
limiting the amounts of written material by African-American girls. Therefore, the pieces
of the puzzle in this dissertation have been extracted from a wide array of source
materials in order to present a picture of girls’ programs in schools, churches and
communities.
Fortunately, Chicago’s history of vibrant African-American communities, its
influence on innovative social programs and intellectual ties to the 20th century’s leading
social scientists and female leaders allows historians to break through the city’s layers of
stories. This is not a comprehensive history of girls during the Great Migration, rather I
provide an illustration of the social, political, and intellectual intersections that
surrounded African-American girls and girlhood during an important period of AfricanAmerican history.
15
African-Americans in Chicago
Chicago has been the setting of a wide range of Black experiences, and it provides
the ideal backdrop for studying African-Americans. African-Americans were among the
early pioneers of Illinois, and runaway slaves often sought refuge in the state. After the
population swell of the Great Migration, African-Americans were often the victims of
urban decline’s accompanying poverty. Also, a substantial number of African-Americans
were also able to gain middle-class respectability through Chicago’s civil service and
union jobs. African-Americans participated in pivotal political organizing with the
Chicago Urban League and the local branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People. Some African-Americans, like Abbot, were even able
to build impressive wealth through a variety of businesses, from soul food restaurants,
hair salons and barber shops to publishing houses, most notably Johnson Publishing
Company, the creators of Jet, Ebony and Sepia magazines.
Black Chicagoans proudly trace their history to almost a century before Chicago
became a city, when Haitian fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable established his home
at the mouth of the Chicago River in the late 1700s. Over the course of 200 years, Black
Chicagoans grew in numbers large enough to establish their own communities, complete
with class distinctions and an elite leadership class. The city also afforded them crucial
rights. By 1870, African-Americans had the right to vote in municipal elections; four
years later Chicago desegregated its school system. After the integration of schools,
plans for all-Black school facilities repeatedly failed to gain citywide support. In 1900,
Blacks lived in various proportions in all of Chicago’s 35 wards, yet comprised only
16
1.9% of the city’s population (30,150).16 Before the Great Migration, African-Americans
were interspersed throughout the city. It was not uncommon for African-Americans,
immigrants and native-born Whites to live in close proximity. Blacks were often able to
occupy homes and apartments adjacent to ethnic enclaves or even live as neighbors to
Whites, whom they served as butlers, stable keepers and domestics. These servants lived
near their employers, and this group created its own social class of workerprofessionals.17 Although Black life was not precisely equitable in the city, in
comparison to other locales, Chicago stood as a beacon for all peoples, especially for
those seeking Black progress. Black home and business ownership were possibilities for
middle and upper-class elites, and the possibility alone gave many African-Americans
hope of what could happen in the urban North long before the Defender’s recruiters
seduced Southerners to enter the city.18 One scholar describes Chicago as the “archetypal
City of the West” in the nineteenth century, which led people to see it “as the ideal place
to pursue their own dreams.”19
While Black Chicagoans were establishing themselves in small clusters
throughout the city, their counterparts in the South were waging battles for everyday
survival. When Black Southerners made the decision to vacate the land of their birth,
16
Dempsey J. Travis, An Autobiography of Black Chicago (Chicago: Urban Research Institute, 1981), 11.
17
For an engaging discussion of how the Great Chicago Fire helped segregate the city along various lines
and bring class, race and ethnic tensions to the surface, see Karen Sawislak, Smoldering Cities: Chicago
and the Great Fire 1871-1874 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
18
Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1967), 1-8.
19
Sawislak, Smoldering Cities, 9.
17
they turned their backs on extralegal intimidation and financial bondage, and they moved
toward promises of higher wages and greater social mobility.
Agriculture, an old standard for African-Americans after slavery, became difficult
in the post-bellum South due to massive flooding in the Mississippi Valley. Carter G.
Woodson, the African-American historian and a critic of the Migration, blamed the U.S.
government for improperly maintaining levees “against a natural enemy to property,” and
he estimated that the floods caused the value of the land to depreciate “$400 million” in a
decade. This phenomenon pushed an early migration pattern westward, in which
African-American farmers sought public lands to rebuild their farms in Kansas and
Missouri, or to take advantage of land runs in Oklahoma.20 In 1892, the boll weevil
infested and devastated cotton crops in the South. The boll weevil, an insect indigenous
to Mexico, first struck in Texas and slowly attacked crops throughout the region, sparing
only North and South Carolinas and Virginia. Woodson determined that the boll weevil
crisis cut off much-needed lines of credit to African-American sharecroppers and small
planters. Despite the environmental devastation, African-Americans in the South
continued to work the land that was left. As late as 1910, more than 60% of AfricanAmericans were still involved with the agriculture sector, mostly in the picking of cotton
and tobacco. Although unsupportive of the Migration in general, Woodson conceded, “It
was fortunate for the Negro laborers in the district that there was then a demand for labor
in the North when this condition began.”21
20
Carter G. Woodson, “The Exodus during the World War, 1918” in Malaika Adero,ed., Up South: Stories
and Letters of this Century’s African-American Migrations (New York: The New Press at CUNY, 1993), 114.
21
Ibid, 3.
18
Agricultural workers were not the only laborers marginalized in the New South
economy. Traditionally female sectors, such as laundering and domestic work, did not
provide a strong wage. Another 17-year old girl wrote to Abbot about the meager
opportunities for young women in the South. She wrote: “There isn’t a thing here for me
to do, the wages here is (sic) from a dollar and a half a week. What could I earn?
Nothing. I am tired of hear (sic) …I am afraid to say.”22 Another teen would-bemigrant bemoaned the low wages in New Orleans. The writer, with the initials A.V.,
pleaded with Abbott to help her find a way out of the city. The letter, written mostly
phonetically, explained:
I wont to come there and work I have ben looking for work here for three month
and cand find any. I once found a place $1 a week for a 15 year old and I did not
tak that…New Orleans is so haird tell some have to work for food…if you will
sin me a pass you will not be sorry, I am not no lazy girl, I am smart I have got
very much learning but I can do any work that come my hand to do…now pleas
sire sin me a pass and you wont be sorry of it. A.V., excuse bad righting.23
Migrants read of higher wages in the pages of the Defender and heard stories from
relatives who had left the South earlier. According to a 1916 editorial entitled, “Causes
of the Migration from the Viewpoint of a Northern Negro,” African-American women
earned between “$5 and $7 a week with room and board, as maids, nurses, and cooks” in
the North.24 Men could also anticipate higher wages in the North: “Able-bodied men are
getting $1.75 to $3 a day for ordinary work, and exceptional men are making as foremen
22
Scott, 316.
23
Ibid, 316.
24
R.R. Wright, “Causes of the Migration from the Viewpoint of a Northern Negro,” Chicago Defender,
November 9, 1916.
19
as high as $5 per day.”25 In some instances, these wages were double those available in
the South.
The North’s booming industries and growing need for skilled workers was only
one of the reasons why African-Americans could find well-paying work. Northern
companies looked to the South for workers because of a domino effect in the growth of
industries and the subsequent loss of workers in entry-level fields. As more
packinghouses, factories and workshops emerged in Northern cities, Whites who vacated
unskilled and service jobs for more lucrative ones had to be replaced. Traditionally,
those jobs had gone to Southern and Eastern European immigrants. Yet, World War I
fueled the flames of U.S. isolationism and nativism, creating anti-immigrant sentiments
among employers. Cities such as Chicago, which once embraced Eastern and Southern
European laborers, became closed to their foreign brethren. The Immigration Act of
1917, primarily targeted toward Asians, and the Immigration Act of 1924 established
quotas on immigration, thus exacerbating the need for African-American labor. Unlike
immigrants, African-Americans were able to replace White workers quickly because they
did not have a language barrier to overcome. Although African-Americans gained some
preferences in the new job markets, African-American men still struggled to join unions,
and many Southern workers were used as scab labor, further antagonizing union Whites.
African-American women helped replace foreign-born servants during the years of
curbed immigration. One study of the Migration found that in 1910, 10% of Chicago
domestics were African-American; by 1920, African-American women represented a
25
Ibid.
20
quarter of all domestics. The report found, “similar increases in the percentages for all
the Northern cities to which Negroes have migrated in considerable numbers.”26
Educational opportunity was also a strong motivation for leaving the South.
Parents believed that the North could provide better schools than the South. The
Defender publicized the achievements of African-American youth at schools such as
Wendell Phillips and the Lucy Flower Technical High School, and they reported on
integrated education as if it were commonplace. As one scholar noted in his study on the
Migration, “For the first time since the heyday of the Freedmen’s Bureau Schools, Black
southerners could entertain the expectations that their children might receive an education
that would enable them to compete with Whites.” 27
The North also promised intangible, but equally important, promises to migrants.
After the fall of Reconstruction governments and freedoms, African-Americans faced
legal and extralegal forms of intimidation. The Supreme Court’s cementing of ‘separate
but equal’ in the Plessey v. Ferguson (1895) case and the systematic disregard for the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, gave African-Americans little hope that they
could be protected by their own nation. In addition to these slights from the judicial
system, the extralegal repression of the Ku Klux Klan and the lack of protection from
White power structures fortified a culture of fear among African-Americans nationally,
with the most egregious crimes occurring in the South. All of these forces helped to
install the rule of Jim Crow in the South. One Mississippi migrant recalled his
experiences with the Klan in this way: “The Klan was real bad in the Delta…They were
26
27
Joseph Hill, “The Recent Northward Migration of the Negro,” Opportunity Magazine, April 1924.
James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989).
21
very active. The White folks used them to keep Black people scared, in their place.”28
Whether motivated by the economic hopes of the North or compelled to overcome the
terror of Southern life, African-American migration was one of the strongest protests
against racism and violence. Migration scholar James Grossman describes it as a
moment in which African-Americans could discover “a new source of power over their
lives.”29
This powerful act of protest—migrating from the South— did not come without
reproach from both Black and Whites. Prominent African-Americans like Woodson and
Booker T. Washington were skeptical of the movement. Woodson’s prediction was blunt
and arguably accurate: “The maltreatment of the Negroes will be nationalized by this
exodus.”30 Woodson did not believe that racism would not await migrants when they
arrived in Chicago, Milwaukee and New York. He believed that anti-Black sentiments
would only increase. Washington wanted African-Americans to remain loyal to the
South and encouraged them to acquire New South economic skills. Ironically, Southern
states also resisted the Migration. Several local and state governments put up a fight
when masses of African-Americans decided to turn their backs on them. In Jacksonville,
Florida, the city passed an ordinance requiring labor recruiters to register for a $1000
license to recruit. Failure to purchase the license could result in jail time or a $600
penalty. In Montgomery, Alabama, “enticing, persuading, or influencing” people to take
jobs elsewhere was also punishable by jail time and fines. And, in Macon County,
28
Robert Fleming, “The Ritual of Survival,” in Adero, ed., 33-43.
29
Grossman, Land of Hope, 12.
30
Woodson, The Exodus, 7.
22
Georgia, the city council adopted a $25,000 fee for recruitment agents. They also
required the agents to be approved by a select group of ministers, business owners and
manufacturers.31 The great drive to go ‘up North’ may have hurt African-American job
seekers who chose to stay in the South, as Whites began to catch wind of the migration
and the opportunities. One woman from New Orleans wrote to Abbott, “So many women
here wanting to go that day. They are all working women and we can’t get work here so
much now, the white women tell us we just want to make money to go North and we
do.”32 Southern Whites feared they had truly lost control over African-Americans. Even
as states and cities tried to criminalize various aspects of the Migration, from banning the
sale of the Chicago Defender to barring employment recruiters from speaking to and
meeting with African-Americans, these admonishments and measures proved
unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands still took a chance on the city.
Migrant Life in Chicago
Between 1915 and 1920, 75,000 African-Americans migrated to Chicago.33 The
1920 census found that 83% of all African-American Chicagoans were born outside of
Illinois, with 65% of that group hailing from Southern states.34 Among the mass of
African-American newcomers, were both single and married women. Scholars from a
31
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 59.
32
Scott, Letters from Migrants, 333.
33
Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung. Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals By Race, 1790 to
1990, and By Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for The United States, Regions, Divisions, and States
(Washington D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2006).
34
Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1967), 142-143.
23
variety of disciplines have debated the migration patterns of Southern women to the
North, yet there are no definitive answers to questions on whether women mostly traveled
as members of families or independently. Hine’s Great Migration research suggests that
in Midwestern cities, “throughout the First World War era, the number of black males far
exceeded female migrants.”35 Compared to Eastern and Southern migrant destinations,
the Midwest provided the most and the best jobs for men. Hine highlights that women
tended to migrate directly to one location, as opposed to men who often moved to several
cities in the South and North before settling on one location. Women traveling alone
were at a greater risk for harm, and often they did not feel that wandering was a safe
option. Hine also indicates that single women “usually had a specific relative or fictive
kin” waiting for their arrival to the North.36 This was the case for some teenage girls
migrating to the North, but a significant number of ‘friendless’ girls also arrived to cities
with no one to greet them. African-American women’s organizations, such as the Phyllis
Wheatley Homes, established boardinghouses and designated themselves as allies to
these young women.37 Another benevolence group, the National League for the
Protection of Colored Women, founded in 1905, organized specifically to address the
needs of young migrant working women. The National Urban League absorbed the
protective organization in 1919.38
35
Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-construction of America (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press), 89.
36
37
Ibid, 91.
For more on the Wheatley Clubs and Homes, see Anne Meis Knupfer, “If You Can’t Push, Pull, if You
Can’t Pull, Please Get Out of the Way: The Phyllis Wheatley Club and Home in Chicago, 1896 to 1920,”
The Journal of Negro History 67, no.1 (Spring 1982): 20-33 and Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black
Women’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18., no.4 (Summer 1992): 738-755.
24
Women’s clubs and other African-American organizations were also created in
response to the isolation and segregation of African-American Chicagoans. Although
they often put forth great efforts, these clubs were unable to meet all of the needs of the
city’s Southern-born huddled masses in need of adequate housing, employment, and an
orientation to a new way of life. The migrants and their many needs changed Chicago’s
earlier climate of interracial cooperation and co-existence. The Defender’s Northern
recruitment ads failed to advertise that the peace African-American Chicagoans
experienced prior to the Migration was likely due to the relatively small numbers of
African-Americans in the city. With thousands of newcomers filling train cars each day,
arriving with little or no money, but hoping that all the stories of the North were true, the
city grew tenser. As migrants continued to move into the city and procure jobs, tensions
with native-born and immigrant Whites boiled over and racially motivated violence
ensued. The Red Summer riots of 1919, which left 23 African-Americans and 15 Whites
dead, 537 people harmed and nearly 1000 homeless, served as a wake up call to the
rapidly changing city.39
Violent eruptions occurred periodically in Chicago, but other problems became
permanent fixtures of life ‘up North.’ Chicago’s Black housing crisis was one source of
the city’s racial tension. As Chicago’s Black population grew throughout the 1910s and
1920s, a racially drawn residential pattern began to form at the center of the city,
concentrating newcomers and old timers into a densely packed Black Belt. By the time
39
The Red Summer riots were touched off by the drowning of Eugene Williams, an African-American boy
at the 29th Street Beach on July 27, 1919. After being struck with stones by a White beachgoer, Williams
was hit on the head; his friend’s attempt to save him failed and he died. Police refused to arrest the man
who struck Williams, and instead African-Americans were arrested for being on the ‘white side’ of the
beach. The riots lasted five days, ending when the weather turned threatening. For more on the Great
Migration, as well as the riots that took place that summer, see Chicago Commission on Race Relations.
The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1922).
25
the influx of migrants took hold of the city, the Black Belt modeled the ring-like
segregation patterns visible in other cities; with 90% of African-Americans living on the
city’s expanding South Side. African-American residences were concentrated at the
outskirts of the central business district or downtown, where dilapidated housing kept
property values low, but racial discrimination kept rents exorbitantly high. This pattern
continued well into the 1940s and subsided in the 1970s, when high-rise public housing
projects were introduced into these areas.40 University of Chicago-based sociologist E.
Franklin Frazier believed that condensed housing patterns and the comparatively low
quality of life standards of African-Americans leant itself to ‘debasement,’ the moral and
social degradation of Black people and communities.41
Researchers at the University were not the only people concerned about AfricanAmerican adjustment and survival in the city. Chicago was among the first cities to
establish highly organized systems of trash removal, universal education and public
health. The improvements helped re-establish the city’s infrastructure after the Great
Chicago Fire of 1871. In the decades after the flames of the Great Fire were
extinguished, Chicago began to distinguish itself among peer cities with its highly
organized structure of municipal and social services borne from the communitarian and
Progressive movements. Chicago’s resources coupled with its great service institutions
yielded a sophisticated and modern city. Chicago’s industrialists and capitalists financed
public centers of arts, education and community activity. The city was home to the
40
For an astute analysis on how the urban crisis did not merely emerge in the 1960s, see Thomas Segrue,
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University,
1996).
41
Frazier discusses this in, E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1938).
26
world’s leading philanthropists, including retailers Marshall Field and his processor, John
G. Shedd, as well as Sears and Roebuck tycoon Julius Rosenwald.
Chicago was a model for effective social service organizations, but the color line
made tapping into critical resources virtually impossible. Chicago’s Black Belt presented
substantial work and issues for the most powerful of organizations. Racist, exclusionary
policies prevented African-Americans from participating in the city’s decision-making
and resource allocation process. As a result, African-American neighborhoods in
Chicago were grossly underserved. Often African-American service organizations had to
fill the voids left by a scarcity of municipal and charitable services available to AfricanAmericans in the city. Although Chicago stood proudly as the center of experimental
settlement houses, community-driven programs and projects, and an array of charities,
racism often proved much stronger than philanthropic generosity. Hull House, for
instance, was the training ground and residence for some of the most forward thinkers
about African-Americans, social justice and equality, such as Jane Addams and Louise de
Koven Bowen. Yet, it was not necessarily a place for African-American people.42
Surrounded by one of the largest populations of African-Americans in Chicago, Hull
House rarely developed programs for its Black neighbors. Some settlement movement
workers found it nearly impossible to fundraise for African-American settlement work; in
fact NAACP founder Mary White Ovington turned to the group after failed attempts to
create an African-American settlement house.43 Addams, who also helped establish the
42
Incidentally, Jane Addams was made an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, so her
relationship with African-American women’s organizations was consistently positive, but she remained
passive on the integration question.
43
Judith Ann Trolander, Professionalism and Social Change: From the Settlement House Movement to
Neighborhood Centers, 1886 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
27
NAACP, did work with Ida B. Wells-Barnett against the segregation of public schools.
She also distinguished herself among White women’s club members by inviting delegates
of the National Association of Colored Woman (NACW) to lunch at Hull House in
1899.44
Despite these alliances and gestures, Hull House never truly practiced all that it
preached.45 It was not until the late 1940s and 1950s when a second wave of Migration
hit the North that settlement houses reconsidered their own racial politics.
Chicago’s population explosion coupled with the scarcity of resources available to
Blacks overwhelmed African-American charitable groups. Organizations such as the
Urban League and NACW clubs tried to bridge the gap between needs and services.
Historian Ann Meis Knupfer’s research on African-American women’s clubs reveals the
rich diversity of clubs in Chicago. She describes how small groups of African-American
women were able to manage and serve the impoverished and uneducated. Knupfer
identified 150 active women’s clubs in Chicago by 1915, with interests ranging from
literacy to childcare to anti-lynching campaigns.46 In the historiography of African-
44
Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 18711933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 49-50.
45
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the Settlement House
Movement, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 24-25. Even the formation
of a Black mothers’ club in 1927 was little more than the group using the Hull House space. The Black
mothers were never included in community meetings or official Hull House rosters. In 1930, there was
only one Black settlement house in Chicago. Other programs, such as the summer camps and boarding
program for working girls, were segregated well into the 1940s. Black participation in other projects was
minimal and sporadic at best. Lasch-Quinn notes that the enlistment of Black participation in Hull House
began in 1938, when it employed its first black staff member—Dewey Jones of the Works Progress
Administration. Jones died shortly after his appointment, in 1939, putting an end to formal integration
attempts.
46
See Ann Meis Knupfer, Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African-American
Women’s Clubs in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New York: The New York University Press, 1996).
Northern, African-American women’s clubs made important contributions to a wide range of social,
economic and political movements in their communities, yet it is important to remember that the South was
also home to a vibrant network of women’s clubs. The Chicago Whip reported in the fall of 1919, that
there were 1,553 women’s clubs and 1,962 girls clubs in the South in 1918. These clubs represented a total
of 103,377 women and girls, with the majority of that figure representing girls. More research is definitely
28
American women’s activism, these clubs played a crucial role in establishing the
leadership and influence of African-American women as agents of change in their
communities. Believing that a race could not rise any higher than its womanhood, to
paraphrase the nineteenth century African-American scholar Anna Julia Cooper, AfricanAmerican club women embraced racial uplift as their raison d’etre in fighting for their
families, children, and especially their girls. Historian Deborah Gary White notes that
African-American women “saw only congruity in their race and gender outlook,” and this
perspective emboldened them to address social problems that arose from Migration.
White points out that, “clubwomen codified their duty by making “Lifting as we Climb”
the Association (NACW) motto. Black women leaders did not hesitate to represent poor
Black women, few of who belonged to their organization. Proud of their work on behalf
of their less fortunate sisters, they felt it a duty to speak for them.”47 White makes an
important observation about the nature of racial uplift and social class. AfricanAmerican clubwomen concerned themselves with the plight of the poor not because they
cared to identify with them, but because they believed that they could be role models and
lead their downtrodden sisters and daughters. African-American women leaders
perceived themselves as suited to do racial uplift work because they were the pinnacle of
the race’s moral development. As mothers, they knew what was best for children, and
their guidance essentially shaped the future of the entire race.
needed in the subject of Southern girls’ clubs. “Reports Show Southern Colored People Waking Up,” The
Chicago Whip, September 20, 1919.
47
See Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1896-2000 (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 54-55.
29
African-American women’s work with youth and community predates the arrival
of migrants to Northern cities. Racial uplift work had a long and important history in
African-American life, and the Migration period changed an already existing framework
of benevolence and outreach. In 1895, a banner year for African-American women’s
organizing, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin of the New Era Club in Boston declared:
We need to talk over…things that are of especial interest to us as colored women,
the training of our children, openings for our boys and girls, how they can be
prepared for occupations and occupations may be found or opened for
them…moral education of the race…our mental elevation and physical
condition…how to make the most of our won, to some extent, limited
opportunities.48
Both White and Black women gained footing in community service and activism by
concentrating their efforts toward children and youth, which allowed them to appear nonthreatening in the public sphere. Although African-American clubwomen and activists
sacrificed their personal time and resources for the greater good of their communities, it
did not mean that they were not beneficiaries of this work, professionally or personally.
One scholar of racial uplift classified club work as a parallel to organizing efforts of
African-American men before the turn of the century. “As middle class black men
looked to the YMCA to restore their sense of masculinity, middle-class black women
used their clubwork to reclaim their femininity.”49 Despite the strength of these
organizations and their members, the root causes of African-American poverty and social
alienation could not be addressed by even the most organized of clubs.
48
49
As quoted in White, Too Heavy a Load, 199.
See Jacqueline Moore, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B .DuBois and the Struggle for Racial Uplift
(Wilmington: Scholarly Resources), 105.
30
In light of all these challenges and dangers lurking around African-American girls
in Chicago, they were not without hope—and supporters. In a 1905 issue of the Voice of
the Negro, Chicago-based race woman Fannie Barrier Williams wrote a short article
entitled “The Colored Girl.” In the essay, she asked the question, “What becomes of the
colored girl?”50 She went on to write: “This is the question that cannot fail to be of
interest to men and women everywhere, who have at heart the well being of all people.”
Williams declared that, “the most interesting girl of this country is the colored girl.”51
Williams carried her belief in ‘colored girls’ into her service work, as she was among a
small, but effective, circle of women who tried to elevate the status of African-American
girls through mentoring and advocacy. Williams often wrote about the problems facing
girls in national publications and raised the issue in local club meetings. Williams and
her fellow clubwomen provide one of the entryways into this investigation of how girls
and racial uplift intersected in the Migration years.
The Dissertation
Each chapter of this dissertation focuses on how women’s activism on behalf of
girls, within specific organizations, was part of a response to the Great Migration and the
shifts in African-American life in the North. I use racial uplift as a lens to explore how
50
Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Colored Girl.” in Mary Jo Deegan, ed., The New Woman of Color: The
Collected Writings of Fannie Barrier Williams, 1892-1918 (Dekalb, Il.: Northern Illinois University Press,
2002), 58. The Voice of the Negro was established in Atlanta in 1904, as a moderate publication to bridge
the opinions of both radical and accommodationist African-Americans. Eventually, the magazine
embraced a more radical identity, alienating Booker T. Washington and other African-American
conservatives. After the Atlanta Race Riots, the magazine moved to Chicago, in 1906. The magazine
folded a year later. For more about The Voice of the Negro and its political writing, see Louis R. Harlan,
“Booker T. Washington and The Voice of the Negro, 1904-1907,” Journal of Southern History 45
(February 1979): 45-62.
51
Ibid.
31
women viewed girls, as well as how girls fared in Chicago. I not only highlight the
programs for girls, but also analyze the various ideologies, methods, and leadership styles
that influenced these groups. Each group in this dissertation epitomizes how racial uplift
efforts helped to create the image and ideal of the African-American girl and her potential
for leading the race in a new era marked by possibility and change.
In Chapter One, I present the Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls.
Originally founded as an African-American orphanage by evangelist Amanda Smith, and
later led by educator Adah M. Waters, the Smith School’s rise and fall illustrates the
various debates about childcare that characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. I also introduce the complex relationships between two sets of racial
uplifters— African-American leaders and White benefactors. This racial divide created
numerous tensions regarding who knew what was best for African-American girls. The
Amanda Smith School’s history exemplifies how racial uplift ideologies influenced
African-American women’s support for the institutional care of girls. Smith, and her
supporters, held a strong belief in the industrial school system as a means of liberating
girls from the social evils of idleness and dependence.
Chapter Two examines an important shift in African-American life during the
Migration—the rise of new religious movements and groups in the North. In this chapter,
I focus on the Moorish Science Temple, which was often described as one of many new
Black religions of the Migration era. The Moorish Science Temple was a bizarre
amalgamation of Islam, Eastern religions and Garveyist politics. Although not explicitly
a girls’ group or an organization traditionally associated with racial uplift, the chapter
demonstrates the important role gender, women and girls played in sustaining and
32
unmaking a powerful, African-American group. The Moorish girls’ programs reveal
how the Migration created an emergence of religious, as well as commercial markets that
targeted African-American girls.
Chapter Three discusses the work of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., a
national college and alumnae organization founded at Howard University in 1908.
African-American sororities have been the topic of many African-American women’s
history texts because of the rich archival material these groups have left behind. In a
slight departure from traditional institutional histories, I focus on the rhetoric surrounding
their Vocational Guidance campaign, a push to help girls find their professional callings.
The A.K.A. sorority’s vocational guidance work often obscured the harsh economic and
social realities for African-American girls, who often had to work instead of pursuing an
education. The framework of A.K.A.’s leadership in vocational guidance shows us the
limitations of racial uplift in the face of dire economic and racial injustice.
The final chapter looks at the Second Ward Camp Fire Girls, an AfricanAmerican branch of the national camping organization, The Camp Fire Girls. Camp Fire
Girls, established in 1910 by Progressive intellectual-activist Luther Halsey Gulick, was
an attempt to prepare girls for the work of a modern era while emphasizing the values of
maternalism and a woman’s distinct place. The national organization did not explicitly
bar African-American girls from participating, but instead often ignored the contributions
of African-American groups and racism within the organization. Camp Fire’s work
reveals how racial uplift ideologies were brought to an organization outside the AfricanAmerican women’s leadership community. The Camp Fire agenda was a response to the
urban environment as much as it was a celebration of the outdoors and the beauty of
33
nature. This chapter explores how African-American women used an existing
organization and set of principles and recapitulated its meaning for African-American
girls.
Each chapter provides a glimpse into some of the opportunities for girls in
Chicago. It is not an exhaustive history of girls in Chicago. Rather, it is a look into the
places where girls were protected, nurtured and participated in the dizzying changes in
African-American life. We can only wonder if that teenage girl from Selma, Alabama
ever got a response from Robert Abbot. We do not have records of what happened to
her. Yet, we know that thousands of girls found themselves in the “promised land” of
Chicago, as well as other Northern cities, and in this dissertation we find out how some
promises were fulfilled and others were not.
CHAPTER ONE: THE AMANDA SMITH INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL
FOR COLORED GIRLS
A Celebration
On June 28, 1899, in the midst of a “wild storm of wind and rain,” an elderly exslave-turned-evangelist braved the elements to participate in an important occasion.52
After years of prayerful discernment, careful planning, and exhaustive fundraising,
Amanda Berry Smith proudly opened the Amanda Smith Orphanage and Industrial Home
for Abandoned Destitute Colored Children on that wet summer day. The former African
Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.) missionary established Illinois’s first orphanage
for African-American children in a modest frame house in the suburb of North Harvey,
thirty miles outside of Chicago. In the process of opening the institution, she also laid the
foundation for future educational opportunities for African-American girls in Chicago.
Smith’s Orphanage, which she believed fulfilled a calling from God, became an all-girls
industrial school, named the Amanda Smith Industrial School for Girls, in 1912.53
In this chapter, I present the Smith School’s work with girls. I begin with a
history of the Orphanage, including a brief exploration of Smith’s background,
leadership, and her successes and failures as an orphanage matron, until her departure in
1912. Smith’s story provides an illustration of women’s racial uplift work in the Chicago
area before the Great Migration and accentuates some of the critical issues for AfricanAmerican women’s activism during this time. The Orphanage’s opening preceded the
Migration by more than a decade, and its operations demonstrate how small groups of
52
As quoted in David C. Bartlett and Larry A. McClellan, “The Final Ministry of Amanda Berry Smith,”
Illinois Heritage 1,no. 2 (Winter 1998): 20-24, 22.
53
For more on Amanda Smith’s life and legacy, see Adrienne Israel, Amanda Berry Smith: From
Washerwoman to Evangelist (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press), 1998.
34
35
African-Americans in Chicago supported privately funded racial uplift efforts and
collaborated with wealthy Whites to provide services for Black children in need. The
chapter then turns its focus toward the Orphanage’s shift to an industrial school, under
the leadership of Adah M. Waters. Waters was a member of a younger generation than
Smith. She was formally educated and spent her formative years at the Cheyney Institute
for Colored Youth, outside of Philadelphia. Waters balanced a desire to adopt modern
methods of training and educating girls in the Industrial School with traditional racial
uplift commitments to protecting African-American girls. Waters’s vision for the
Industrial School and her leadership style reflected emerging concerns about girls in
Chicago’s labor markets and the appropriateness of institutional care for destitute or
delinquent girls. Upon assuming the post of superintendent of the school, Waters soon
learned that her formal education and commitment to girls were not enough to quell the
battles among the School’s benefactors and interracial board. This chapter highlights the
various financial and political challenges to African-American women’s work on behalf
of girls and introduces important debates about African-American youth and segregated
institutions. Within the archival material concerning the Smith Orphanage and Industrial
School, there is not a wealth of information about girls’ experiences at the institutions.
Yet, through the School’s records of public activities, the leaders’ private correspondence
and the coverage of the institution in African-American newspapers, we are able to get a
sense of the institution’s culture and values, as well as its desire to see girls secure safe
jobs and nurture their intellectual curiosities. This chapter chronicles the Great Migration
era’s most salient and pressing questions about what girls needed and what they faced in
36
the urban context, with particular attention to girls with little or no familial or financial
support.
The Long Road to Chicago: The Lord’s Dealings with Amanda Smith
Smith’s journey from her birthplace on a plantation in Long Green, Maryland to
her activism in Chicago included stops and adventures around the world. Smith was born
into slavery in 1837, the eldest girl among Samuel Berry and Mariam Matthews’ thirteen
children.54 Her father purchased his family’s freedom when she was a young girl, and the
Berrys settled in Pennsylvania. Smith’s early life included many tragedies. She was
made a widow twice and endured the deaths of four of her five children by the age of
thirty-two.55 To ward off depression and the lures of an ever-tempting Satan, Smith
attended lively religious camp meetings and revivals. Each week, believers gathered to
shout out emphatic hallelujahs, sing meeting songs and listen to fiery circuit preachers.
After years of attending these invigorating celebrations, Smith’s own spirit could not
resist The Spirit. Smith became sanctified—reaching the pinnacle of human purity—in
1868 and immersed herself in the A.M.E. Church. After nine years of preaching and
singing at A.M.E. and Methodist meeting camps, Smith heard the call to go overseas to
spread the Word. She made arrangements for her daughter Mazie to attend school in the
States, which allowed her to travel to England in 1878. She later relocated to India for
two years, where she spent time among Christian converts and worked with two
54
Amanda Smith, An Autobiography. The Story of the Lord’s’ Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith the
Colored Evangelist; Containing an Account of Her Life Work of Faith, and Her Travels in America,
England, Ireland, Scotland, India, and Africa, as an Independent Missionary, Electronic Edition, (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 505.
55
Bartlett and McClellan, 21.
37
churches. Smith’s curiosity then led her to Africa. She traveled to Liberia and across
West Africa after leaving India. Smith spent eight years in Africa, where she adopted
two children, a boy named Robert and a girl, Frances.
Smith ended her missionary work in 1890 and returned to the United States.
Fatigued and in poor health from her travels, Smith had to find less strenuous work to
support herself and her mission to establish an orphanage for African-American children.
Smith’s friends and A.M.E. colleagues had urged her for years to write her travel
accounts; Smith always resisted because of her lack of formal education. Smith finally
asked God for guidance, as she did before making any major decisions, and discovered
encouragement in the Bible. She wrote in her autobiography that the answer was in
Second Corinthians, “My eye lighted on these words, ‘Now, therefore, perform the doing
of it, and as there was a readiness to will, so there may be a performance also out of that
which ye have.’”56 In 1893, she published An Autobiography, The Story of the Lord’s
Dealing with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist Containing an Account of her
Life Work of Faith, and Her Travels in America, England, Ireland, Scotland, India, and
Africa, as An Independent Missionary. Six years after the autobiography was published,
Smith had saved a considerable amount of her earnings and was able to match her money
with donations for the Orphanage. After amassing a small fortune of $10,000, Smith
purchased a converted store building at the corners of 147th and Desplaines Streets in
North Harvey (which later incorporated into the town of Harvey).
Smith learned about orphanages while at Christian missions overseas. She
believed that the role of the orphanage was to save children from developing a poor work
56
Smith, iii.
38
ethic and bad habits. The top priority of the Smith Home was to keep already
disadvantaged children from slipping into vice. Smith extolled the virtues of
temperance, self-reliance, thrift and piety. She believed that these values coupled with
practical work training were the keys to success in a world overflowing with lures and
opportunities to fall into idleness and sin. Smith Home children learned manual labor
skills—laundering, basic farm work, and domestic service. After leaving the Smith
Orphanage, some of the industrial training school graduates were able to secure janitorial
work in Harvey businesses; others settled in Chicago as domestic servants. Occasionally,
abandoned children were reunited with their parents, or they found new homes with
African-American families in the city. Ever protective of her children, Smith tried to
visit potential adoptive homes to ensure children were not merely being ‘adopted out,’
meaning procured by families in search of servant children, or mistreated once in their
new homes.57
Amanda Smith’s Strategic Leadership
Smith considered herself a humble woman, yet she was also a strategic leader
when dealing with matters associated with the Orphanage. Smith, like many AfricanAmerican women engaged in racial uplift projects at the time, demonstrated her
leadership abilities by coalition building with Black women’s clubs, serving as a
spokeswoman for her cause and fundraising. Smith exercised her leadership by drawing
interracial support from both Whites in Harvey and Blacks in Chicago. She also created
57
Israel, 127.
39
business opportunities to generate income for the Orphanage through her status in the
A.M.E. religious community.
African-American clubwomen and activists held Smith in the highest regard.
Several of Chicago women’s clubs sponsored fundraisers and special visits to the Smith
Orphanage to pay their respects to Smith, and they encouraged African-Americans to
visit Harvey and the ‘inmates’ of the Orphanage. Anti-lynching activist Ida B. WellsBarnett was one of Smith’s strongest supporters. Wells-Barnett’s Fellowship Herald
newspaper urged readers to attend annual anniversary events at the Orphanage.
“Everybody knows of this home, and how…Amanda Smith has taken care of the waifs
and strays of the Negro race, besides furnishing homes for many orphans and half
orphans whose mothers and fathers could not keep them and at the same time make a
living for them.”58 In 1910, on the Orphanage’s 12th anniversary, Wells-Barnett spoke
on Smith’s behalf, encouraging groups to solicit donations from their home churches to
help update the facilities with “electric lights” and “shower baths.”59 The Chicago
Defender’s Sabine, the women’s page writer, celebrated Smith’s 70th birthday by calling
her the “grand old woman.” Sabine continued, “Mrs. Smith today is a splendid object
lesson for intelligent and vigorous woman no matter what their age.”60
58
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Report of Work of Women’s Clubs: Personals and Meeting Notes,” Fellowship
Herald: Organ of the Negro Fellowship League 1:8, June 22, 1911. The event included activities at the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union and speeches by leading race woman speakers, Wells-Barnett
herself and Wilberforce (Ohio) University’s Hallie Q. Brown. Brown included Smith in an edited volume
on African-American women entitled, Homespun Heroines. See Hallie Q. Brown, Homespun Heroines
and other Women of Distinction (Xenia, Oh.: Aldine Publishing Company, 1926), 129-133. Brown said of
Smith, “Amanda Smith lived on Earth, but her conversation was in heaven.” Brown, 132.
59
Chicago Defender, “Smith’s Home Anniversary,” July 2, 1910.
60
Sabine, “Motherhood Only Career,” Chicago Defender, February 24, 1918.
40
Prior to the Orphanage opening, Smith lived on Chicago’s predominately Black
South Side, which made it easy for her to participate in African-American community
activities. Despite her strong relationships with African-Americans in Chicago, Smith
purposely established the Orphanage outside of the city in Harvey. Originally named
South Lawn, Harvey was founded as an alternative to the sinfulness of Chicago. The
town’s founders capitalized on the growing popularity of Chicago during the 1892
Columbian Exposition by condemning the World’s Fair itself and presenting Harvey as a
pious alternative with wholesome activities. The planners envisioned a place where
visitors could find everything not offered at the lowbrow Fair—no belly dancers and
undulating Egyptians within the Harvey limits. Blending his Christian values with his
business savvy, the town’s namesake Harvey W. Turlington appealed to manufacturers to
build factories in the town to provide jobs, attracted followers of evangelist Dwight
Moody to move to Harvey to fill these new positions, and used lumber from his own
business to build houses financed by his lending agency. As its population grew, Harvey
became host to religious societies and a variety of churches. Within a year of Harvey’s
establishment, a local branch of the Illinois-based Women’s Christian Temperance Union
(WCTU) was founded to help promote the “planned temperance community.”61
Harvey’s citizens may have readily accepted Smith and her charges, the only AfricanAmericans in the town, because of the community’s collective belief in temperance.
Smith was an avid member of the WCTU since her days in England. Smith’s friend,
61
www.cityofharvey.org, April 24, 2006. Temperance ended shortly after the community established itself
as a dry town. Harvey’s residents voted to license a saloon in town in 1895, by a small majority, ending the
city’s claim of temperance.
41
WCTU President Frances Willard later tapped her to serve as the organization’s national
evangelist.62
Smith’s status as an evangelist in the A.M.E. Church helped to promote and
support the Orphanage. Smith was a prominent figure in the Methodist community
internationally and her orations were recognized for their heartfelt passion. She was
famous for her testimonies of faith and performance of praise songs. In the introduction
to her autobiography, Methodist Bishop James Mills Thoburn recalled hearing her speak
and determined that she possessed a “rare degree of spiritual power.”63 The national
A.M.E. press also praised her. In an 1895 edition of The Christian Recorder, Bishop
Wyman described Smith as “that great female evangelist,” and he believed that the
Orphanage would flourish because its leader was “a woman so well known.”64 In
Harvey, Smith was a local dignitary. Local churches often invited her to speak about her
domestic mission. In the fall after the Orphanage officially opened, she presented a talk
about the Home, and six of the orphans performed a song before an audience at a Harvey
Methodist Episcopal Church. The Harvey Herald reported, “Little Robert…a bright and
cunning fellow, was the favorite of the evening and received hearty applause.”65
Throughout the life of the Orphanage, she tried to enhance the institution’s wealth by
62
Frances Willard has an interesting history with race relations and the inclusion of African-American
women into the temperance movement. In1893, in an annual address to the WCTU, Willard essentially
accepted the practice of lynching as a necessary evil to protect White women from, “the devourers of
women and children.” She also suggested denying suffrage to African-Americans and reified the lynching
principles of the South. This touched off a rebuttal and a feud with anti-lynching activist Ida B. WellsBarnett. For more on Willard, race and her conflict with Ida B. Wells-Barnett, see Ida B. Wells, "Mr.
Moody and Miss Willard," Fraternity (May 1894): 16-17.
63
Smith, Lord’s Dealings, vi.
64
“Notes By the Way,” The Christian Recorder, November 7, 1895.
65
“Locals,” The Harvey Herald, sec.1, October 5, 1899.
42
conducting speaking tours, for which she negotiated and collected her own fees. Few
women, Black or White, wielded as much influence at church meetings. Church councils
and camp meeting planners sought her out to share her stories of evangelizing overseas
and to perform songs. Her frequent speaking tours and appearances at revival meetings,
sometimes before wealthy interracial crowds, helped her secure the seed money to start
the Orphanage. Smith also created The Helper, a short-lived newspaper to augment the
Orphanage’s income.66
The Challenges of Institution Building
Smith may have acted strategically in planning for the Orphanage, but when it
came to managing it, Smith was not at her best. The level of care she demonstrated in
giving religious instruction to the children was not duplicated in the handling of the dayto-day affairs of the Orphanage. She often found herself at odds with her employees and
unable to work with them. She sometimes wrote letters to the A.M.E. Church’s Christian
Standard, The Harvey Herald or The Harvey Tribune-Citizen, complaining about having
to shoulder the entire enterprise of the Orphanage because her staff was incompetent.67
Smith was overextended and overcommitted in her position as the Orphanage’s principal,
spokesperson, disciplinarian, supervisor, and fundraiser.
66
67
Israel, 128.
Ibid, 129. While on a trip to Florida during the summer of 1907, a fire broke out at the Home. The
Harvey Fire Department, along with a group of boys at the Home, extinguished it. Upon returning from her
trip, Smith was angry that no one notified her of the fire or wrote a letter of thanks to the Fire Department,
so she wrote one in the Harvey Tribune Citizen. In the letter, she criticized the staff: “And please pardon
the seeming ungratefulness of those whose duty it was to have made this acknowledgment through your
paper weeks ago. Thanks the Firemen,” Harvey Tribune Citizen, July 7, 1907.
43
Despite her business savvy in securing speaking engagements, she often
compromised the financial standing of the Home. Smith did not have a consistent source
of funding for the Orphanage. As was the case with many African-American self-help
institutions, its dependence on charities and its leaders’ income to pay its expenses
created financial instability. Smith often purchased plots of land in hopes of expanding
the Orphanage, but could not afford to build on it.68 The Orphanage’s financial resources
paled in comparison to the coffers of similar orphanages, which received state funding or
could rely on wealthy donors. For instance, in 1906, the Orphanage reported assets
totaling $16,552.35, with the majority of that figure representing its properties and
furniture; the school only had $52.35 in cash on hand.69 In comparison, the Chicago
Industrial Home for Children, which housed fewer orphans than the Smith Orphanage,
reported assets totaling $19,378.86, with more than three times as much in cash on hand,
and a portfolio including $1090.66 in investments and $374.15 in “farm implements.”70
While Smith kept an eye on her staff and tried to balance the Orphanage’s budget,
she was also being watched. Although the Orphanage did not receive significant
financial support from the state, it was still under scrutiny of the Illinois State Agent for
the Visitation of Children and the Illinois Board of Public Charities (IBPC), as well as the
Orphanage’s own Board of Trustees. The state made little effort to aid African-American
children, but they still retained the right to inspect and, if necessary, sanction AfricanAmerican institutions. Each of the Orphanage’s monitors took exception with elements of
68
Ibid, 131-134.
69
State of Illinois Board of Public Charities, “Report of the Illinois Board of Public Charities, 19: 19041906,” 337.
70
Ibid, 320.
44
Smith’s management style and the Home’s meager housing conditions. Critics raised
questions about the amount of time Smith spent traveling. Visitors noticed Smith
sometimes remained in her room to avoid the children and the staff. Smith may have
wanted to hide from the mounting financial stresses on the Orphanage and the decline of
the campus’s main frame house and its fire-damaged brick cottages.71
The Orphanage repeatedly received negative evaluations from the state, but
because of its status as the only place for African-American orphans, the criticism never
resulted in fines, denials of charter or closure. In 1905, Charles Virden, State Agent for
the Visitation of Children, filed a negative report about the Orphanage. Virden’s
inspection coincided with one of Smith’s lectures at a camp meeting in a Chicago suburb.
Virden noted that the Orphanage was deep in debt and that Smith was ignoring the
children. The IBPC’s report of that year also supported Virden’s assessment about the
Orphanage’s shortcomings. Virden, despite his reservations, admitted that he did not
revoke the Orphanage’s charter or call for its closure because “it was the only
institution…in the state for the care of the colored children.”72 The IBPC concluded
similarly that that the institution was necessary for maintaining segregated public and
private social services in the city, and therefore had to remain open. 73
The Orphanage was allowed to languish in its problems because it not only
provided care, but it also it allowed other orphanages to avoid integration. Chicago
orphanages often catered to highly specific racial, ethnic and religious groups. For
71
Israel, 134.
72
Charles Virden (CV) letter to Julius Rosenwald (JR) Box 37, File 3 (37/3), Julius Rosenwald Papers
(JRP) Joseph Regenstein Library Special Collections (JRL) at the University of Chicago (UC).
73
State of Illinois, 337.
45
example, the North Side’s Angel Guardian Orphanage, which opened its doors only to
Roman Catholic German children with the explicit goal of maintaining German culture
among the orphans. Although African-American children did not appear in Chicago’s
orphanage system in significant numbers prior to the Great Migration, children’s
institutions remained rigidly segregated. The State needed the Orphanage if the color line
in children’s homes was to remain. Although Catholic African-American children were
able to stay at some Catholic homes, there was no established and comparable nondenominational institution for Black children prior to Smith opening the Orphanage. In a
report compiled by the Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society (ICHAS), the group
assessed 22 organizations for dependent children, including the St. Mary’s Home, Jane
Addams’s Hull House, and the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum.74 Only half
of the organizations were willing to accept African-American children. Some had tried in
the past, namely the Chicago Home for Boys, but concluded that integration was a
failure. The Chicago Day Nursery Association found that White mothers objected to
sharing the nursery with African-American children.75
The County not only allowed the crumbling Orphanage to continue to exist, but it
also exploited the Orphanage to avoid spending money on African-American children.
After a favorable IBPC report in 1903, which stated that “the children are treated well
74
The Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society (ICHAS) was founded in 1883 for the sole purpose of
finding homes for abandoned and neglected children. Throughout the century, the ICHAS worked on
establishing formal systems of adoption for African-American children, including several campaigns of
providing informational material to potential families. They partnered with African-American churches
and clubs to promote the practice. The ICHAS speculated that African-Americans often self-selected
themselves out of the process due to limited means; also many African-American families informally
adopted relatives after deaths, migration or loss of family income.
75
ICHAS, Memorandum to the ICHAS in Regard to Facilities for the Care of Dependent Colored Children,
1913. Box 1, Folder 1, Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society Papers (ICHASP), Richard J. Daley
Library Special Collections (RJD) at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC).
46
and the food furnished is of good quality,” the Inspector determined that the Orphanage
was “competent to receive children committed to its care by the courts,” and it should
become an outlet to place African-American children.76 Although the Cook County
Courts were referring children to the Orphanage, it did not provide a steady source of
financial support for those same children. In that same year, the Orphanage was strapped
for cash; Smith depended on revenues from The Helper, her speaking engagements, and
board charges for four children paid for by their parents, and donations.77
With so little money coming into the Orphanage, Smith often found that she could
not take any of the recommendations to improve the Orphanage. Yet, whether or not she
complied with the suggestions did not jeopardize the Orphanage’s standing; there were
no real incentives for compliance, so it was not a top priority. In 1906, the Orphanage
was able to solicit enough donations to make significant changes to the Orphanage.
Responding to an array of criticisms and recommendations from their last inspection,
Smith managed to direct some large-scale renovations of the Orphanage. The staff
cleaned out some of the school’s store rooms, renovated a third cottage to expand the
facility, outfitted the children in better clothes, cleaned the dormitories, repainted,
purchased new beds, and fired a questionable matron and secretary, but not before
thoroughly auditing her books.78
The Orphanage’s financial situation worsened each year, leading some to wonder
if the Orphanage should change its mission. By the fall of 1907, for the first time, Smith
76
State of Illinois Board of Public Charities, “Report of the Illinois Board of Public Charities 14” (1904),
132-133.
77
Ibid, 133.
78
State of Illinois, “Illinois Board of Public Charities (1906),” 322-323.
47
could not admit orphans due to financial limitations. The added burden of the County’s
referrals, the expense of hiring private teachers, and a fire in a cottage in the spring of
1907, sunk the Orphanage deeper in debt. The annual IBPC report found that 49 children
were ‘inmates’ of the Orphanage and with one less cottage available “two slept in a
bed.”79 Despite the strains, the IBPC report for 1907-1908 included favorable comments
about the sanitary conditions of the Orphanage and the room and board of the children.
The inspector also made a few suggestions that not only highlighted some of the issues in
the Orphanage, but also indicated an emerging trend in the care of orphaned children, a
trend that would have significant influence on the Home’s next phase as the Industrial
School for Girls. The IBPC implored the Orphanage’s Board to seek out home
placement, or adoption, aggressively.80 Beginning in the mid-1900s, progressive activistintellectuals were highly critical of orphanages and their unsanitary and congested
conditions. Critics also accused orphanages of not formulating strategies to help reunite
families and they made it difficult to keep poor families intact. Progressive reformers
advocated foster care as the most humane alternative to orphanages.81
Smith was deeply committed to the orphans and was beloved by her community,
but her commitment and admirers could not protect her from the very real stress of
running such an important institution. As an African-American woman directing an
orphanage in the early twentieth century, Smith had to contend with inconsistent financial
support, bureaucratic scrutiny, and the color line. Similar problems confronted African79
Ibid, 322-323.
80
State of Illinois Board of Public Charities “Report of the Board of Public Charities (1906-1908),” 20.
81
See Kenneth Cmiel, “Orphanages,” The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago: Chicago
Historical Society, 2004).
48
American service organizations across the spectrum. Ironically, the Orphanage’s
problems may have been a blessing in disguise, because the failure of that program
helped to usher in the girls’ school. Yet, the Industrial School for Colored Girls, even
under different leadership, was not immune from these and other challenges either.
An Industrial School for Girls
Considering the challenges that faced Smith in leading the Orphanage, it is not
surprising that she decided to walk away from it. She was deeply passionate about the
Orphanage, but the many responsibilities took its toll on the aging Smith, and she decided
to retire in 1912, at the age of 75. 82 Ever savvy and committed, Smith ensured that her
legacy would remain by reorganizing the Home as an all-girls industrial school, which
made it eligible to receive state funding. Smith knew all too well that the institution
needed a steady stream of money to operate. The Industrial Act of 1912 provided
funding for the Industrial School, which led Cook County’s child welfare division to
grant a monthly stipend of $15 for every girl they placed in the school.83 The
Orphanage’s boys relocated to the Louise Manual Training School on Chicago’s West
Side, and the school’s new charter renamed it the Amanda Smith Industrial School for
Colored Girls. 84 The School’s reopening also included a thorough cleaning of rooms,
renovations to the building and new decorations to reflect an all-girls space.85
82
Smith broke the color barrier by moving to all-White Sebring, Florida, where a former benefactor and
friend had founded the town and provided Smith with housing until her death on February 25, 1915.
83
84
Israel, 141.
Elizabeth McDonald founded the Louise Manual Training School in 1907. The School was established
after McDonald volunteered as a probation officer for Chicago’s Juvenile Court system. Noticing the
number of dependent children who would be put in jails for delinquent children, she established the home.
It closed after her death in 1920. For more on the Smith and Manual Homes, see Sandra M. O’Donnell,
49
When Smith left Chicago for her retirement home in Sebring, Florida, she left the
new School in the hands of the Interracial Circle of the Amanda Smith Home, the
School’s trusted advisors committed to cross-racial cooperation. They took “full charge
of the Home” to hire staff, make decisions about the school’s new direction and solicit
public support for their mission.86 This distinguished group worked with the Board and
managers to improve the new industrial school, met at African-American social clubs,
and organized Christmas parties and fundraising concerts for the girls. They also
maintained strong ties with the Chicago’s juvenile courts; Chicago’s Judge Merritt
Pinckney even hosted the School’s first general committee meeting.87
Smith’s departure marked another crucial moment in the relationship between
Chicago’s social services programs and African-Americans in the city. Smith’s entrance
into the field of childcare depended almost exclusively on private support. Therefore
African-American women developed a sense of ownership in dealing with the
Orphanage, as if they were also matrons at the Home. Clubwomen celebrated Smith’s
work because it was also their work. With the shift to the Industrial School, the
relationship would be slightly different. The School was in a formal relationship with
the state, exposing it to a larger circle of critics and making it more dependent on White
power brokers to help it maintains its status. The School’s interracial Board regarded
themselves as representative of the collaborative spirit that sustained the Orphanage, but
“The Care of Dependent African-American Children in Chicago: The Struggle between Black Self-Help
and Professionalism,” Journal of Social History 27, no. 4 (Summer 1994), 763-776.
85
Chicago Defender, “Training School for Colored Girls,” August 9, 1913.
86
Chicago Defender, “The Interracial Circle,” May 17, 1913. Also, Chicago Defender, “The Amanda
Smith Home,” February 22, 1913.
87
Chicago Defender, “Amanda Smith School for Girls Formed in Court Room,” August 16, 1913.
50
their actions reveal a great deal of interracial tension and a split on ideologies on what
was best for African-American girls.
Challenges for the Colored Working Girl
The governing body of the new industrial school hired Adah M. Waters of
Pennsylvania to lead the school. Waters arrival ushered in a different kind of leadership
to the Smith School. Unlike Smith, Waters was more inspired by the experiences of
college rather than the excitement of camp meetings. As a graduate of the Cheyney
Institute, the nation’s first Black college, Waters entered her position with a sophisticated
understanding of the possibilities for African-American girls to use formal education in
the workforce. Unlike Smith who could rely on her name to garner support for the
Orphanage, Waters had no ties with the A.M.E.’s powerful community, and she knew
very little of Chicago’s network of Black women’s clubs and leaders. Ultimately, Waters
was hired to face a much different problem than Smith did. Smith’s major challenges
were securing funding for the school and imparting basic skills on the orphans, so they
could find manual labor jobs, remain employed and live a Christian life. Waters also had
to find funding sources, but her explicit responsibility of training girls for gainful
employment was much more daunting in light of Chicago’s employment marketplace for
African-American women and girls.
When Waters was hired as superintendent of the industrial school, activistintellectuals in Chicago were grappling with questions on the appropriate role of young,
female labor in the city’s ever-growing industries and businesses—legal and otherwise.
As the leader of an industrial school, Waters was probably familiar with the distinct
51
issues facing African-American girls as they struggled to earn a living. The mission of
training African-American girls to become working girls was as much about gaining
respectability in society from both Blacks and Whites, as it was about fair wages and
opportunities for advancement. Within the culture of racial uplift projects, training and
industrial school provided two benefits. First, they prepared young women to contribute
financially to their homes and communities during a time of economic uncertainty for
many African-Americans. Second, in a less tangible sense, well-trained, efficient and
skilled girls could put the best face on the race as they interacted with White bosses,
peers and customers. Industrial schools could individually lift up girls out of poverty,
and their good works could in turn contribute to the lifting of the entire race. Generally,
teenage women in Chicago were more employable than their male counterparts in the
scarce, ‘respectable’ white-collar positions, such as typists, store clerks and ticket takers.
Racial up lifters often invested substantial time and resources into assessing how to get
African-American girls into these jobs.88
Prominent Chicagoans had taken up the mission of securing safer workplaces for
African-American girls and young women even before the swell of the Migration hit in
the 1910s. University of Chicago alumna Frances Kellor helped establish the National
League for the Protection of Colored Women in 1905. The organization tried to vet
potential exploitation and danger for Southern women in cities by providing escorts from
train stations and screening employers. In 1911, the League disbanded and was
subsumed into the National Urban League. The Urban League then became another
outlet for African-American women workers to learn about employment and for
88
See Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City rev.
ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
52
exploited workers to seek redress or settle grievances. Some female migrants were aware
of the vulnerabilities of being a woman alone in Chicago and prepared for it. One
woman addressed the pitfalls of the city in a letter to Robert Abbott and the Defender.
She wrote:
I have very fine references if needed. I am a widow of 28, no children, not a
relative living and I can do first class work as house maid and dining room or care
for invalid ladies. I am honest and neat and refined with a fairly good education.
I would like a position where I could live on places because it’s very trying for a
good girl to be out in a large city by self among strangers.89
The Juvenile Protective Association (JPA) was also concerned about employment
issues. The JPA published and widely distributed reports with titles ranging from The
Department Store Girl to Our Most Popular Recreation Controlled by the Liquor
Interests. 90 The Hull House-derived JPA made the working conditions of young women
one of its top priorities in a 1911 investigation.91 In the annual synopsis of its work, they
listed a report on “the physical and moral conditions, which surround working girls.”92
This study included the personal histories of 200 department store girls, 200 factory girls,
[and] 200 office girls.”93 The JPA was concerned with some of the dangers young
women faced inside and outside of their workplaces. The JPA investigated inappropriate
89
Emmett J. Scott, “Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916-1918,” Journal of Negro History 4:3 (July 1919).
316.
90
Juvenile Protective Association (JPA), “Report of the Juvenile Protective Association of 1911,” (1/25).
JPA Papers (JPAP), RJD at UIC. Women residents of Hull House founded the JPA in 1907 out of their
concern about the temptations and vices corrupting Chicago youth. The most prominent leaders of the stillstanding organization were Louise de Koven Bowen and Jessie Binford, the first President and Director
respectively.
91
Ibid, JPA.
92
Ibid, JPA.
93
JPA, “The Work of the Juvenile Protective Association: A Synopsis,” (1/118), JPAP, RJD at UIC.
53
work relationships between managers and young girls and employment scams run by
procurers seeking out girls for prostitution or trafficking. The JPA was also examined
what girls did with their paychecks after work hours. The synopsis of 1911 included
reports on: dance halls, beer garden, five-and-ten-cent theatres and the Riverview Park,
where “a number of objectionable features” were investigated.94
The JPA undertook a special report focusing on African-Americans also. Some
critics regarded the 1913 report entitled, “The Colored People of Chicago: An
Investigation Made for the Juvenile Protective Association” as racist in its
characterization of African-Americans, but the study nonetheless was one of the few
examinations of African-American life which also focused on African-American girls in
the city.95 One of the motivations for conducting the study was the prevalence of
African-American girls working as maids in houses of prostitution. Hull House protégé
and researcher Louise de Koven Bowen wondered about “the public opinion which
would so carelessly place the virtue of a colored girl in jeopardy,” and blamed
employment agencies for sending unknowing African-American girls into workplaces
deemed unsuitable for their White peers. Bowen concluded that “congenial jobs for
refined girls” of color were nearly non-existent in the city. African-American girls
became prey to morally vicious employers or jealous. Their White counterparts were not
immune to this either, but fared much better at securing safer jobs in offices and
retailers.96
94
Ibid, “Work of the JPA.”
95
Louise de Koven Bowen, “The Colored People of Chicago: An Investigation Made for the Juvenile
Protective Association,” (1/128), JPAP, RJD at UIC.
96
Ibid, “The Colored People of Chicago.”
54
The triple binds of race, gender and age often left African-American girls in
search of jobs in a vulnerable position. Some brought African-American teenage women
found the best paying jobs in the Chicago’s vice districts or at the public amusements that
dotted a few interracial neighborhoods and operated mainly in Black ghettoes. All-night
lunchrooms, speakeasies, brothels and picture shows often needed young women to
attend to the needs, sexual and otherwise, of their clientele. For every young, White
woman caught up in these industries, she had a respectable, White counterpart who
avoided late night beer gardens and movie theatres at all costs. For African-American,
working girls, there were far fewer counterparts in the more respectable fields. Even the
most honest girls looking for employment as stenographers and typists were recruited
into indecent industries.
Some African-American working girls, however, were not disillusioned about the
city or particularly turned off by the fringe industries of the city and merely capitalized
on what was available to them.97 Kellor, Bowen and others concerned with the scarcity
of morally upright jobs available to African-American girls failed to consider that some
girls actually saw the potential in working in the vice districts. Work in the vice
industries could be as exploitative; yet, more respectable work could also be degrading.
Young domestics and clerks also endured long hours, insults and attacks against their
characters. In the biographies of some famous African-American blues singers and
performers, the women claimed to have found their creative voices and opportunities
while working in vice districts and other unrespectable places. Josephine Baker, who
began working as a domestic at only eight-years old, escaped an abusive employer and
97
For narratives on girls working in seedy entertainment venues, see E. Franklin Frazier, Negro Family in
Chicago (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1932).
55
traveled to St. Louis. She then became a member of the Dixie Steppers vaudeville act.
She was only thirteen-years old. Blues singer Alberta Hunter migrated to Chicago to sing
when she was thirteen also. She sang in clubs frequented by pimps and prostitutes, who
adopted and ‘raised’ the young singer. Similarly singer Ethel Waters grew up in a vice
district in Philadelphia, nurtured by older women in the sex trade.98
The records of organizations such as the JPA and news stories from the Defender
indicate that employment concerns were also tied to anxieties about the moral lives of
African-American working girls. The public image of African-American girls was also
important to racial uplifters. Mrs. B.S. Gaten, a member of the Young Women’s
Christian Association wrote an article in the Defender entitled, “The Standards of
Looseness in Public Places” in 1918, pleading for better social graces at public events
held for “the race.”99 The Defender Women’s Page contributor remarked, “the White girl
observes this most important fact and our girls neglect it, not knowing its importance.”100
The writer revealed her self-consciousness about appearing respectable in front of
Whites, so she and other African-Americans could escape scrutiny and reproach. She
chastised the behavior of allegedly respectable “race people” in public, and critiqued the
“loose” and “uncombed” dancer at one particular event. She even claimed that the girl’s
provocative performance caused a truly respectable lady to faint.101 Gaten’s reaction to
the dancing and her exaltation of White girls’ behavior epitomizes the ways in which
98
Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18: 4 (Summer
1992), 738-755.
99
B.S. Gaten, “Standards of Looseness in Public Places,” Chicago Defender (July 13, 1918).
100
Ibid.
101
Ibid.
56
racial uplift was often motivated by a desire to gain social acceptance from Whites. In
the literature on African-Americans and racial uplift, historians have often characterized
the Black middle-class of the early twentieth century as obsessed with not only reforming
the Black underclass, but also gaining credibility with and acceptance from middle-class
Whites.102 Regardless of the motivation for alerting young, African-American girls and
women to the dangers of dance halls and the need for industriousness and hard work,
realizing the goal of White acceptance and social equality was not easy, and racial
injustice could not be repaired by simply acting respectable.
The Smith Industrial School, the JPA, and the Defender contributor shared the
same fears about African-American girls’ vulnerability to the seedy worlds of the city.
Even in girls and teenage women were able to secure respectable jobs, the arbiters of
African-American respectability still monitored them closely. Although, industrial
schools and job training programs championed the elevation of girls and young women
through wage earning and skill building, they did not advocate total independence. The
Smith Industrial School, and similar projects, did not trust them to make socially or
financially wise decisions. African-American teenage women who worked in laundries,
private homes, and offices often lived in heavily supervised environments even if they
did not live with their parents. Teenage girls and young women lived in family-like
settings, such as industrial homes, African-American YWCA boardinghouses or
supervised houses, like the Phyllis Wheatley Home on the city’s South Side. The
Wheatley Homes in Chicago and throughout the country, provided boarding for young
102
For an engaging discussion of this issue, see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent: The
Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Higginbotham argues that African-American women sought out middle-class respectability in their
activism and organizing.
57
working women well into the 1960s.103 The supervised environments served as another
layer of protection between young women and the dangers of the urban environment, and
they often tried to dictate how their residents and students spent their earnings.104
Despite the progressive thinking that contributed to the establishment of girls’ training
schools and programs, all of these innovations were encapsulated by strict notions of
gender roles and social control of young women’s choices.
There are no records indicating whether the Smith Orphanage or Industrial
School’s girls were ever vulnerable to employers of all-night lunchrooms and
boardwalks. It is unlikely that Smith School girls found their ways to the indulgences of
the city. Smith most likely doled out harsh warnings, if not punishments, regarding the
temptations in the city that she and the early Harveyites tried to keep at bay. Yet, the
fears of the city’s potential influence on girls and the desire to prove the respectability of
the girls shaped the next stage in the Smith’s Home’s life.
103
The Phyllis Wheatley Home was established in 1896, under the leadership of Elizabeth Davis Lindsay,
who led the Phyllis Wheatley Club of Chicago for 28 years and published a history of the National
Association of Colored Women (NACW). The home was seen as a refuge for young, Southern women
who came to Chicago searching for work, or in rare cases, education. The organization’s mission was: “To
maintain a home and to safeguard and protect the young woman who is a stranger without friends or
relatives in Chicago. Surround them with Christian influences; to aid in securing employment.” See Anne
Meis Knupfer, Toward a Tenderer Humanity and Nobler Womanhood: African-American Women’s Clubs
in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
104
Young wage earning women were sometimes restricted on how they spent their money when they
resided in homes. A number of women’s historians have explored the relationship between young women
laborers and the public amusements in early twentieth century cities, yet we still have much to learn about
how young, African-American women indulged in these leisure practices and spent their discretionary
income. For more on White women laborers in the early twentieth century, see Nan Enstad, Ladies of
Labor, Girls of Adventure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), Kathy Peiss, Cheap
Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1987) and Laura Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies and Culture in
Turn of the Century Chicago (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998). For African-American
women and public amusements, see Tera W. Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives
after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
58
The Amanda Smith Industrial School for Girls: A New Beginning
Waters and Smith may have differed in a lot of ways, but both women used past
experiences to guide their work with the school, and took their responsibilities seriously.
Waters immediately demonstrated her strategic leadership skills when she developed a
comprehensive plan for the Industrial School. Waters proposed an upgrade to the
School’s curriculum to include an academic program alongside industrial training, she
wanted to raise funds to remedy nearly two decades of financial insolvency and move the
school in a new direction, and she implemented a different way to organize the existing
facilities to better serve the girls.
Waters entered her position with a sophisticated understanding of the possibilities
for African-American girls to gain a formal, liberal arts education in addition to an
education geared toward the workforce. As Smith was inspired by her experiences with
orphanages in Africa, Waters was inspired by the Cheyney model of education and its
noted leader Fanny Jackson Coppin, a friend of Amanda Smith. The Institute, founded in
1837 in Philadelphia, was established by the Society of Friends’ Richard Humphreys, as
a high school to provide both classical and industrial training to African-Americans in the
city.105 The Institute added manual training under Coppin, the school’s principal from
1869 to 1906. Coppin envisioned a school where Latin and Physics were taught
alongside Sewing and Woodworking. She hoped to provide an education “adapted to the
situation of the colored people, as it seems necessary to send them out prepared to work
at some trade, and to stand up for themselves,” but the Institute’s reluctant board and
105
Linda M. Perkins, Fanny Jackson Coppin and the Institute for Colored Youth, 1865-1902
(New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc, 1987).
59
growing racial tensions between the school’s African-American administrators and the
Quaker benefactors tested Coppin’s vision. 106 In 1902, the Institute aligned itself with
Booker T. Washington and moved to George Cheyney’s farm 25 miles outside of
Philadelphia. These decisions fundamentally changed the Institute. The Institute quickly
adopted the Tuskegee model of education and lost some of its classical education
foundations; Coppin lost faith and resigned from her position in 1906. In 1914, the
school became the Cheyney Training School for Teachers.107 Regardless of the problems
that faced the Institute after Coppin’s departure, the school continued to play an integral
role in developing generations of educators and school administrators like Waters, and
the school modeled how to provide two distinct styles of education in one place.
Waters’s academic plan for the School required a great deal of support, and she
appealed to donors to understand the importance of her School’s mission. In her
solicitations, Waters often stressed the need for gender equity and a strong belief in the
leadership of young women. Following a small fire on the school’s campus, which may
have occurred in February of 1917, she penned a letter to donors. She wrote of Chicago’s
“poorer colored girls...their minds are starving for the better things on which the soul
grow.”108 Waters’s prescription for this problem was industrial training and “literary
foundation.”109 She was hopeful that the School’s newly hired faculty—an English
106
Ibid, 200. Perkins notes, “Following the examples of Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, janitorial and
household chores were performed by the students of the Institute. In additions, students were requited to
follow a restricted schedule.”
107
Cheyney became a Teacher’s College in 1921, then became a state college in 1959 and was granted
university status in 1983.
108
Adah M. Waters (AMW), “The Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls,” pamphlet, (37/3),
JRP, JRL at UC.
109
Ibid.
60
teacher and a sewing teacher trained at the University of Chicago—would help build the
cornerstone of a new Smith School with an academically rigorous training school. She
proposed adding practical courses in home economics, nursing, hairdressing,
stenography, chiropody, as well as academic courses in African American history and
culture. The most ambitious proposal was to develop an academic program equivalent to
four years of Chicago public high school into the existing industrial plan.110 At that time,
there were few high schools for African-Americans in Chicago, let alone one that could
cater especially to African-American girls.
Waters could not implement any changes unless she first straightened out the
School’s financial mess. Waters personally conducted an audit of the School’s finances
when she received her appointment. Her investigation into the home’s mortgages yielded
a curious problem. In a letter to ICHAS superintendent W.S. Reynolds, she wrote, “I find
there are two or more mortgages, but could not find out the amount or the names of the
holders of them.”111 Adding to her problems was the school’s debt of $284.67.112
Smith’s poor financial management plagued the School after her departure, and it
jeopardized her ability to make improvements to the facility. Due to a judgment placed
against the house in 1913, the School could not borrow any money to make badly needed
repairs on the property.113 Funding continued to fall short; the State never increased its
provision of $15 per girl. Waters, like her predecessor depended heavily on donations to
110
Israel, 143-144.
111
AMW letter to W.S. Reynolds (WSR), (75-18/75-107) ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
112
Ibid, AMW to WSR.
113
Israel, 142.
61
support the 34 to 38 students that lived at the School in 1918, the majority of whom were
referred by Cook County.114 Waters hoped that the powerful and well-connected
Reynolds and the ICHAS could help her “accomplish the work for…neglected girls that
they so much need.”115 The School’s new charter, the new friends of the institution, the
name change and even the new source funding could not radically change the economic
realties of the institution. The years following Smith’s retirement from the Orphanage
were similar to the years preceding her departure. The school sank deeper in debt,
despite a Board of Trustees that included several successful businessmen and wealthy
community leaders.
Undeterred by the problems with the Board and the many financial dramas
associated with the School, Waters continued to make plans for the future. In March of
1918, she proposed moving the School to Chicago’s South Side. Waters set her sights on
a building on the corners of 50th and Indiana Streets, where the school could establish “a
small factory in which the older girls could work part time and defray their expenses.”116
She was housing 47 girls that year, and she was increasingly willing to compromise her
vision of a classical-industrial education, but her commitment to girls remained at the
heart of her ideas.117 After presenting the proposal for building a new school to Sears
Roebuck tycoon and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, Waters urged him to invest in the
girls by tying African-American uplift with the distinct role of mothers and care givers.
114
No detailed records of the students are available, yet it is very likely that there was a large range of girls
sent to the facility by Cook County’s various divisions, ranging from Judge Mary Bartelme’s Juvenile Girls
Court to the Department of Public Welfare, which placed abandoned and neglected girls, as well.
115
Ibid, 142.
116
AMW letter to WSR, March 27, 1918, (75-18/75-107), ICHASP, WJD at UIC.
117
Israel, 146.
62
She wrote that the good fight for African-American mobility “cannot be done without the
right kind of mothers. This root need of colored mothers among the lowly is the reason
why I am struggling to put our work on a financial basis.”118
With a limited supply of money to depend upon, Waters found free and
inexpensive ways to reorganize the school to improve the girls’ conditions. In order to
further the aims of using the School as a laboratory for the home, she introduced the
cottage system to the School. The cottage system was popular at industrial schools
throughout the Midwest and East Coast, including the Chicago area’s Park Ridge School
and The Girls Industrial School of Ohio, outside of Columbus. Waters believed that the
cottage system was paramount to creating order and trust among the girls as they shared
living quarters. Cottages created an imitation of family life by creating ‘families’ out of
the residents, with a matron or a married couple supervising the girls and presiding over
meals and communal activities. As more social workers gained the necessary credentials
to become professionals in child development, orphanages often sought their expertise in
creating physical and ideological spaces consistent with notions and theories of the
physically, emotionally and psychologically healthy child. The rising class of female
experts on abandoned children advocated a country setting for cottages, a main dining
room in which to share meals and adequate spaces for child’s play and exercise.119 The
Smith School, unable to finance the building of new cottages, parceled makeshift units
out of their two-story brick building and the frame annex that stood at the corner of an
acre of land. The cottage system also promoted good health and nutrition through set
118
119
AMW letter to WSR, March 27, 1918, (75-18/75-107), ICHASP, WJD at UIC.
See Nurith Zamora, Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 72.
63
bedtimes and healthy meals. Waters secured better health care for the cottages. In 1913,
she hired a Chicago dentist, Dr. Charles Lewis, to serve the school.120
The cottage system related to Waters’s appeal to cultivate “the right kind of
mothers” by recreating and modeling the middle-class home to girls who had little
contact with this style of home life. In the estimations of the girls’ industrial education
advocates, like Washington D.C.’s Nannie Burroughs and Waters, women’s work was
potent in both the private and public spheres. At the Smith School, girls had few
opportunities to exercise their political will and voices at club meetings and rallies. Yet,
within the structure of the School, the intricacies of home life became the stage for
engagement with the leadership training that informed and created mothers and race
women. Waters restructured the operations of the School’s residential life and the
industrial school sections in order to synthesize the work of the two areas. As
superintendent, she wanted the academic-vocational training to coincide with the daily
life of the dormitory rooms and communal spaces, lessening the school’s institutional
feel. A lesson on how to wait tables was practiced at meal times. The girls learned how
to launder garments and then practiced washing and folding the school’s linens. The
school’s nursery was the site of practicum in childcare and running a household. This
innovation, according to Waters, was a success. She wrote: “The girls like the new
arrangement. They show it in their improved manners and by their personal
appearance.”121
120
Chicago Defender, “In Chicago and its Suburbs,” September 6, 1913.
121
AMW letter to WSR, March 27, 1918.
64
Waters was pleased to see positive changes in the girls’ manners and appearances,
considering the shift in the School’s student population after the Industrial School
opened. When the Courts gained direct access to the School, the student body was
deeply affected. The Court referred a number of girls who had been charged with petty
crimes and others who exhibited poor behavior due to trauma and neglect. Waters
insisted that these girls would be best served by adopting a more pleasant demeanor and
good manners, and she tried to model this when dealing with the Court-referred group.
She described some of the girls as “hardened in lying, stealing and fighting,” having
“pernicious habits…twisted natures, [and] dull, crude” manners.122
In addition to the new School population introduced by the Courts, Smith had to
confront a growing population of Southern girls arriving in Chicago each year. The
Great Migration was in full swing when Waters settled in Harvey. With nearly half a
million African-American newcomers coming to Chicago in the period between 1910 and
1918, Waters and other African-American leaders could not ignore the changing
demographics and social needs of their communities. Waters acknowledged the growing
number of girls migrating with their families from the South and formulated a plan on
how the Smith School would respond to them. Waters’s plans included a program for
Southern girls in order to “fit them for their surroundings.”123 Fitting Southern migrants
to their new surroundings was a particularly important task for African-American elite
uplifters and leaders in the North. African-American women’s clubs and organizations
sponsored classes and held meetings to address Southern migrants’ behavior on
122
Israel, 143-144.
123
AMW to WSR, March 27, 1918.
65
streetcars, proper housekeeping and food preparation, and how to shed off their ‘country’
appearances and mannerisms. Waters may have believed what Bowen and Kellor feared
about female Southern emigrants to the North: They were unable to adapt to the fast pace
of the big city, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. In her solicitation
letter, Waters added that training Southern girls would “enable them to become valuable
industrial assets.”124
As leader of the School, Waters wanted to prepare girls to be both an earner as
well as a mistress of her own home, two roles often played by African-American women,
regardless of social status. Studies of African-American clubwomen and activists have
found that they were often employed in education, small business and even domestic
work while they helped form organizations such as the NACW and the first AfricanAmerican sororities. Unlike their White counterparts, they could not engage in
community work exclusively and often had to help support their families financially.
African-American women worked in both public life and paid labor in Progressive-era
Chicago.125 The JPA’s Colored People of Chicago found that 42.5 percent of AfricanAmerican women were “bread-winners of their race… double the proportion of White
women employed.”126 Of those employed White women, only .04 percent were married;
124
Ibid, AMW to WSR.
125
For more on African-American women, labor and African-American women’s club work, see Mary
Taylor Blauvelt, “The Race Problem as Discussed by Negro Women,” American Journal of Sociology 6
(1900-1901): 662-672 and Linda Gordon, Pitied, But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of
Welfare, 1890-1936 (New York: Free Press, 1994).
126
JPA, The Colored People of Chicago, 3.
66
the same census found that 60% of married African-American women were employed
outside of the home.127
Waters’s appeal to support job skills in the poorest and most vulnerable girls was
tied to the prescribed roles of African-American women in racial uplift projects. To help
African-American girls learn new skills and be productive was to guarantee a better life
for African-American men. Waters’s appeal characterized the African-American
woman’s success as a conduit for African-American men to rise above oppression.
Waters believed: “It takes the right kind of woman to produce and train a boy in the right
kind of man. It takes wonderful love, wisdom and care to build the woman with a
harmonious and symmetrical character out of the ill shaped life of a young girl.”128
Maternalism, one of the key strategies used by Gilded Age White women activists, was a
means of securing women’s rights to advocate for ‘women and family’ issues such as
mother’s pensions, kindergartens, parent-teacher associations, and child health care. For
African-American women activists, who were more likely to actually be mothers
themselves, maternalism was also a strategy to gain political voice and power. Maternal
politics were deployed to make overarching appeals about their ability to secure AfricanAmerican social, political and moral improvement community-wide.
Helping boys and men by becoming mothers was only one part of the overall
project of educating girls. A larger guiding motivation for the investment in girls’
education was a belief that by educating girls, all people of the race could benefit. In
127
128
Ibid, 3.
AMW letter to WSR, March 27, 1918. For more on racial uplift, see Kevin Kelly Gaines, Uplifting the
Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina, 1996) and Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990).
67
Anna Julia Cooper’s series of essays, A Voice From the South, the Sorbonne-educated
feminist linked the progress of the race with the work of mothers. Cooper wrote: “The
atmosphere of homes is no rarer and purer and sweeter than are the mothers in those
homes. A race is but a total of families. The nation is the aggregates of its homes.”129 A
girl’s training school reflected the values Cooper espoused by providing a strong sense of
capability and competence in girls within the socially acceptable sphere of the home and
domestic life. Girls could live out the metaphor of racial uplift in one of the aggregate
parts—an acceptable and orderly home. Advocates for African-American girls’
education extended their belief in women’s special role in the preservation of virtue and
respectability into the training of girls, so that each generation can assume the mantle of
the earlier one’s uplifters. Cooper challenged other African-American women to:
Let our girls feel that we expect something more of them than that they merely
look pretty and appear well in society. Teach them that there is a race with
special needs which they and only they can help; that the world needs and is
already asking for their trained, efficient forces.130
Cooper’s use of the word “trained” reveals the important distinction she and
Waters agreed upon in dealing with African-American girls, regardless of background.
Although Cooper was a member of the African-American elite, and Waters was also to a
lesser degree, they both acknowledged the potential within all girls of the race and their
value to the larger project of African-American liberation and success. That this work
was not only for the most educated or the most beautiful signals a somewhat egalitarian
vision of women’s leadership, even with its gendered biases and clearly defined roles.
129
Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (Xenia: Ohio: The Aldine
Printing House, 1892), 29.
130
Ibid, 8.
68
Searching for Support Systems
Waters’s experience, ideas and enthusiasm could only change the culture and
conditions of the School so much. She needed allies in the struggle, and found very few
in the School’s Board or Interracial Committee. Waters had to reevaluate her goals in
light of the workings of the School’s Board. Smith was a leading figure in Methodist
circles and her status may have garnered a level of deference, respect and consideration
from the Board members. With Smith no longer at the Home’s helm, the Board may
have felt less compelled to engage with School business and uphold their responsibilities.
The younger and lesser-known Waters may have dealt with the worst of the Board’s
inefficiency and conflicts.
Racial tensions often impeded the Board from taking action on the School’s
behalf. After Smith’s death in 1915, Charles Virden forced Ferdinand Barnett and some
of the other African-American members to resign from the School’s Board. Virden
threatened the School with closure if they failed to comply. His wife, Ida B. WellsBarnett was allowed to maintain her seat along with three other African-American
members. After Barnett was removed from the Board, Henrotin assumed the financial
responsibilities for the School.131 In addition to the removal of her husband from the
Board, Wells-Barnett had her own set of issues with the Board. Wells-Barnett and the
three other African-American Board members served the School alongside Ellen Martin
Henrotin and Esther W.S. Brophy, two White women who simultaneously sat on the
Smith Board and that of the notoriously segregated Park Ridge School. They were also
members of the all-White General Federation of Women’s Club, an organization that
131
Israel, 143.
69
excluded African-American women’s clubs from its membership. Wells-Barnett, who
founded the Ideal Woman’s Club and helped organize the NACW, was at the forefront of
the battle with racially exclusive women’s groups.132 Before Smith’s departure and
death, Wells-Barnett also argued with Smith’s dear friend Frances Willard about her
decision to not take a stand against lynching. Despite their differences, Wells-Barnet,
Brophy and Henrotin were able to collaborate on fundraising. In April of 1914, they
addressed the Fulton Street Methodist Church on behalf of the School.133
Waters confided in Reynolds that she was “very discouraged” by the Board’s
fighting and inactivity. He responded by trying to recruit new Board members; he sent
letters to the Chicago Urban League on Urban Conditions of Negroes, the Rosenwald
Fund, and the Juvenile Court to find people willing to replace absentee members.134 The
search did not provide new leaders, and Waters’s carefully crafted plans for the Smith
School were met with little support, as the Board members continued to exercise the
benign neglect of its earlier days. Waters was unable to even assemble the Board for
meetings. Under Henrotin’s financial management, the School sunk deeper in debt. The
Bank of Harvey sued the School twice and the town sheriff turned over the School’s deed
to one of its creditors.135 In the spring of 1916, a debate in the state legislature on the
state’s funding of sectarian schools tied up the School’s funding and threatened to cause
132
Ibid, 143.
133
Chicago Defender, “On the West Side,” April 25, 1914.
134
Letter from WSR to Thomas A. Hill, (TAH) of the Chicago Urban League, on Urban Conditions Among
Negroes, March 26, 1912 (75-18/75-107), ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
135
Israel, 144.
70
the eviction of 42 girls. The Board’s president, Edward Wentworth, a realtor, bailed the
school out using his own money.136
Frustrated with the Board’s inaction, Waters appealed to Rosenwald personally.
Waters requested nearly $28,000 to repair the facilities, provide salaries and purchase
supplies for the school’s pantry. Rosenwald gave his standard response: An institution
had to first prove financial independence and generate matching funds before any
proposals would be accepted. Rosenwald eventually offered the School $2750 for
furnace repairs, an additional $750 during one of the School’s many emergencies, and he
loaned the school $500 when the state withheld funds.137 The numerous financial crises
interfered with the overall mission of the School as an educational refuge for abandoned
girls. Financial problems forced Waters to put two girls up for adoption and she
repeatedly turned away girls whose families could not contribute to their boarding costs.
The girls were not the only ones who suffered from the financial restraints. When the
School lost $528.20 from the budget for October and November of 1917, Waters cut her
own salary and that of a “valuable worker;” the woman could not work for less money
and quit the School entirely.138 Around that time, in October, Wentworth sent a letter to
Reynolds suggesting that the ICHAS find a way to take over the school and indicated that
136
Ibid, 146.
137
The delay in funding was most likely due to the Illinois case of Dunn vs. Chicago Industrial School for
Girls (1917). In the previous precedent-setting case, Cook County vs. Chicago Industrial School for Girls
(1888), the Court ruled that the Catholic organization could not receive public monies. In the second case,
however, the Court ruled that if institution were paid less than the full cost of attendance or board at a
school, than the state was not in violation of ruling. See Knupfer, Reform and Resistance: Gender,
Delinquency, and America’s First Juvenile Court (New York: Routledge, 2001), 168.
138
AMW letter to WSR, April 25, 1918, (75-18/75-107), ICHASP, RJD, at UIC.
71
the situation had taken a turn for the worst. Wentworth stated that there was no “possible
co-operation between the teachers at the home and the Board of Trustees.”139
Waters was tenacious, and she would not allow the conflicts with the Board
interfere with the management of the School. As the School still struggled with shortages
in money and resources, Waters cast her eyes on Chicago’s Black communities to help
her. Attending to the School’s daily survival consumed so much of Waters’s time and
energy, expansion was nearly impossible. Like her predecessor, Waters was consumed
with fundraising to cover basic expenses. Fortunately, Waters’s appeals were met with
great enthusiasm. When Smith first settled in Harvey, Black Chicago was still relatively
scattered with a sprinkling of clubs, guilds and societies. By the time Waters was
crafting pamphlets and solicitation letters for her girls, Black Chicago had changed
dramatically. The population was far from affluent and land holding like in Smith’s era,
but Waters was still successful in mobilizing efforts for the School. Amanda Smith and
her Home still remained in the Black community’s collective consciousness as a model of
sacrifice and benevolence toward children. Smith’s legacy helped tremendously during
fundraising campaigns. In 1914, the Ideal Woman’s Club hosted an anniversary party for
the School. The event welcomed “more than one hundred persons, including eleven
pastors,” Wells-Barnett, and Julius Taylor, the editor of Broad Ax. The eight-hour event
yielded a much needed $25 for the School.140 In Elizabeth Davis Lindsay’s chronicle of
139
140
Edward Wentworth (EW) letter to WSR, October 19, 1917, (75-18/75-107), ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
Chicago Defender, “Anniversary of Amanda Smith Industrial School; Hundred or More Persons Attend
Exercises, and Ministers and Publishers Deliver Addresses—Ideal Woman’s Club Hosts.” July 4, 1914.
72
the Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, the Amanda Smith Home is named as
a major charity, to which they donated “large sums.”141
Another campaign, launched in the pages of the Defender, was invaluable to the
School’s daily operations. In 1918, Waters used the Defender aggressively; in the
summer, the paper promoted a benefit for the school held at the South Park M.E.
Church.142 Later that fall, the school launched its “Coal Fund,” a campaign to help heat
the school for winter. Beginning in mid-September, the Defender published a solicitation
for the campaign in every edition until they raised enough money for the coal supply.
The notice urged readers: “We need not speak of our duty in this connection. It should be
the pleasure of every loyal person in Chicago to donate to this, the only school we have
for dependent Protestant girls.”143 The Defender staff donated $20, and volunteers
solicited funds at an American Giants baseball game.144 Waters eventually secured
$227.25 to purchase 62 tons of coal needed for the winter.145 Adding to the stress of
141
Elizabeth Davis Lindsay, The Story of the Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs (New York:
G.K. Hall and Co, 1997), 9.
142
Chicago Defender, “Will Help Amanda Smith Home for Girls,” July 27, 1918.
143
Ibid, “Will Help Amanda Smith Home for Girls.”
144
Chicago Defender, “Amanda Smith School Coal Fund,” September 14, 1918. Also see Chicago
Defender, “Young Women’s Collection for Amanda Smith Home,” September 28, 1918. In the
solicitation, the newspaper notes that this is the only place for Protestant girls. Some of the city’s Catholic
charities, particularly the Illinois Technical School where 150 ‘colored girls’ could be accommodated
regardless of religion, were willing to place African-American children in their homes. This did not
necessarily make parents comfortable, especially considering the majority of African-American Chicagoans
were Protestant. The orphanages, asylums and boarding houses of this time in Chicago were highly
sectarian. In her pamphlet to raise money for the school, Waters makes the same distinction about the
School. See Sue Ellen Hoy, “House for the Good Shepard/Chicago Industrial School for Girls,” The
Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 2004).
145
Chicago Defender, “Young Women’s Collection for Amanda Smith Home,” September 28, 1918.
73
finding a way to pay for the coal, the great influenza outbreak of 1918 had traveled to
Harvey, infecting 34 girls and sending two teachers home to recuperate. 146
Tragedy at the Smith School
Tragically, the School would not use the whole supply of coal it worked so hard
to purchase or see ground break on a new cottage or factory. On the night of November
21, 1918, no one was quite sure if the heat of the flames or if the cries of the two little
girls awoke the inmates in an upstairs bedroom. Help was only two blocks away, but the
thick, black smoke that filled that dorm room traveled much faster than the Harvey Fire
Department. Everyone would soon learn that they could not and did not hold on for too
long. Their names have been lost in the historical record, but everyone soon learned that
two little girls, aged three and nine, suffocated in their bedroom. After the electrical fire
was extinguished and the other girls were accounted for, Chicago’s Black community
mourned three deaths. The two orphans died along with the very School that had once
saved them from the troubled life that fell upon their kind. Nine days later, Defender
readers learned of the tragedy on the front page; the headline summed it all up: “Two
Girls Perish in Fire at Amanda Smith: Crossed Electric Wires Start Flames Which
Destroy Building.”147 Community leaders from the A.M.E. church and the influential
women’s clubs worried that there would be nowhere for the “the most neglected girls in
146
Chicago Defender, “Amanda Smith School is hit by influenza,” October 26, 1918.
147
Chicago Defender, “Two Girls Perish in Fire at Amanda Smith Home,” November 30, 1918.
74
America” to go when their parents could not care for them and the state would not do the
same.148
Waters’s plans to train the school’s girls “for useful womanhood” were not
entirely derailed by the November fire and she remained hopeful that rebuilding the
School was possible.149 Within a week of the fire, African-American leaders called
meetings to discuss the future of the current residents and the possibility of keeping the
School open. The fire department’s investigation confirmed that faulty wiring caused the
blaze; no doubt that state inspectors overlooked the damaged wiring during a visit. Smith
School supporters immediately placed the blame upon the state for continually allowing
the Orphanage, and later on the School, to operate despite its inadequate facilities.
Critics then pointed to the School’s Board, which had four less members than the
requisite seven, and emphasized their lack of support. Of the three remaining Board
members after the fire, one was fighting in World War I and another had left Chicago the
previous year. The only remaining Board member, Wentworth, knew very little about the
School’s activities.150
The ICHAS and the Chicago Urban League were among the first organizations to
respond to the displaced girls and seek out concerned citizens to plan for the future. The
Urban League hosted a meeting of interested people, including a representative from the
state council of defense, Reynolds from the ICHAS, a minister from the South Park
Methodist Church, a staff member from the Defender, a female employee of the Juvenile
148
AMW, “The Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls,” (37/3), JRP, JRL at UC.
149
Ibid, “The Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls.”
150
Chicago Defender, “Two Girls Perish in Fire at Amanda Smith Home.”
75
Court, and an Urban League leader.151 The attendees of the meeting optimistically
agreed that out of the tragedy “will come another institution, which would typify the
modern ideas of caring for the ward of the county, city and state.”152
Optimism was not enough to pay for a new facility or create consensus on what a
modern method of caring for children actually meant. Prior to the fire, the Board
members were divided on the relevance and appropriateness of the School entirely in
light of the State’s movement toward securing adoptive homes for abandoned and
orphaned children. The IBPC’s report of 1907, which advised that the Smith Orphanage
pursue adoption schemes, foreshadowed the most divisive debate among the School’s
Board. The debates about adoption and institutionalization revolved around two
interconnected issues: whether the Smith Industrial School helped to maintain the color
line in other institutions and should African-American children try to integrate these
institutions, and should African-American communities focus on adoption for their
destitute children. The State of Illinois allowed the School to continue to operate because
it was truly the only one of its kind for African-American girls. Similar to the case of the
Orphanage, the institution was able to survive because of the State’s reluctance to force
integration at comparable Homes. For instance, The Park Ridge School for Girls, in the
northwest suburbs, refused to integrate. With the addition of the Smith industrial training
school, Park Ridge could remain an all-White facility with no challenges to its policies.
Park Ridge utilized more ‘modern’ approaches to institutionalization, adopting the
cottage system and locating the School outside of the city, in a more rural setting.
151
Ibid, “Two Girls Perish in Fire at Amanda Smith Home.”
152
Ibid, “Two Girls Perish in Fire at Amanda Smith Home.”
76
Prior to the Smith School’s restructuring, orphaned African-American girls were
sometimes left at penal institutions due to a lack of viable options. Illinois’s own state
institution, the Geneva Stat Reformatory, was a well-funded girls’ state training school
designed for delinquent girls. The facility was a notoriously dangerous place for AfricanAmerican girls.153 Sophonisba Breckenridge, the noted political scientist at the
University of Chicago’s Department of Household Administration, wrote about her
students’ visits to the facility for delinquents. While teaching students in the School of
Civics and Philanthropy, she found that a number of African-American girls, who were
not juvenile delinquents, were residing at the Geneva State Reformatory for Girls.154
The Defender found this system reprehensible. In an article on the establishment of the
Industrial School, the reporter remarked, “That is a most unjust condition of public affairs
which gives to a white orphan girl care, education and training in a school, and then
instead of caring for an [African-American] orphan girl either farms her out in private
homes or sends her to prison.”155 The Smith School provided a safer alternative for girls
misplaced in the segregated and racist systems of girls’ care. With each dysfunctional
year of existence, the Smith School relieved the pressures on similar institutions to
integrate or to add to the handful of African-American residents reluctantly admitted and
isolated in separate dormitories or classrooms.
Some of the School’s supporter believed that the children should integrate
segregated institutions. When Wentworth appealed to Rosenwald on the Industrial
153
See Anne Meis Knupfer, “To Become Good, Self-Supporting Women”: The State Industrial School for
Delinquent Girls at Geneva, Illinois, 1900-1935,” Journal of the History of Sexuality Vol. 9, no. 4, October
200: 420-446.
154
Sophonisba Breckenridge (SB) letter to WSR, April 4, 1918, (1/3), ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
155
Chicago Defender “Amanda Smith School for Girls Formed in Court Room.”
77
School’s behalf for funds to settle $4000 in debts, Rosenwald offered an idea instead of a
donation.156
Rosenwald, a moderate integrationist, suggested that the Park Ridge
School end its policy of racial segregation and open its doors to Smith School girls.157
Board member Esther Brophy recoiled at the idea. The Park Ridge School rejected the
proposal on both racial and sexual grounds. Some White institution leaders believed that
African-American girls seduced White girls in those settings.158 Brophy claimed that
“these girls when put with or even near the same class of White girls…exercise a very
deleterious influence on each other…they had love affairs, and act in a way that is
demoralizing.”159
Edith Abbott, a former dean of the University of Chicago’s School of Social
Services Administration, also advocated integration on the basis that the Industrial School
was disorganized and poorly managed. Abbot provided this observation on the care of
African-American children to the ICHAS: “The colored people find it so difficult to raise
money for the social enterprises in which they are engaged that they have a lower
standard for such work than the White people have.”160 Abbott suggested that Whites
manage facilities for African-American children and she continued to argue that the
156
EW to Charles Virden (CV), June 22, 1915, (49/15), JRP, RJD at UIC.
157
Esther W.S. Brophy (EWB) letter to JR, December 7, 1915, (49/15), JRP, RJD at UIC. Rosenwald
suggested a similar idea to the Phyllis Wheatley Club of Cleveland, Ohio after they requested funding for a
home. Rosenwald suggested that they merge with an already established YWCA. That idea was met with
opposition from the YWCA. See JR to Phyllis Wheatley Club, Cleveland, (49/7), JRP, JRL, at UC.
158
For more on sex and girls’ institutions, see Agnes Bennett Murphy, The Girls’ Industrial School of the
State of Ohio, unpublished dissertation, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago,
1935, Philip Morris Hauser, “Motion Pictures in Penal and Correctional Institutions: A Study of the
Reactions of Prisoners to Movies” (Master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1933), 75, and, Knupfer, “To
Become Good, Self-Supporting Women.”
159
As quoted in Israel, 145.
160
Edith Abbott (EA) letter to the ICHAS, January 10, 1913 (30/6) ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
78
“modern” practice of home placement and attendance in public schools would be the key
to the success of African-American children. Abbot, like Rosenwald argued that the
School stood in the way of desegregating the public schools, which were implementing
stricter racial segregation policies as more African-American children migrated to the
city. These integrationists often lacked confidence in African-American leadership in
children’s agencies, and they encouraged the School to try to use the public school
system or close entirely as a means of traversing the color barriers of other organizations,
which were better funded and well managed. Abbott’s predecessor Breckinridge was
also concerned about the effects of institutional life and segregation on African-American
girls. “I have always felt that it [Smith School] was a wholly unsuitable place… I am one
of those who feel that the Park Ridge Board violates its charter when it refused to accept
colored girls.”161 After the fire, Breckenridge argued that the displacement of the girls
could create momentum in a fight against segregation in public schools and training
facilities, and to popularize adoption among African-Americans.
When the school was opened, the Board members engaged in these debates, but
they never actively tried to close the school or change it into an adoption service. Both
Smith and Waters arranged some adoptions, and the Board members did not have the
power, or even the will to dismantle the organization. Yet, with the fire temporarily
closing the School, the anti-institutional forces on the Board were empowered to promote
integration or adoption. Also, by 1919, when meetings were held on the future of the
School, arguments against institutionalization were even stronger: the availability of
mother’s pensions to war widows, the development of foster care homes for temporary
161
SB to WSR, April 4, 1918 (75-18/75-107), ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
79
stays and the formalization of adoption proceedings made it difficult for advocates of a
new school to make a strong case.
The African-American members of the Board were not supportive of a full
adoption scheme or the push toward integration, and they tried to find temporary
institutional solutions for the children. The African-American leadership was reluctant to
use the girls to test the racial limits of the social services resources in the state. Waters
and Wells-Barnett, particularly, did not believe in accommodating Jim Crow, but they
were cautious to put children in the line of fire in order to promote integration. They
believed that girls were to be protected above all things; politics was the work of women,
not girls. The poor treatment of African-American girls at the Geneva State Reformatory
and boys at Glenwood Manual Training School were enough proof for the AfricanAmerican women leading the School to pass on plans to integrate the children. There
may have been discomfort in using the children for political ends, and there may have
also been aware of the ways in which integration made African-American girls targets for
character assassination and sexual stereotyping. Whether it was protecting children from
vice or victimization at the hands of Whites, both Waters and Smith believed that a
separate facility for African-American children could shield them from the harsher
realities of Migration-era Chicago.162
Wells-Barnett proposed that the children be taken to the African-American
Provident Hospital until homes or new schools could be located. Wells-Barnett wanted
these children to be under the auspices of an African-American organization. The
Provident Hospital was on the city’s South Side, and just as the Smith School was well
respected, Provident was a symbol of the community’s philanthropy and cooperation.
162
SB to WSR, undated letter (75-18/75-07), ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
80
Wells-Barnett argued that adoption did not guarantee the girls a safe or stable home life,
and she feared for their safety if sent to private homes.163
The Urban League ignored the concerns, and the organization instead partnered
with the ICHAS. They immediately initiated an adoption scheme for the girls. The
ICHAS hired African-American women to help place the displaced girls; this move
infuriated Wells-Barnett. The supremacy of the home over the institution was the
dominant discourse in the ICHAS homefinding movement and its many allies in social
services. Wells-Barnett was deeply concerned that girls would be placed in abusive and
exploitative homes. She feared that board providers were more concerned with the
child’s accompanying stipend than the girl’s well being.
The ICHAS acknowledged the problem of neglectful foster parents, but they were
certain that the plan would work. In their search for foster homes for African-American
children, they found that girls were easier to place than boys, and African-American
families rarely asked questions about a child’s social or medical history before agreeing
to take them home. In a report conducted for the ICHAS, the investigator found that in
the case of African-American homes, physical appearance was sometimes the most
important factor in a foster care decision:
The quality of a child’s hair, especially if she is a girl is of utmost importance.
The other major consideration is the color of a child. The family does not want
the child either lighter or darker than they are, although they will more readily
accept a child who is lighter.164
163
Chicago Defender, “Two Girls Perish in Fire.” Also see, Alfred Duster, ed., A Crusade for Justice: The
Autobiography of Ida B. Well (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 373-374.
164
ICHAS, Report to the ICHAS by Roberta Church (RC), September 22, 1944, (30/7) ICHASP, RJD at
UIC.
81
Although, the ICHAS was hopeful that the strategy would work, they had to
confront the high cost of the home-finding program and the challenge of getting
previously institutionalized children to adapt to a private home. In a letter written on the
subject of finding homes for African-American children, Katherine Briggs, General
District secretary of Chicago United Charities revealed:
We have sometimes been obliged to pay board for these children in private
families, when institutional care should have been given. It is difficult to find
proper private homes and is a very expensive plan. Often the children need the
discipline of a good institution before they are ready for any private home.165
The ICHAS ignored Wells-Barnett’s concerns and their own reservations about
the program. The ICHAS representatives ‘advertised’ the girls at various Black
community events in the city. Representatives wrote letters to leading African-American
women’s clubs and churches. The organizations would then post details about the child
in bulletins and make announcements at meetings. 166
There are very few records of what happened to the surviving girls after their
placements in private homes. The ICHAS placed nine girls, at least three of them
teenagers, in private homes within eight days of the fire. Each family received $3.50 per
week for taking in the girls; some families boarded up to three girls.167 Some girls were
greeted into families by eager parents. A Mr. and Mrs. Pierce of Harvey were anxious to
adopt a girl from the School. The Pierces were interested in a girl of “12 or 13 years” to
165
Letter from Katherine Briggs (KNB) to the ICHAS, January 11, 1913 (30/6), ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
166
One example of such letter was sent on May 14, 1917, Reynolds sent a note to the President of the
Phyllis Wheatley Club and member of the Chicago Federation of Colored Women’s Club, Mrs. Mary F.
Waring. The letter announced the need for homes for “two mighty fine light brown colored girls, 9 and 7
years of age, full orphans.” Letter from WSR to Mary F. Waring (MFW), (30/9), ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
167
ICHAS, “Notes of the ICHAS,” 1918, ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
82
enjoy their family home and “school advantages.”168 Some of the other girls may have
ended up in the Chicago Home for Girls or Refuge for Girls, which reluctantly accepted
African-American girls as early as 1899. In 1918, they reported having an unusually high
number African-American girls at the facility—ten. In the following years, the number
declined.169
A University of Chicago student in the Household Administration department
found that within a few years of the School’s closing, homefinding was not as successful
as the ICHAS may have hoped, because some girls were referred to institutions by the
Juvenile Courts, indicating some type of criminal or antisocial behavior in the past.
Maude Mary Firth wrote of this problem in her master’s thesis in 1924, “In a limited
number of Cases, the Court places delinquent girls in colored family homes when suitable
ones can’t be found, and it also uses the limited number of boarding clubs which the
community provides for colored working girls.”170 The dearth of private homes and the
lack of African-American institutions left a number of African-American girls adrift
throughout the city. Firth recognized the need for some type of institutional setting for
girls, although she doesn’t entirely support the institutions of the past. Firth
recommended that a pre-placement program be established to help African-American
168
Letter from I.E. Putnam (IEP) to WSR, January 2, 1919, (30/6), ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
169
Illinois State Charities Commission, “Second Annual Report of the State Charities Commission to the
Honorable Charles S. Deneen, Gov. of Illinois, December 31, 1911” (Springfield: Illinois, State Journal
Company, State Printers, 1912).
170
Maude Mary Firth, “The Use of the Foster Home for the Care of the Delinquent Girls of the Cook
County Juvenile Court” (Master’s Thesis, Department of Household Administration, University of
Chicago, 1924), 53.
83
girls transition from institutional life to home life with a family, a process often available
to White girls at the Mary Bartelme Clubs.171
As girls were being placed into new families or other institutions, the ICHAS was
selecting the members of the Special Committee to Consider Matters Relative to Future
Plans Concerning the Care of Colored Girls. Although the ICHAS maintained its alliance
with the Urban League, African-Americans were pushed out of the school’s planning
body. Several names were suggested and ideas circulated, including retaining WellsBarnett as a Board member, but in the end only three African-Americans were selected to
serve on the nine-person committee. Ostensibly, the committee would become the new
School’s board; the African-American members included T.A. Hill from the Urban
League and a representative from the Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs.172
Soon, though, the ICHAS’s objections to institutionalization would stifle any
work by the very committee they assembled. At an emergency meeting two weeks after
the fire, comments from some of the concerned social workers and philanthropists
foreshadowed the school’s demise. Reynolds did not support the rebuilding of a new
industrial school. “In the East they are doing away more and more with the institution
care for the normal child and substituting home life.”173 This was not the first time he
expressed this sentiment when discussing the School. In later letters, Reynolds presented
171
Mary Bartelme was the first woman to become an assistant judge in Chicago’s Juvenile Courts. She
established a special Girls’ Court in 1913 to hear cases. The Girls’ Court provided girls with basic
necessities like clothing and toiletries; local women’s clubs donated these items. Mary Bartelme Clubs
were open to girls who could not return home after being released from juvenile detention. The first Clubs
were opened in 1914 and 1916 for White girls. Eventually, in 1921, a third Club was opened for AfricanAmerican girls transitioning out of juvenile facilities. Firth, 56.
172
Letter from Mrs. S.E. Cooper (SEC) to ICHAS, December 28, 1918 (75-18/75-107), ICHASP, RJD at
UIC.
173
ICHAS, “Minutes of the Special meeting Called to Consider Plans for the Amanda Smith Home for
Girls,” December 6, 1918 (75-18/75-107) ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
84
a plan to create a home visiting system supported by the Chicago Board of Education and
the Public Schools. Reynolds envisioned visitors, most likely trained social workers,
working with families to improve living conditions rather than removing children from
the home and sending them to institutions. This system would be available for families
whose only designated problem was poverty in the home.174
The movement to rebuild and establish a new School lost momentum with each
passing year. For years after the fire, African-American organizations held fundraisers
for the School. The property itself was most likely abandoned and fell deeper into
disrepair. In July of 1921, burglars vandalized the Home, stealing furniture and fixtures
worth $200. A local pastor was put in charge of the Home, but he was unable to secure
it.175 That same year, Chicago’s Grant Chapel’s building fund committee hosted a
musical to raise money for the home, and the pastor of St. Monica’s Church in Chicago
took up a collection for a new building at a weekend Mass.176 The School’s Board was
still meeting to discuss plans for a new building as late as 1922. On March 15 of that
year, the Board received “specifications and plans” for the building.177 A month later, the
Allied Choir held a musical festival at the Quinn Chapel to raise money for the building
fund.178 By 1924, Waters, most likely demoralized by the lack of support for the School,
174
WSR letter to AMW, January 22, 1919, (175-18/75-107), ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
175
Chicago Defender, “Amanda Smith Home Entered by Burglars,” July 9, 1921.
176
Chicago Defender, City News in Brief, “Amanda Smith Musicale,” September 17, 1921; Chicago
Defender, “Will Aid Amanda Smith Home Building Fund,” October 8, 1921.
177
Chicago Defender, “Dr. Fannie Emanuel New Treasurer Wheatley Home,” March 25, 1922.
178
Chicago Defender “Allied Choir Musical Festival,” April 29, 1922.
85
moved on to lead the Friendship House for Girls, an organization similar to the Smith
School, but also unable to support her ambitious educational goals.179
Despite years of prayers, committee meetings and drafting new plans for the
School and alternatives to institutionalization, the Amanda Smith Industrial School never
re-emerged. Chicagoans, Black and White, were more likely concerned with the war
abroad. Everyday people were in fights to resist the destitution and poverty that spread
throughout the streets of Black Chicago. In the humid heat of the city’s summers, racial
violence erupted on the beaches, in densely packed neighborhoods, and on the floors of
slaughterhouses and factories. Public health officials were still nervous about another
influenza outbreak or an entirely new scourge. In the whirlwind of war, riots and
diseases, African-American girls were a low priority. Waters may have realized all of
this when she asked the question, written on one of the school’s many fundraising
pamphlets: “Why is it so hard to interest people in colored girls?”180
Conclusion: Girls and The Struggle for Uplift
A general lack of interest in African-American girls was only one of the
contributing factors in the School’s demise. The Smith Home and School’s story provides
some important insight into the nature of African-American women’s leadership during
the pre-Migration and Migration eras. It also instructs on the challenges faced by
African-American girls in the urban context, and the various obstacles to meeting their
needs.
179
180
Chicago Defender, “Students Hear Prince at Both Universities,” November 8, 1924.
AMW, Pamphlet attached to letter from EW to WSR, ICHAS, October 19, 1917 (75-85/75-107),
ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
86
The Smith School was not unusual in its short history, as a number of AfricanAmerican organizations often had to close or partner with larger groups in order to
continue serving its constituencies because of a lack of financial resources. The
differences between Smith’s and Waters’s individual commitments and leadership ties
may have also contributed to the School’s closure, as they were a generation apart in their
experience and their methods. As the school shifted from a religious to a more secular
enterprise, it lost some of its ties to the powerful A.M.E. and Methodist Episcopal Church
worldwide. Smith’s religious zeal led her to distrust the city, particularly the city’s Black
Belt, which bordered unsavory entertainment venues and was plagued with constant
poverty and growing overcrowding. White benefactors were far more comfortable with
Smith, who was often described derisively as being accommodationist in her politics,
deferential to White leadership, and at times hostile toward her African-American
subordinates.181 Smith’s alliance with the WCTU and Frances Willard indicated that she
was not going to agitate for social equality among the races. Waters, having been
educated in Philadelphia, did not have the same aversion toward the city; she even
proposed moving the school to Chicago’s South Side. Her appeals for the School did not
reflect the same religious rhetoric as her predecessor. Waters, who represented the
clubwoman class of leader, did not entrust the enterprise to the faithful. In fact, many
clubwomen found some organized religion that targeted African-Americans to be
distasteful. NACW leaders such as Wells-Barnett and Fannie Barrier Williams believed
that “the race was most hindered by a large part of the ministry instructed with leadership
181
See Israel, 129.
87
than any other single cause.”182 At a meeting two months before the fire, the discussions
illustrated how far from Smith’s vision the School had been lost on the new leadership.
The meeting brought Reynolds, Waters, Probation Officer J.L. Moss and Henry Stewart,
a Subscriptions Investigator, together to discuss the school’s future. The group came to
the conclusion that “as far as possible to confine its admissions to girls sent by the
Court,” and to refer other applicants to Chicago United Charities.183 The group also
debated whether or not to retain representatives of the Methodist church as advisory
members of the School’s Board. The group agreed to keep the church on the advisory
Board, but the question itself reveals how far the School had moved away from Smith’s
intentions.
Like her mentor Coppin before her, Waters learned how difficult it was to change
an institution’s culture while scrounging for resources and public support. Waters’s
leadership of the School went beyond Smith’s platform of piety, thrift and hard work
Waters expressed a budding feminist perspective on female self-sufficiency and
independence, a perspective that was being espoused and supported by other AfricanAmerican women educated in elite institutions and exercising their power in various
organizations. Her ideas reflected a new consciousness on racial uplift and female
progress that was taking root nationally: Women had to do more than be good examples
for the race from afar, they had to work within the race to make changes.
182
Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New
York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1999), 73.
183
ICHAS, “Minutes of Informal Conference Regarding Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored
Girls,” September 12, 1918 (75-18/75-107) ICHASP, RJD at UIC.
88
Waters’s innovation and ideas could not penetrate the pervasive resistance to
maintaining a girls’ institution. The warnings about the dangers of institutional life on
children were not strong enough when considering the lives of African-American people
at the time and the limited possibilities for African-American girls. In many ways, the
Smith School was the best among very few options. No matter how many AfricanAmerican individuals truly cared about the plight of girls, there were a limited number of
African-American households that could afford to support a girl attending school in their
home. African-American newcomers to the city were already engaged in informal foster
care, caring for extended family members and children from their Southern hometowns.
Resistant to further scrutiny from social workers and public aid administrators, AfricanAmericans were reluctant to participate in the ICHAS’s programs. Girls in the institution
could be, at the very least, protected from the racial backlash and antagonism in the city’s
public schools. Institutional life guaranteed that girls would be able to interact with each
other and come in contact with committed race women, concerned with their
development and continued education. The loss of the Smith Home was an end to a place
that served hundreds of African-American girls in Chicago, and it had the ability to
inspire even more African-Americans to consider the thoughtful training and education of
girls. Chicago’s African-American women’s clubs were rising in power and clout in the
city, but very few clubs were actively engaged in the lives of girls in the ways that the
Smith School advocated and tried its best to practice.
In the end, the Smith School’s near disappearance from the record books of
Chicago history reminds us of the challenges of sustainability for African-American
organizations fighting on so many fronts for equality—gender, economic, social and
89
racial. Often, contemporary historians deem the failure of African-American
organizations as resting on issues of finances and the scarcity of resources due to racism
and poverty. This is part of the case of the Smith School, yet it is important to assess the
collective conditions and contexts that doomed this project. As a program for AfricanAmerican girls, the Smith School had to contend with larger ideological shifts and social
problems that could not be addressed with more collection plate appeals, newspaper
advertisements or chicken dinners at the School. Although the Tuskegee Institute had
successfully created a model for industrial training, specific girls’ training was still open
for debate and vulnerable to arguments that insisted that boys needed training more than
girls. African-American girls were also contending with many of the same stereotypes
heaped upon African-American women, and organizations working on their behalf had to
constantly plead for their virtue and acceptability in both the public and private spheres.
The rhetoric of shaping future mothers of a great race was not strong enough to elicit a
whole-hearted commitment to girls and their education. Skilled girl workers were still
girls after all, and the fear of their sexual licentiousness and the potential exposure to
outlets of moral corruption made it difficult to make a case to support and nurture them.
The protective bubble that covered the Smith School’s frame house and the
Christians of Harvey could not protect the School from the debates about the proper care
of children and the role of institutions that raged in Chicago. African-American
institutions were as subject to the happenings in African-American sections of the city as
they were to the elite academic circles that only seemed so distant from AfricanAmerican people. The School’s Board comprised a brain trust of the social services
community, and beyond the Board, the School often solicited the advice and opinions of
90
the leading researchers on children and their care. Although classified as an AfricanAmerican organization, the Smith School was constantly shaped by the work produced in
the nearly all-White University of Chicago. This interracial interaction reminds
historians of African-Americans that Jim Crow and state-sanctioned racial segregation
created an illusion about the separation of the races. Residential patterns, hiring policies
and lunch counters proved that segregation existed, but when we look at the permeability
of discourse, ideologies and thoughts, we see something entirely different. AfricanAmerican girls living in the Smith School were as affected by shifts in African-American
leadership, secularism and migration, as much as they were by the work of White social
scientists, theorists and philanthropists. This interracial reality, no matter how guarded
and obscured by their living conditions, is what they were most vulnerable to—
sometimes this reality worked to their benefit, sometimes it did not. In the case of the
Smith School, the interracial cooperation that helped shape Amanda Smith’s life’s work
was overwhelmed by interracial conflict, leaving the girls to deal with the aftermath.
This case illustrates the racial uplift that was both the work of African-Americans and
Whites. If we understand African-American girls’ experience as the litmus test for
progress, then in the period that the Smith Orphanage and School operated, 1899-1918,
we see a story of limitations and disappointments alongside another narrative of struggle
and great commitment.
CHAPTER TWO: THE MOORISH SCIENCE TEMPLE OF AMERICA
Chicago’s concerned race women could not mourn the loss of the Amanda Smith
School for Colored Girls for too long. There was simply too much work to do, and more
girls to serve. By 1918, the year of the School’s closing, Chicago’s Black population
expanded by more than 100,000 migrants.184 Chicago’s Black women’s clubs, organized
under the umbrella of the Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, were quite
powerful during this time. They took on the plight of migrants and swiftly organized
kindergartens for working mothers, readied boardinghouses for single women workers,
volunteered to host girls’ clubs and established job clearinghouses for those seeking
employment.185 Despite their many successes, the women’s clubs alone could not
adequately address the numerous needs of the massive waves of men, women and
children who sometimes arrived with only the clothes on their backs. As the Migration
progressed African-American Chicagoans, both old settlers and newcomers, looked to the
network of long-established African-American churches to rise to the formidable
challenge of helping manage the influx. Women’s clubs strengthened their ability to
serve, by working in conjunction with mainline Christian churches, such as Amanda
Smith’s beloved AME and the National Baptist Convention’s churches. The various
types of religious organizations that grew from the Great Migration became sites where
girls could also receive a wide array of support.
Although African-American mainline churches were most prominent in taking the
lead in addressing newcomers, they were not the only groups that captured the hearts and
184
Carolyn A. Stroman, “The Chicago Defender and the Mass Migration of Blacks, 1916-1918,” Journal of
Popular Culture 15 no. 2 (Fall 1981): 62-67.
185
See Knupfer, Towards a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African-American Women’s
Clubs in the Turn-of-the-Century Chicago.
91
92
souls of Southern migrants. As the Migration progressed, some Southerners decided to
exercise their new freedoms in the North by establishing their own spiritual homes, away
from the watchful and critical eyes of conservative, middle-class, Northerners.
Migration-era groups served as a departure from established Protestant churches, but
remained loyal to Christianity. The leaders of such groups as urban Pentecostalism and
Holiness Churches, tailored their messages, worship styles and music to connect with
Southern religious sensibilities and became more relevant to the Migration experience. In
storefront churches along commercial boulevards, preachers delivered powerful sermons
that spoke to the migrants’ rural past and their present oppression. Rather than advising
the migrants to wait patiently for salvation in a glorious afterlife, church leaders focused
on the community’s current social conditions. The Christian offshoots also helped to
pioneer the soulful sounds of gospel music, which spoke to Southern musical tastes. One
observer of the Migration found that “storefronts had a special appeal for common
people, who come from small communities where everyone knew his neighbor and where
the church was the political forum, school, social center and spiritual guide.”186 By the
1930s, Chicago was home to more than 250 storefront churches.187
A smaller, even bolder group of migrants chose to reconfigure their lives outside
of the framework of Christianity altogether. The Great Migration also ushered in the rise
of entirely new religions, sects and cults. Usually, charismatic leaders—seen as saviors
by some and charlatans by others— led these groups. The leaders often created religious
formations that drew upon the dominant Christianity of African-Americans, even if they
186
Illinois Writers Project (IWP), “…And Churches,” notes, Negro in Illinois Papers (NIP), Vivian Harsh
Archival Collection (VHAC), Chicago Public Library (CPL), Chicago, IL.
187
Ibid, “…And Churches.”
93
claimed to reject it. They renamed or provided a different context for familiar Christian
concepts, integrated elements of other faiths and contemporary political philosophies, and
mandated specific codes of behavior and dress. These fringe groups essentially invited
newcomers to reinvent themselves in the name of their new faith. Great Migration
historian Davarian Baldwin emphasizes that Chicago’s “old-line” churches—Baptist and
AME—stood in contrast to these new religions, because mainline Christianity stood as
symbols of “old settler respectability.” Baldwin highlights the growing tension between
storefront churches and other “religious variants,” and the middle-class Christians.188
Old settlers anxiously watched the success of the new groups in attracting converts and
establishing their authority both in their places of worship, as well as in the political and
economic spaces of the city. The Migration era’s new religious groups reflected the spirit
of freedom, spontaneity and reinvention that Black migrants dreamed of when they
moved to cities. Most importantly, for the purposes of this study, these groups also
proved to be highly influential in creating new outlets for African-American girls and
women in the North to worship, learn, and lead.
The Moorish Science Temple of America was one such group that created distinct
spaces for women and girls during the spiritual renaissance of the Great Migration. The
self-titled prophet Noble Drew Ali (nee Timothy Drew in 1886), himself a migrant to
Chicago from North Carolina by way of Newark, founded the Temple in Chicago in
1925. By May of 1926, the Temple raised enough money to purchase land on the South
Side and build a brand new temple, which also served as the Moorish Science national
188
Davarian Baldwin Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 158. Baldwin also discusses the battles over
gospel music, which was considered too “up-tempo” and “demonstrative” to be respectable to some.
Gospel music was one of the major cultural productions that grew out of the religious shifts during the
period.
94
headquarters.189 Ali was no stranger to religious organizing. After a failed attempt to
create a Christian church devoted to integration, named the Drew Baptist Church, he
organized the Canaanite Temple in Newark to “uplift...the lost-found nation of American
Blacks.”190 With beguiling tales of conquering the Temples of Cheops and learning from
the great caliphs of Saudi Arabia, Drew successfully captured the hearts and minds of
thousands of fellow Black urbanites. Within seven years of the organization’s existence,
its membership rose to an impressive 30,000 members throughout Great Migration cities
such as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, New York, and Detroit, as well as parts of
the South including Richmond, Pine Bluff, Arkansas and Charlestown, West Virginia.191
This radical and polarizing group existed at the margins of Chicago’s middle-class,
African-American church communities, yet its belief system was firmly grounded in the
racial uplift thinking of ‘the better classes’ of Blacks, who found the group’s audacious
style of dress and their indisputable accomplishments in recruitment strange and
frustrating.
The Moorish Science Temple shared many of the organizational and
philosophical characteristics of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA), which he founded in Harlem in 1917. Both movements expressed a
nationalist, New Negro consciousness and a desire for Black self-determination and
economic independence. Garvey laid the crucial foundation for Ali when he established
189
“The Moorish Science Temple of America’s First Annual Convention,” Undated publication, Box 1,
File 1 (1/1), Moorish Science Temple of America Collection (MSTAC), Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture (SCRBC), New York Public Library (NYPL), New York, New York.
190
See Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of Black Muslims in the Americas
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 206.
191
Vilbert White, Jr., Inside the Nation of Islam: A Historical and Personal Testimony by a Black Muslim
(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001), 8. Also Gomez, 206-207 and 260.
95
a Chicago office of the UNIA in the late 1910s. A legal dispute between the Defender’s
Robert Abbott and Garvey over Garvey’s sale of his company’s stock in Chicago forced
him to leave the city in 1919. The proceeding years were difficult for the Chicago UNIA.
Although the group claimed a membership of 9,000 Chicagoans in 1922, by the next
year, a violent split in the group led it to unravel.192 Sociologist Allan Spear theorized
that, “their feud marked by frequent shootings, dissipated whatever strength the
movement had retained in Chicago.”193 This made the city ripe for Ali’s interventions.194
In this chapter, I examine how the Temple configured gender in their ideologies
and community life. Gender informed nearly every aspect of Moorish Science, and I
highlight three areas: the Temple’s Black supremacist ideologies, the elevation of
African-American womanhood and girlhood, and the participation of women and girls in
the religious and economic projects of the Temple. Ali’s construction of AfricanAmerican identity and his belief in Black supremacy rested on rigid definitions of
masculinity and femininity. Moorish teachings advocated a hyper-elevation of AfricanAmerican femalehood and created a new avenue for African-American female
respectability. As Amanda Smith and Adah Waters believed that labor and work
provided an avenue for respectability, the leaders of the Moorish Science Temple set their
own standards and pathways to respectability for girls. I specifically examine Moorish
192
Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1967), 194-196.
193
194
Ibid, 196.
Abbott was also one of many co-signers on a letter requesting the U.S. Attorney General investigate the
UNIA. The letter accused the movement of stimulating “the violent temper of the dangerous element,” and
they called Garvey “an unscrupulous demagogue.” The letter appears in Amy Jacques-Garvey, ed.
Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey , Or Africa for the Africans (New York: Athenaeum, 1969)
For more on the dispute between Abbott and Garvey, see Shawn Leigh Alexander, “Marcus Garvey and the
Chicago Defender, 1917-1923,” unpub. diss., University of Iowa, 1995).
96
girls’ experiences through the leadership of Moorish women in the religion, the religion’s
policies on girls’ appearance and the Temple’s own production of beauty products, and
the creation of job opportunities for girls within the Temple. Unlike the previous
chapter’s exploration of an explicitly girl-centered organization, this chapter discusses
how a nationalist Black religious and political organization utilized girls and women’s
work and maintained a culture of racial uplift in its ideologies and enterprises. The
archives do not provide us a wealth of information about individual girls within the
structure of the Temple, but through many reports and observations of this radical
religious and political philosophy, we are able to gain some insights into what girls in the
Moorish Science learned and experienced.
The Religious Landscape of the Great Migration
Before exploring the rise of the Temple, it is important to understand the social
conflicts, which made new Black religions viable and attractive to migrants. The Great
Migration did not create class stratification or sexism within Chicago’s African-American
churches, yet the thousands of new faces who crowded into churches on Sunday
mornings created more pressure for the well-intentioned pastor and his respectable flock
to respond to the steady stream of Southern migrants. One report on African-Americans
and the Church from the 1930s observed that, “Negro churches in the North, almost grew
overnight from memberships of a few hundreds to thousands…the northern church
especially in great migration centers like Chicago…grew by leaps and bounds.”195 This
population explosion accompanied considerable growing pains, both for the newcomers
195
Benjamin E. Mays and Joseph William Nicholson, The Negro’s Church (New York: Arno Press and
New York Times, 1933), 108.
97
and the old settlers. The churches may have embraced this change more if the
newcomers were of their same ilk; yet migrants often embodied the very characteristics
African-Americans Northerners hoped to keep at a distance. Religious historian Michael
Gomez aptly states that the rise of fringe religious groups like the Moorish Science
Temple reveal, “different visions of both the terrain and objectives of struggle [which]
speaks to the effective bifurcation of the African-descended people into a class-ridden
society…and the failure…[of mainline churches and organization] to experience a
profound resonance with the working poor, to really know their aspirations, and to
champion their cause.”196
The national AME church did not see itself as a champion of the Migration cause.
At a meeting of AME bishops in 1917, the year the Chicago Defender declared would
usher in the Migration period, Bishops Benjamin Lee and John Hurst prepared a
statement on the exodus. While emphasizing the Church should provide “welcome and
fellowship” to migrants, Lee and Hurst expressed concern about the vulnerability of this
group to fall into “the haunts of vices.”197 The pair even encouraged Southerners to wait
patiently for social change in the South rather than take their chances on a new life up
North. They wrote, “Those who remain at their homes must cooperate with the
sociological movements that are sure to be put into action, to discover the causes of
unrest and find a remedy.”198 Their advice indicated their own discomfort with the
196
Gomez, 210.
197
“Address of the Council of Bishops, A.M.E. Church,” Christian Recorder, August 16, 1917, in Milton
C. Sernett, ed., African-American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, 2nd Ed. (Durham: Duke
University Press 1999), 362.
198
Ibid, 361.
98
Migration and the migrants themselves. Before the Migration, there was a fine line
between racial uplift and social gospel, and the line nearly disappeared as established
African-American religious leaders tried more and more to keep Southerners at a distance
and were unwilling to accommodate newcomers fully. Historian Robert Gregg argues
that: “The Social Gospel movement was distinct from liberation theology in that its
adherents were not intent on reshaping theology to reflect the aspirations of impoverished
and repressed peoples; rather they concentrated on “uplifting” oppressed peoples so they
could share in the advances and advantages of “civilization.”199 Gregg’s analysis focuses
on the shortcomings within African Methodist Episcopal churches; he concluded that a
lack of political reform of perspectives on racial uplift, the conservative liturgical and
biblical positions of the community, and that AME churches were less likely to embrace
and attract non-Methodists from the South. This reticence to change fueled the fringe
movements that gave birth to the Moorish Science Temple.
Lee and Hurst’s reactions were not the only responses to Migration. Some
churches saw great potential in the Migration, and assembled to find strategies to
embrace the growth. Although migrants strained nerves and pew capacities, these
outreach-centered churches perceived the Migration as a call to action. The Olivet
Baptist Church’s involvement in welcoming migrants is among the strongest examples of
an enthusiastic, if rare, response to Migration. Olivet, founded in 1850, was one of the
largest and most powerful of Chicago’s African-American churches. The Church took
the lead in not only addressing migrant needs, but also in encouraging Southerners to
come north. Olivet took its social mission seriously, and it immediately expanded its
199
Robert Gregg, Sparks from the Anvil Of Oppression: Philadelphia’s African Methodists and Southern
Migrants, 1890-1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 70.
99
worship services to accommodate the more than 4,000 new members it acquired between
1915 and 1919.200 By 1921, the church had grown by a total of 11, 144 members, and
moved to a larger space.201
Olivet’s transformation from a church to a community resource would have been
impossible without the work of women in the Church. Transforming churches into
service providers required far more resources than a congregational staff; churches had to
turn to its membership to fill the void. This shift brought deeply committed, and often
times well-trained women to manage the new undertaking, providing them opportunities
to exercise their professions when their race and sex limited career opportunities. S.
Mattie Fisher, one of the first African-American social workers in the U.S., was one of
the most important leaders in Olivet’s social services movement.202 Fisher led Olivet’s
attempts to respond to the migration crisis by using social science research and social
work theory. Fischer conducted a survey of the Black Belt in order to assess what
migrants needed the most from their churches. In addition to collecting basic
demographic information from more than 5,000 households, Fisher asked people to
identify, “their church connection,” and “their experience as Christian workers in their
home church.”203 Armed with the vital statistics on African-American families
surrounding the Olivet’s neighborhood, the Church successfully began helping migrants
secure jobs and rent housing. The survey was also used to establish a community center
200
Milton C. Sernett, Bound for the Promise Land: African-American Religion and the Great Migration
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 157.
201
Mays and Nicholson, 179.
202
S. Mattie Fisher and Mrs. Jessie Mapp, “Social Work at Olivet Baptist Church” in Sernett, AfricanAmerican Religious History, 368-370.
203
Ibid, 368-369.
100
at Olivet for the migrants, and to prepare for the mass of people the Church believed
“were coming among us.”204
Fisher’s programming efforts were successful and helpful for both adults and
children. She later reported to a Christian women’s magazine on her success in
integrating girls into the Church’s programs. Mrs. Jessie Mapp, another Olivet member,
assisted with the girls’ programs. On Tuesday nights, between 35 and 55 girls
participated in the Girls Community Guild meetings, which included sewing classes and
the reading of devotionals. The focus of the girls’ guild was to create good wives and
mothers; Fischer was proud that the guild, “intended to help them in making the best
Christian homes.”205 Volunteer churchwomen also divided girls and their mothers into
small groups. Some volunteers led the daughters in how to sew and mend, while leaders
at the mothers’ meetings instructed on home economics, health and hygiene. The guild
leaders devoted an entire hour of these gatherings to industrial work and promoted
instruction and job readiness. Olivet’s activities reveal the strong commitment church
women had to setting standards of cleanliness and industriousness in migrant girls and
women. Their programs reflect a deep loyalty to the racial uplift thinking that shaped the
somewhat dim view of migrant women and justified church women’s interventions in
their personal lives.206
Although women’s leadership helped to reform the culture of churches to fulfill a
204
Ibid, 368.
205
Ibid, 369-370.
206
For a thorough discussion of class, gender, and Black women’s church work, see Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Woman’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church (Cambridge:
Harvard, 1993).
101
greater servant role for migrants, the simple fact that migrant women and girls
participated in organized church outreach did not mean they were entirely sold on the
values and messages espoused. Baldwin notes, “Many migrants endured social programs
on hygiene and domestic arts and sermons on public behavior in order to have access to
childcare and obtain referral networks while also acquiring social status through church
attendance.”207 Migrant women did not achieve social status at the same level as their
instructors in their betterment classes, but church membership and activity was one way
these women could move one step closer toward respectability.
Women were not only helpful in ‘female’ capacities such as sewing classes and
hygiene instruction; they lent their support to a wide array of church projects, including
fundraising efforts and creating schools. Despite their efforts, African-American women
did not engage in the highest levels of decision-making processes of the church.
Religious historian Milton Sernett notes that, “in the black church tradition much of the
burden for assisting the poor and needy fell to women.”208 Although women repeatedly
proved themselves competent, Sernett concludes, “women…in the black
denominations…have rarely occupied positions of leadership.”209 African-American
churchwomen existed in dual positions in their faith communities. They demonstrated
considerable leadership yet remained marginalized within the larger power structure of
their churches. The contradictory position of being essential and marginal in the same
structure led some women to abandon mainline churches and establish their own
207
Baldwin, 159.
208
Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land, 115.
209
Sernett, African-American Religious History, 164.
102
churches or join fringe organizations that provided seemingly more powerful places for
women of all classes. 210
‘A Small Negro Wearing a Flaming Red Fez’: Ali’s Emergence in Chicago
When Noble Drew Ali arrived in Chicago in 1925, he was familiar with the
challenges facing Southern migrants seeking a spiritual home in the North. Due to his
experiences in Newark, Drew understood the tensions that existed within mainline,
Christian churches and he knew that some middle-class members were ambivalent about
welcoming migrants with open arms to their churches. He also knew that some
churchfolk believed that migrants were a drain on resources. Ali then crafted his
ideologies to address migrant anxieties about these issues.
In a report about Black Nationalism during the Great Migration, an Illinois Works
Progress Administration writer described Ali as a “small Negro wearing a flaming red
fez…” proclaiming “a startling new doctrine.”211 The WPA report on the Moorish
community also noted that:
[Ali] possessed an eloquent tongue, a persuasive, and a native shrewdness, which
enabled him to sway the poor and unlettered people who listened to him. Most of
them remember the race riots of 1919; all of them had experienced discrimination
and other wrongs. Drew Ali was offering them pride and dignity.212
210
The most noted Chicago women to take up the challenge of establishing their own congregations were
Lucy Smith and Mary Evans. The most famous woman-led group was the All Nations Pentecostal Church,
organized by Lucy Smith, a prominent faith healer. In the 1930s, Mary Evans left the AME church and
became the leader of the Cosmopolitan Community Church, where she turned the debt-ridden church into a
“singing, praying, and tithing” church, where 98% of members regularly gave 10% of their income to the
church. See Wallace Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago,
1915-1952 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 147-180.
211
IWP, “Early Studies in Black Nationalism, Cults, and Churches in Chicago by the WPA, circa 1941,”
notes, NIP at VHAC, CPL.
212
IWP, “The WPA Study of the Moorish Science Temple, 1940,” notes, NIP at VHAC, CPL.
103
Considering the material and social hardships migrants faced in the South and the North,
pride and dignity were not small matters. Ali called on migrants to reject traditional
forms of Christianity, and this message of self-help and Black empowerment seemingly
provided alternatives to biblically based lessons on obedience and patience. Even lively
storefront churches and camp meeting-style gatherings were losing ground against
organizations like Ali’s, which elevated African-American identity to stratospheric
heights, called for racial separatism, and supported the vilification of Whites. These
fringe groups did not reconcile the contemporary suffering of African-Americans with a
belief in a redemptive after life. Instead, the fight against the indignities of racial
injustice was confronted with almost hyperbolic racial pride and a denunciation of White
people and power structures. As the WPA report stated, for migrants who had witnessed
and survived the 1919 Race Riot, the bloody floors of the packinghouses and lived in
wildly overpriced, cramped kitchenettes, turning the other cheek was not only impossible,
it became implausible. The entangled class and gender conflicts within AfricanAmerican mainline churches during Ali’s rise to power and prominence insured that he
would be able to find people to abandon Christianity and embrace “the everlasting gospel
of Allah.”213
Ali’s gospel revealed a religious system based on African-American pride and an
Orientalist appeal to the exotic and foreign. Ali’s new religion was a curious mélange of
ancient, African history, studies of the Muslim Koran, infused with some of the principles
of Marcus Garvey’s Black supremacist thinking. Ali entitled the Moorish holy book The
Holy Koran of the Moorish Holy Temple of Science 7, Know Thyself and Your Father
213
NDA, “Koran Questions for Moorish Children,” undated, (1/1) MSTAC, SCRBC, NYPL.
104
God-Allah, That You Learn to Love Instead of Hate. Everyman Need to Worship Under
His Own Vine and Fig Tree, The Uniting of Asia. Moorish history recast the AfricanAmerican past, and created an intricate story of the Moorish (or Asiatic) people, traced
their roots back to the Middle East, and declared Islam their true religion. Drew
proclaimed that the Moorish people traced their lineage back to the land of Canaan, the
land of Noah’s son, Ham. The Moorish family tree also branched from the people of
Moab and West African Moors. Ali declared that Moorish ancestry proved that AfricanAmericans were meant to be Muslims, not Christians. His Temple’s instructed that Jesus
was also a prophet, and he was merely misappropriated by Europeans to establish
Christianity. Ali also asserted that slavery was a result of a loss of identity among Moors
in the New World.214
In Moorish Science, historical accuracy was not as important as raising the esteem
of his followers. Ali’s religious philosophy was wrought with misinterpretations of the
Koran and sometimes, contradictory admixtures of Christian and Jewish beliefs.215
Gomez’s research on Moorish Science concludes that the contradictions and “the
absorption of multiple influences” did not compromise “the integrity of the core beliefs
and practices.”216 One of the most important of Moorish core beliefs revolved around the
214
NDA, “Circle Seven Koran,” undated publication, (1/1), MSTAC, SCRBC, NYPL.
215
For example, Noble Drew Ali made references to Mohammed, but did not call him a prophet. He
claimed that Mohammed was the founder of a unifying Muslim religion and the fulfillment of Jesus’s
works. Ali’s reconfiguration of the Ham narrative is particularly curious. In the Bible, Noah cursed Ham
with dark sin. Ham’s story was used as a justification for slavery. As I stated earlier, the Moorish Science
Temple, like other fringe religions, used elements of Christianity to discuss their teachings. The
relationship between Marcus Garvey and Drew Ali was likened to that of Jesus and John the Baptist. See
Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North
(Philadelphia: University Press of Pennsylvania, 1944), 48. Also, Herbert Berg, “Mythmaking in the
African American Muslim Context: The Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam and the American
Society of Muslims,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73:3 (September 2005), 685-703.
216
Gomez, 215.
105
true identity of African-American people. The Moorish narrative declared that AfricanAmericans were indeed Asiatics and Moors, and it eschewed terms such as ‘colored’ or
‘black.’ Ali also accounted for other racial and ethnic groups in his theology, and he
included Celts and Asians under the umbrella of Moorish identity.217 One Moorish
Temple member, identified in a study as a Louisiana native named H.R. shared that
“from the age of seven years he could not believe in Christianity…he wanted to be with
his own and he never was satisfied until he became a Moslem. Then he learned there was
no Negro, black or colored, and he’s been happy ever since.”218 The report continued
that, “many Negroes on the South Side of Chicago flocked to the new teacher…a change
of status from “Negro” to “Asisatic” promised an easy way to salvation.”219
In addition to the new perspective on Black identity, Moorish identity allowed for
men and women to experience masculinity and femininity in new ways. As a movement
inspired by Black, nationalist ideologies, gender and sex-specific roles played an
important part in the construction of Moorish worldviews and practices. The Moorish
religion called upon men to lead their own communities of Moors through acts of proud
nationalism and displays of masculinity. This element of Moorish Science was shared
with the Garvey movement, which called upon African-American men to reign over their
217
For more on the mythology of this group and other African-American Muslim groups, see Berg, 689.
The Nation of Islam, a direct descendant of the Moorish Science Temple of America movement, was first
called the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in Detroit in 1934. Ali’s addition of Celts to the Moorish
community is notable because of the ways in which African-Americans identified with Ireland and Irish
oppression during this period and the Harlem Renaissance. Some Moorish Science Temples to this day
celebrate St. Patrick’s Day as a special holiday and declare that the story of St. Patrick is actually about the
Moors being driven from Ireland. For more on this see Peter Lanborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the
Margins of Islam (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1993), 15-50.
218
Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North
(Philadelphia: University Press of Pennsylvania. 1944), 41.
219
Ibid, 42.
106
people as well. The Moorish prescription for men to rise up for their people was
consistent with the point Kevin Gaines has raised about the nature of these types of
groups. “Black nationalism and racial uplift ideology would often phrase both the
problem and its solution—representing both Black oppression and its remedies—as a
question of manhood.”220 The Moorish rhetoric of manhood emboldened their male
membership. One example of Moorish men expressing their masculinity was a series of
incidents sometime in 1926 or 1927. The local Chicago press published rumors that
Moorish men were ‘assaulting’ Whites on the streets. While dressed in their signature
White robes and red fez hats emblazoned with the star and crescent—symbols of Islam—
the members would stop Whites on the streets and show them the Moorish identity card.
The cards read:
This is your nationality and identification card for the Moorish Science Temple of
America, and birthright for the Moorish Americans. We honor all the divine
prophets, Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, and Confucius. May the blessings of God
of our father Allah, be upon you that carry this card. I do hereby declare that you
are a Muslim under the Divine Law of the Holy Koran of Mecca-Love, Truth,
Peace, Freedom and Justice. I am a citizen of the USA.
The men allegedly called White people devils and alerted them to their imminent
destruction at the hands of Moors. Sometimes they would dare Whites to discriminate
against them, while yelling, “I am an citizen of the USA.” Writers Arna Bontemps and
Jack Conroy wrote about the group in an essay on the ‘cults’ of the Migration era. The
writers reported that they harassed the, “White enemy on the streets, showing their
membership card and buttons, and proclaiming in the name of their prophet Noble Drew
Ali, that they had been freed of European domination. They flaunted their fezzes on the
220
Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 127.
107
street and treated the White man with undisguised contempt.”221 Ali admonished the
men
for their behavior, yet his teachings played a strong role in encouraging the actions. Ali
did not want his followers to become greater targets of law enforcement or degrade the
upstanding image he encouraged, so he redressed aggressors in his column in the group’s
newspaper, the Moorish Voice. Ali wrote, “I hereby inform members that they must end
all radical agitating speeches while at work in their homes or on the streets. We are for
peace not destruction. Stop flashing your cards at Europeans, it causes confusion…our
work is to uplift the nation”222
Gender, Class and Nationalism in Moorish Science
While men sought ways of expressing their masculinity through anti-White
tirades, women and girls could not act so boldly in the name of their new religion. In
order to help realize the aims of Moorish Science’s restorative patriarchy, women had to
occupy two seemingly contradictory positions. Through the stories and laws of the Circle
Seven Koran, Ali called upon Moorish girls and women to take up the work of the
Temple as a means of supporting the destiny of Moorish males, while remaining passive
objects of admiration and desire. The Moorish community looked to the Circle Seven
text for guidance on a wide variety of theological and practical matters of conduct,
including the appropriate treatment of and behaviors for girls, women and wives.
Moorish women instructed girls regarding the Circle Seven’s laws, and their
221
Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, “Registered with Allah,” Anyplace But Here (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1966), 219.
222
NDA, Moorish Voice, undated publication, (1/5) MSTAC, SCRBC, NYPL.
108
parents were responsible for developing the qualities of a good ‘helpmate’ in their
daughters. The Circle Seven celebrated Moorish girls for their purity, and the sacred text
described how girls “walketh in maiden sweetness, with innocence in her mind, and
modesty on her cheek.”223 Girls were also taught that they were the “reasonable
companion” to men, rather than the “slave of his passion,” Moorish teachings did not
vindicate girls and young women entirely in all matters regarding sexuality and
marriage.224 In the first declaration in the “Holy Instructions and Warning for All Young
Men,” the Koran warns men to keep away from “the harlot” and her “delights,” casting
women as temptresses to be avoided at all costs.225
In the Circle Seven’s “Marriage Instructions for Man and Wife,” the prophet
made clear the dual roles of Moorish women: “Remember thou art man’s reasonable
companion…to assist him in the toils of life, to soothe his heart with thy tenderness and
recompense his care with soft endearments.”226 In the context of marriage, boys were
told that women were “not merely to gratify…but to assist him in the toils of life,”
highlighting female potential and ability.227 Good Moorish wives learned that
“submission and obedience are the lessons of her life.”228 While Moorish women were
expected to be toilers, they also were also characterized as filled with “luster…brighter
than the stars of Heaven,” with smiles “more delicious than a garden of roses,” and a
223
NDA, “Circle Seven Koran.”
224
Ibid, “Circle Seven Koran.”
225
Ibid, “Circle Seven Koran.”
226
Ibid, “Circle Seven Koran.”
227
Ibid, “Circle Seven Koran.”
228
Ibid, “Circle Seven Koran.”
109
bosom that “transcendeth the lily.”229
The characterization of Moorish womanhood and girlhood within Moorish
philosophy stood in opposition to representations of women and girls in mainline
churches and middle-class uplift organizations. While the Moorish Science community
described its women as having a “mansion of goodness” within her and “virtue…at her
right hand,” old settler organizations focused on the potential for evil and depravity that
resided within its most needy girls and women. Industrial training school founder Nannie
H. Burroughs reported in 1920 to the National Baptist Women’s Convention that migrant
women “like the children that many of them are…satisfy their Wants and forgets [sic]
their Needs.”230 She claimed that migrating women were “restless, unreliable type[s]
whose habit it is to work long enough to get what they want and take many vacations or
days off between.”231 Burroughs continued on to indict all migrants when she noted, “the
masses of our people are intoxicated…”232
The contrast between Moorish conceptions of women and girls and the
clubwomen’s perspective also reveals the class antagonisms that helped to create fringe
movements. In the arena of representation, Moorish women held an advantage over
middle-class women. Although Moorish women did not possess the social luxuries of
respectable middle-class status, they did enjoy some freedoms associated with their own
229
Ibid, “Circle Seven Koran.”
230
Nannie H. Burroughs, “Report of the work of Baptist Women, Twentieth Annual Report,” Journal of the
Twentieth Annual Session of the Woman’s Convention Auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention, Held
with Second Baptist Church, Indianapolis, Indiana, September 8-13, 1920, 318-326, 332-347, In Sernett,
African-American Religious History, 387.
231
Ibid, 391.
232
Ibid, 388.
110
social class, particularly when it came to religion. Migrant women had an advantage
when it came to choosing one’s own place of worship. For those women who sought a
new beginning in cities, they were free from the strictures of class, family name and deep
roots in Chicago. They could exercise their options as to where they would worship and
under what terms. Moorish women, and other women in nationalist groups, chose to be
celebrated and admired instead of maligned and judged. African-American women’s
historians Barbara Bair and Deborah Gray White, among others, have determined that
part of the appeal of Garveyism—and I include the Moorish Science Temple—for
women, was its rhetoric on the exaltation and protection of African-American women.
Bair notes in her work on the Garvey movement, “Many women embraced these roles
and images, including the idea of black women as beautiful and the centrality and worth
of motherhood.”233 By embracing their statuses as symbols of Black beauty and
motherhood, Moorish women bore significant responsibilities within the Temple to
represent the faith and work on its behalf.
The UNIA and Reactions to Black Nationalism
Ali’s time in Newark as a church leader coincided with the spread of the Garvey
movement. Although the UNIA crumbled in Chicago, Ali and the Temple leadership not
only shared rhetorical strategies and ideologies, but they used similar strategies in
creating spaces for women and girls to participate in their nationalist visions. Ali found
inspiration for his directives surrounding gender in the UNIA’s equally masculinist
233
Barbara Bair, “Comparing the Role of Women in the Garvey Movement,” www.pbs.org, Accessed
August 1, 2007. See also Barbara Bair, “True Women: Real Men: Gender, Ideology, and Social Roles in
the Garvey Movement," In Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby, eds., Gendered Domains: Rethinking
Public and Private in Women's History (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1992).
111
discourse. The UNIA, although not a religious organization in its self-conception,
appealed to a similar population as the Moorish Science Temple. Ali and Garvey spoke
to the hearts and minds of African-Americans distanced from the material comforts of
middle-class life and the security of understanding the ins and outs of city life.
Garvey mobilized hundreds of thousands of people, and he built a small empire in
urban centers, particularly in New York City, by arousing support of the ‘manly’
elements of the race. Similarly to Ali, Garvey made his defense of Black masculinity
clear: “This is the age of men, not pygmies, not of serfs and peons and dogs, but men, and
we who make up the membership of the [UNIA] reflect the new manhood of the
Negro.”234 The Chicago Whip, which was more sympathetic to Garvey than the
Defender described the movement’s gender split in this way: “It takes the men and trains
them to be manly and lawful, loyal to their race and country.”235
Women, on the other hand were framed as the natural complement to men yet not
nearly as reliable to take up the fight of the movement. “What the night is to the day, is
woman to man…she makes one happy, then miserable…constant, yet inconstant…no real
man can do without her.”236 Even if women were “inconstant,” they were still exalted as
“Black queen of beauty…sweet goddess of the ever green land.”237
Despite women’s natural inconsistency, Garvey used women and girls in various
sectors of the UNIA’s moneymaking enterprises, as Ali would later do the same within
234
As quoted in Gray White, 120. Incidentally, this was one of Garvey’s last speeches before he was
incarcerated.
235
Spear, 196.
236
Amy Jacques-Garvey, ed., Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (New York: Anthaneum, 1969),
20.
237
Marcus Garvey, “The Black Woman,” as quoted in Gray White, 123.
112
his Temple. The UNIA established the Black Cross Nurses, who tirelessly served
Garveyites and their medical needs. In 1920, when the Chicago UNIA assembled for
their “first annual mass meeting,” the Black Cross nurses appeared in “White veils, White
dresses,” representing the purity of Black womanhood.238 Women agents sold stocks and
tickets for Garvey’s “back-to-Africa” vessels called the Black Star Lines. The UNIA’s
Universal African Motor Corps, a paramilitary women’s group, appeared at public events
to symbolize the strength of the UNIA movement. The girls, attired in green U.N.I.A.
uniforms, also participated in the flagrant parades that symbolized the movement,
especially in Harlem.239 The UNIA’s Juvenile Divisions provided the valuable blueprints
for creating girls’ programs within the Moorish Science Temple. In the Garvey
community, all children were instructed on the principle of the movement, yet by age
seven they were segregated by sex. Girls learned how to sew, along with instruction in
proper etiquette and courses in African-American history. When girls became teenagers,
they were directed toward learning skills to prepare them for the Black Cross Nurses and
focused on the domestic arts.
The UNIA and Moorish Science Temple both placed women in high leadership
positions within their respective organizations. Each UNIA chapter elected a highly
symbolic ‘lady president,’ who served to symbolize the virtues of Black womanhood the
organization was to celebrate. Garvey’s wives—Amy Ashwood and Amy Jacques
Garvey—both played integral roles in the UNIA, even though they never gained formal
238
239
Spear, 196.
For more on the Black Cross Nurses, see Anne Macpherson, “Colonial Matriarchs: Garveyism,
Maternalism and Belize’s Black Cross Nurses, 1920-1952, Gender and History 15 no.3, 507-527 and
“Women in the Garvey Movement,” www.pbs.org, Accessed March 6, 2008.
113
titles like Ali’s wife whom he married when she was a teenager, Sister Pearl Ali, and the
other Sheikesses of Moorish Science.240
While some women inside the Temple and the UNIA reveled in nationalist
discourses about women and men’s roles, a number of women outside the Temple were
critical of its aims. For women activists in groups such as the NACW, Garveyism and its
strand of Black Nationalism diminished their hard work. In similar ways that White and
Black women activists fought over the right direction for the Amanda Smith Home,
Black nationalists such as Garvey and Ali greatly antagonized race women’s leadership
in reaching out to migrant women and girls. Black Nationalist rhetoric contradicted the
claims of African-American women activists that women were the natural leaders in the
quest to uplift the race. White describes the rise in Black Nationalist organizations as
having ushered in the “crushing blow to the women’s era philosophy,” and led to a
retrenchment of support of Black women’s activism, reifying anti-feminist positions
within African-American male circles.241 Women activists such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett,
Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper perceived themselves as standing on equal,
if not higher, footing to African-American male leadership. They resented the
movements and new religions that compromised their positions as leaders. White notes
that, “When black men did community work, they found themselves in the precarious
position of vying with women for leadership in an arena where black women were
240
The Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, “The Moorish Science Temple,”
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 611.
241
Ibid, 120.
114
strong.”242
The Black activist sisterhood’s ill will toward nationalism was also a matter of the
ways in which they believed that nationalist groups failed to stand up for Black girls and
women. The activists believed that the depictions of the Black women’s beauty and her
claims to motherhood were empty because nationalists failed to defend real women and
girls when it truly mattered. They noted African-American men’s silence when Black
female character was maligned inside and outside of their communities. Fannie Barrier
Williams observed:
Too many colored men entertain very careless, if not contemptible, opinions of
the colored girl. They are apt to look to other races for their types of beauty and
character. For the most part, the chivalry of colored men has in it but little heart
and no strength of protection. They ought to appreciate that a colored girl of
character and intelligence is a very precious asset in our social life, and they
should act accordingly.243
Yet, again, not all women were appreciative of the nationalist gestures toward
girls and women, nor were they pleased with their interventions in community activism.
Bair argues that although Garveyite women supported their assertions about the
supremacy of Black manhood, “they also wanted more,” than “chivalry” and “secondary
status.” This desire for greater recognition led some women to leave the movement and
becoming leaders of their own organizations.244
Black Nationalist’s bombastic repudiation of Whites also irritated mainstream
242
Deborah Gray White, “The Cost of Club Work, The Price of Feminism,” in Nancy Hewitt and Suzanne
Lebsock, eds., Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1993), 253.
243
Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Colored Girl,” in Mary Jo Deegan, ed., The New Woman of Color: The
Collected Writings of Fannie Barrier Williams, 1893-1918 (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press,
2002), 65.
244
Bair, “Comparing the Role of Women in the Garvey Movement.”
115
Black women’s organizations. The NACW, like many women’s clubs, were not only
open to interracial collaboration, but also maintained close ties to White peers in order to
leverage their power in reform initiatives and fundraising. African-American nationalists
did not openly advocate ties between themselves and Whites, although interracial
cooperation and contact were inevitable among all groups regardless of guiding ideology.
Their racial proclamations of Black supremacy also alienated the leaders of the Black
metropolis—the storefront preachers, businessmen and new settler politicians—who
considered the migrants their new constituencies. They needed the Southern-born
population to shore up their economic and political success, and they gained their
confidence by assuring migrants that they were not the Chicago elite. With their
economic projects and their ties to White politicians, Black Nationalist groups threatened
the emerging power structure of Chicago’s Black Belt. The tensions between the two
groups would later contribute to the Temple’s greatest challenges.245
Women, Girls and the Temple
The Moorish woman’s pedestal was made large enough to include girls. Moorish
girlhood was constructed in relationship to external and internal forces guiding the
movement. In the case of Moorish girls, the presence of strong women leaders, the
politics of appearance and beauty during the period, and the Temple’s economic
programs all shaped their religious and social experiences of Moorish Science.
Similarly to the work of the Smith Industrial School, it was important for Moorish
245
For more on the struggles among the Black leadership class in Chicago, see St. Clair Drake and Horace
Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1945).
116
girls to have role models of women’s leadership. The Temple provided girls examples of
women leading inside and outside the confines of women’s spheres within a religious
organization. At the very top of the Moorish Science leadership, women were allowed
governorships within Temples, and some were leaders of local branches. Within a few
years of its founding, Sister Whitehead-Bey, a Grand Sheikess in the organization
established a second Chicago Temple. Whitehad-Bey’s leadership helped the movement
expand to several northern and southern cities.246 She also contributed in a more
traditional way to the Temple as the creator of Ali’s princely robes and other, which was
“worn only by those of power such as Grand Sheiks, Grand Governors, and Head
Officials,” of the Temple.247
Drew’s wife Sister Pearl Ali also held high ranks in the national organization.
Sister Ali’s leadership was essential to the development of the Temple’s appeal to women
and its growth in girls and women’s programs. After the Temple arrived in Chicago, she
set out to create a separate group for women called the Sisters of the Temple. Many of
the Sisters, having had contact with other African-American mainline churches, adopted
a model set by Christian women’s groups in establishing clubs to fulfill the hostess and
service roles in the Temple. Using similar methods as African-American women’s clubs,
the Sisters operated as a part-time voluntary association and outreach group. In
December 1928, Sister J. Levine-El expanded on Sister Ali’s idea and founded the
Moorish National Sisters’ Auxiliary. The group began with only ten members in the
proceeding months more “faithful, dutiful Moorish Sisters,” joined the organization. The
246
Moorish Guide, “List of Moorish Temples,” 1928, (1/5), MSTAC, SCRBC, NYPL.
247
Ibid, “List of Moorish Temples.”
117
women collected a modest 25 cents a month for dues.248 The women also contributed to
a Necessity Fund “to help members in need.”249 In March of 1929, the Women
successfully organized the “first Moorish National tag Day” to raise funds for temples.
The Tag Day asked members to commit to a “week of sacrifice.” And upon Ali’s return
from a tour of Temples, “members will drop as much money as they can spare in a box.
Upon his return the box will be presented to him for fallen humanity.”250 ===
The women’s group focused squarely on fallen humanity and they described their
aims in this way: “their paramount object is to uplift fallen humanity and be the right
hand of the Prophet by their kind words, works and deeds.” This call to action sounds
similar to the motto of the NACW, “Lifting as we climb,” which indicates how much the
spirit of racial uplift pervaded the radical group. Similar to mainline churches looking to
serve Southern migrants, the day-to-day operations of the Moorish headquarters required
a large, organized staff to arrange worship services, holidays and help operate both the
charitable and commercial branches of the Temple. In this swarm of responsibilities, the
female membership emerged as leaders within the organization, helping build the
community that Drew desired.251 Sister Ali’s other major contribution was founding a
separate youth group for Moorish girls, with the goals of creating “interest in educational
pursuits and to awaken and cultivate an appreciation for the arts, [and] a greater
248
Ibid.
249
Moorish Voice, 1928 (1/5) MSTAC, SCRBC, NYPL.
250
Ibid.
251
Moorish Guide, National Edition “Women’s Auxiliary,” February 5, 1928 (1/5), MSTAC, SCRBC,
NYPL.
118
attendance at the literary and trade schools.”252
Women’s leadership also played a significant role in the Temple’s first national
convention, their grandest public act since their establishment in Chicago. In between
October 15-20, 1928, thousands of Moorish Science members gathered to report on their
Temple activities, socialize and participate in a “grand spectacular parade through
Chicago’s beautiful residential district with all Grad Sheiks…in Full Regalia.”253
Convention committee secretary, Sister Whitehead-El presented a report on the West
Side’s Number Nine Temple, Sister Lomax-Bey lead the “grand musical concert,” and
Sister Lomax also presented on Detroit’s Temple.254 Women and girls prepared the
“Good wholesome Meals and the Refreshments” under the “Moorish Cafeteria
Service.”255 The Moorish cafeteria was one of many businesses run by the Temple and
supported by women. In addition to her work with women and girls’ issues, Sister Ali
also served as the Temple’s national secretary and as treasurer for the Business Men’s
club, the Moorish publications (The Moorish Guide under the leadership of editor Sister
Juanity Mayo Richardson Bey, The Moorish Voice and the Moorish Review) and the
Moorish Manufacturing Company.256 For Moorish girls, unlike some of their Christian
counterparts, they had many opportunities to interact with women who help positions of
considerable responsibility and respect. In addition to seeing them do the work, the girls
252
Chicago Defender, “Mrs. Drew Ali Organizes Young Moorish People,” December 1, 1928.
253
“The Moorish Science Temple of America’s First Annual Convention,” 1928, unspecified Moorish
publication (1/5), MSTAC, SCRBC, NYPL.
254
255
256
Ibid, “The Moorish Science Temple of America’s First Annual Convention.”
Ibid, “The Moorish Science Temple of America’s First Annual Convention.”
Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press), 101.
119
regularly heard the Temple acknowledge women’s roles in the movement. Gomez notes
that, “although the Moorish Science concept of the nuclear family was conventionally
patriarchal, it remained possible for women to ascend into the higher levels of
organizational management.”257
In the world of the Moorish Temple, a woman or girl’s work was as valuable as
the ways in which she presented herself publicly. Moorish styles of dress ensued that
members would be noticed in public. Moorish teachings stressed modesty and purity for
girls, and Moorish girls clothing reflected the style of dress adopted by Moorish women.
Ali mandated that girls not wear short skirts and make-up. Girls and women covered
their heads in public and donned long dresses out of fear that dishonorable men would
further objectify them.258 Leering men were not the Temple’s only concern. Moorish
modesty was partly a response to the emerging flapper styles of the 1920s—styles that
created a stir about young women’s sexuality and power in the urban context.259 One
newspaper article about the dangers of too many “carmine cheeks” and “powdered noses”
on flappers concluded that “even the innocent bystander is coming to the conclusion that
many members of the female sex have given way to a tendency to overdress their
faces.”260 Another Defender editorialist was less concerned about the flapper craze
among African-American teenage girls, because “the colored girl is the most modestly
dressed member of the female sex on our streets.” But, the writer still quotes another
257
Gomez, 260.
258
NDA, “Circle Seven Koran.”
259
For more on flappers in the 1920s and African-American women, see Gray White, 128-130 and
Margaret A. Lowe, Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993), 103-133.
260
Chicago Defender, “Physician Has Fears for the Young Flappers,” June 17, 1922.
120
newspaper writer who declared “there has been a very decided break in the moral
level.”261 Moorish female modesty was juxtaposed against the popular cultural and social
images of African-American girlhood in the city. While newspapers reported on flappers
showing off their defiant styles at dances, Moorish girls appeared in public spaces fully
covered. By donning conservative clothes and embellishments that served as allusions to
a North African past, the Moorish community was able to simultaneously claim sexual
purity and innocence for African-American girls in the current contemporary culture,
while encouraging them to perform ‘otherworldliness.’ This connection to other lands
and African roots gave its membership a sense of a world free of Jim Crow, racism and
class conflict. In the Moorish community, performing Moorish identity was as important
as believing in it, and this movement gave girls an opportunity to perform Black girlhood
under the most respectable and chaste terms. Again, the Moorish Science Temple
replicated the same preoccupations with public presentation of mainline churches, as well
as the prescriptions of the nationalist movements. Moorish teachings paralleled Garvey’s
ruminations on the beauty of their women, and discourses on beauty and physical played
an important role in the Temple’s views on women.
In order to keep girls obedient to the call for modesty, the Temple had to address
the lures of some elements of the flapper styles. Girls may not have elected to wear
shortened dresses or bob their hair, but the lures to participate in some form of beauty
regime were strong during the 1920s. The rise of the Moorish Science movement
coincided with an explosion in health and beauty aids for African-Americans, especially
girls and young women. African-American women’s beauty culture was a powerful and
261
Chicago Defender, “The Flapper Age,” July 29, 1922.
121
pervasive force in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s because of the multivalent ways
in which it interacted with African-American life. Teenage girls and young women
employed by beauty companies such as Annie Malone’s Poro College, Madame C. J.
Walker’s Manufacturing Company and other companies were given a taste of economic
freedom while working as beauticians and sales agents. African-American advertising
companies developed enticing strategies to market these products. And more
importantly, in the context of this study, African-American women’s beauty became a
strategy in the racial uplift projects of political and social organizations. Religious
groups, although generally opposed to vanity and the sexualized appearance of make-up
and provocative clothing styles, still encouraged women to maintain a level of female
beauty that became associated with respectability. Acceptable female beauty in AfricanAmerican communities relied heavily on the use of the very beauty products that
celebrated vanity as a virtue rather than a vice, leading religious groups to maintain an
uneasy relationship to the marketplace for hair straightening pomades, cosmetics and skin
bleaches. Middle-class activist women decried too much rouge or blushing powder, but
they were not completely against women using products to enhance their looks. Historian
Susannah Walker discovered that even Nannie Burroughs supported the beauty culture
when she stated that African-American women “should not be apologetic or feel ashamed
of the desire to make ourselves more presentable or beautiful.”262
Instead of participating in an awkward dance of restrictions on and celebration of
Black female beauty in relation to the beauty culture, the Moorish Science movement
capitalized on it and made it into a profitable arm of its organization, allowing women
262
Susannah Walker, Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African-American Women, 1920-1975 (Louisville:
University of Kentucky Press, 2007), 32. Burroughs’ comments were made to the graduating class of Apex
Beauty College.
122
and girls to indulge in beauty culture on their own terms. The Moorish Manufacturing
Company peddled products that promoted holistic healing, which promoted ‘all-natural’
beauty. In Moorish advertisements, a single Moorish product claimed to serve nearly a
dozen purposes. The Moorish Body Builder and Blood Purifier’s could be used to
appear more attractive, and it also claimed to be “beneficial for Rheumatism, lung
trouble, rundown constitutions, indigestion and loss of manhood,” all for fifty cents.
Women used the Moorish antiseptic bath compound as a face wash to combat “skin
troubles,” but it also promised to help relieve rheumatism, stiff joints and sore feet. Men
and women both could use the products, but women were often the targets of the
advertising for the products. The Moorish Mineral and Healing Oil was a neural
medicine, good for toothaches, and it could also be used for sore and tired feet, stiff
joints, and ‘loss of manhood’ when the healing oil was applied to the spine and lower
parts of the stomach.263 Yet, the testimonial for the product featured a woman, who
proclaimed that the oil made her “feel like a young girl.”264 The Temple’s businesses
provided more than leadership opportunities and cosmetics for women and girls. The
Temple’s businesses were able to provide safe and wholesome jobs to girls and teenage
women. As the previous chapter on the Smith School revealed, there was a scarcity of
opportunities for young female job seekers. The Temple intervened on girls’ behalf by
training them within the confines of the organization’s enterprises, protecting them for
potential sexual exploitation and racial discrimination. The Sisters National Auxiliary
organized girls to sew pajamas, which were later sold through advertisements in the
263
Moorish Guide, 1927, MSTAC, SCRBC, NYPL.
264
Pamphlets in the, MSTAC, SCRBC, NYPL.
123
Moorish Voice. The proceeds from the pajama sales were used to establish the Moorish
National Home for the Aged. In Indianapolis, girls made “sturdy and durable” brooms to
help support their local Temple.265 The Temple’s Unity Hall and The Moorish
Lunchroom, located at 424 East 39th Street provided jobs for girls, as well as a
respectable space for working girls. The Hall served as the center of Moorish life and
was often rented out as a “hospitable and convenient public gathering place,” for ‘whist
parties, balls, and receptions” to outsiders.266 The non-Moorish community could have
greater contact and possibly understanding of this eccentric group of people by attending
their events. The Lunchroom was open both day and night and ladies were allowed to eat
there, providing an alternative to seedier restaurants and segregated dining facilities in the
Black Belt. Staffed mainly by girls and the Sisters of the Temples, the Lunchroom prided
itself on its cleanliness and excellent customer service. Nationally, The Moorish Temple
created its own small empire. The Temple owned land and farms throughout the
Northeast, in the Berkshires Mountains, Long Island, New York and Connecticut.
Researchers Yvonne Haddad and Jane Smith have noted in their study of the Temple, the
Moorish enterprises allowed for “economic independence and the sense of self-worth
necessary to overcome racist employment patterns.”267 Moorish-American businesses
staffed by girls also allowed its membership to engage with consumer culture without
confronting segregated stores. As the African-American population grew, so did
frustrations with inadequate services and concerns over whether African-Americans
265
“Advertisement from Moorish Voice,” “Moorish Science Temple History”,
www.moorishsciencetemplehistory.org, December 10, 2006.
266
267
Undated publication, MSTAC (1/4). SCRBC, NYPL
Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane Idleman Smith, Mission to America: Five Islamic Sectarian
Communities in North America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 88.
124
should spend money in places that denied them jobs, and decent service. Moorish grocery
stores and lunchrooms were popular places for Moors and non-Moors to be served with
dignity and not struggle with bad service and overcharging. 268
Ali recognized the position girls could play in the economic mission of Moorish
“uplift of humanity” and declared that the Temple wanted “better positions for our men
and women, more employment for our boys and girls and bigger unions will follow, and
economic security.”269 By including girls as a part of the larger economic vision, Ali
encouraged girls and young women to seize upon the entrepreneurial spirit of the
organization and locate themselves within its mission. Ali wrote, “We shall believe in
nothing until we have economic power. A beggar people cannot develop the highest in
them, nor can they attain to a genius enjoyment of the specialties of life.”270, Ali ensured
a steady supply of reliable workers and control over the Temple’s girls and young women
by allowing Moorish girls to work within the framework of this “economic power”
mission Moorish girls had some organizations designed for them, like the Young
Women’s Business Club, and they participated in sponsored activities.
Unlike Adah Waters’s desire to see African-American girls grow into women in
268
Confrontations between White-owned businesses and African-American communities laid the
cornerstone for several boycotts and protest movements long before the Civil Rights Movement. For more
on this form of activism, called “Don’t Buy Where you Can’t Work,” see Cheryl Greenberg, “Don’t Buy
Where You Can’t Work,” in Or Does it Explode?: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991). Prior to the Great Depression, access to simply buying at Chicago stores
was a hot-button issue among African-American activists. In an article in the Chicago Whip, the
newspaper reported that a Miss Viola Penn was refused service at the famed Marshall Field’s and Company
department store. The newspaper took “the matter up with the management of the stores, to find out why
our people cannot spend the coin of the realm in their establishment.” Penn planned on bringing suit
against the retailer. “Marshall Field & Co. Again Refuses to Sell to Colored Girl,” The Chicago Whip,
1919.
269
Ibid, 1928 Moorish Guide.
270
NDA in the Moorish Guide, 1928. “Economics” MSTAC, SCRBC, NYPL.
125
chosen professions, the Temple did not encourage girls to seek wage-earning and regular
employment as steps toward a career. Rather, girls were to use their training and skills
exclusively within the Temple’s structures. When girls and women had to work outside
of the Temple it was out of the economic necessities of African-American life at the time.
Yet, Moorish female employment allowed for the Temple to send its best representatives
out into the city. Chicago’s Moorish women were known to make good domestics
because “they quickly gained a reputation for being prompt, efficient, and honest.
Because they did not drink, smoke or gamble, their integrity was above reproach.”271
As the Moorish Science movement grew in popularity as a religion and as a
source of commercial products, girls became even more important to the daily operations
of the Temple’s businesses. The Lunch Room, the Moorish grocery and the Temple’s
events kept the Girls Club busy with activity. The Moorish Manufacturing Company
emerged as the most profitable branch of the Temple’s multi-pronged businesses and was
the source of the majority of the Temple’s wealth. The mail-order healing products
business was popular inside and outside of the Temple; one scholar estimated that his
manufacturing company yielded up to $36,000 a year for the Temple.272 Girls were
needed to take orders, mail packages and help create advertisements for the oils, creams
and bath powders. 273 The Temple’s economic success should have secured its
permanence in Chicago, but its prosperity served to undermine its power.
271
“The Moorish Science Temple,” The Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, 611.
272
Turner, 100.
273
Ibid, 100.
126
The Decline of the Temple
As the Temple grew, so did Ali’s connections with Black Chicagoans outside of
the Temple. In a short period of time, between 1925 and 1929, Ali strengthened the
Temple’s economic programs, he gained the respect of both Black and White elected
officials and he brokered a positive relationship with Robert Abbot. In 1927, the
Defender reported on Ali’s return from a trip to the South and alerted readers to the
Temple’s “drive for more members,” and provided the Temple’s address for “persons
desirous of learning of the great work that is being done.”274 Two years later, in January
1929, the Governor of Illinois and Black congressman Oscar DePriest were among the
“prominent men, both in business and public life,” who attended Ali’s birthday
celebration at Unity Hall.275 As the Temple expanded, it began to appeal to a wider
audience. No longer considered an insignificant ‘New Negro cult,” the Moorish Science
became a respectable organization, so much so that more and more middle-class AfricanAmericans began joining the Temple. This more educated membership became
instrumental in maintaining the racial uplift standards for the group, yet their presence
was not entirely beneficial for the Moorish community. According to sociologist E.
Franklin Frazier’s assessment, “some Negroes with education joined the organization and
attempted to exploit the members by selling herbs, magical charms, and potions, and
literature pertaining to the cult.”276 These products were not under Ali’s control, as they
274
Chicago Defender, “Noble Drew Ali Returns After Long Visit South,” November 19, 1927.
Incidentally, Ali visited Marcus Garvey in Atlanta during his trip to the South. Garvey was spending time
in a federal prison.
275
Chicago Defender, “Birthday of Moorish Leader is Celebrated,” January 12, 1929.
276
E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), 70.
127
were outside of the Moorish Manufacturing Company.
Ironically, the successes and rapid changes in the Temple led to tensions between
Moorish community old-timers and newcomers. The influx of new members into the
Temple, who were ostensibly more sophisticated than some of its founding members,
lead to infighting among the leadership of the Temple.277 Members who had joined the
Temple to escape class warfare were now confronting it. Moorish-Americans at various
levels began to question Ali’s leadership, and he was unable to exert his control over
Chicago’s Temple as Temples grew in other parts of the country. Factions of Moorish
men decided they could build the organization more effectively than Ali and began to
challenge his authority. During this time, women’s leadership and girls’ opportunities
were on shaky ground, because marriage to a male Moorish leader was the way women
could solidify power; the infighting among the men compromised women’s voices and
advocacy for girls.
By the spring of 1929, the Temple’s problems exploded. As Ali’s Temple was
divided over his leadership, the beleaguered prophet was accused of murdering a New
Orleans-based Moorish leader. While in custody, Ali disappeared momentarily from
police custody; during his disappearance, Claude Greene, Ali's lead rival for control of
the Temple and his former driver, was shot and stabbed several times at Unity Hall.
Chicago police claimed that Ali was the murderer, and brought him back to jail, where he
was subject to severe police brutality. While out on bond, Ali died.278 A number of
277
278
Fauset, 43.
Chicago Defender, “Cult Leader Being Held in Murder Case,” May 18, 1929; The Chicago Defender,
“Prophet’ of Moorish Cult Dies Suddenly,” July 27, 1929; Chicago Defender, “Five Moors Indicted in
Murder Case,” October 12, 1929.
128
theories emerged as to the true cause of his death. Some members believed that his death
came from the injuries caused by the police while he was in jail. Another theory
speculated that he was assassinated as part of a government-wide conspiracy to
destabilize the Moorish community. The most potent theory on the murder case,
revolved around Ali’s relationships with teenage girls in the Temple community.
As the forces to destabilize Ali’s leadership strengthened, Ali was accused of
having illicit affairs with women in the Temple several years his junior and underage
girls. When, the Defender reported that a “Cult Leader Lured Girls to His Harem,” the
true decline of the organization began. Ali, the man who provided thousands of Chicago
girls and young women a place to worship, learn, develop business skills and prepare to
become virtuous Moorish women, had impregnated two teenage girls. The girl, one
fourteen-years old girl and the other sixteen-years old, were members of the Temple.279
Another article suggested he also “ruined a 12-year-old-girl.”280 One historian claims
that Ali in fact married the fourteen and sixteen-year old girls in “Moorish American
ceremonies, but there were no legal records of the marriages,” and the state would not
have recognized these marriages in addition to his partnership with Pearl Ali.281 The
Defender reported on Ali’s polygamy. The article revealed that Ali explained his
marriage to the16-year-old girl by claiming that he was “permitted to have more than one
wife” and that these marriages could be performed without the authority of a court.282
Some members of the Temple speculated that the girls’ fathers killed Ali to avenge their
279
Chicago Defender, “Cult Leader Lured Girls to Harem,” March 23, 1929.
280
See Nance, 693.
281
See Turner, 100.
282
Chicago Defender, “’Prophet’ of Moorish Cult Dies Suddenly,” July 27, 1929.
129
daughters’ ravishments. In addition to the murder charges, Ali faced trial for
contravention under the Mann Act and statutory rape.283 The Defender was one of Ali’s
harshest critics in the scandal, but the paper did not blame Ali solely for his sexual
crimes. The newspaper accused Moorish mothers of giving their underage daughters to
Ali. Ali explained that this practice was part of his divine rite to girls’ bodies. Ali
claimed that, “it was holy to have their daughters receive the affections of Mohammed’s
representative here on earth.”284
Ali’s sexual violation of girls extricated the Moorish Science Temple from the
community of respectable churches and placed it among the various African-American
groups entangled in various scandals. Sociologist Spear noted that “Black nationalism
had prewar roots in Chicago,” but the early movements experienced an “early death”
because their leaders were often discovered to be false prophets.285 Spear noted the case
of “two, self-styled Abyssinian Jews” who established the International Peace and
Brotherly Love Movement” in 1913. One of the leaders David Ben Itzoch was
uncovered as a Southerner who had never been to the Holy Land of Abyssinia, as he
claimed.286 The Defender regularly reported on the negative influences of these fringe
groups on Southern migrants. The stories usually involved financial and emotional
exploitation, as well as sexual. Three years before the Moorish scandal, in 1926, the
283
Turner, 100.
284
Susan Nance, “Respectability and Representation: The Moorish Science Temple, Morocco, and Black
Public Culture in 1920s Chicago,” American Quarterly 54 no. 4 (December 2002), 623-657
285
Spear, 193.
286
Ibid,193.
130
Defender reported on a raid of a New York cult in order to “rescue girls in harem.”287 In
1934, the newspaper reported that Elder W. Roberson was arrested in Chicago for leading
the Black Jews of New York; he claimed to be the descendant of King Solomon and the
Messiah. He used donations from his followers to finance a lavish lifestyle, under the
guise of an outreach organization—the Relief Association of Hebrew Settlement Workers
and Welfare Home for Children. Roberson drove a Pierce-Arrows luxury car, and
outfitted his New Jersey farmhouse with bedrooms for the “favored virgins” of his harem.
Roberson also sold “comely maidens” of his harem from the farm.288 The Defender also
reported on other African-American groups who identified themselves in Middle-Eastern
terms—Moors, Gypsies, and Turks—who lingered on city streets ready to exploit
unknowing Blacks, particularly Southerners, into fortunetelling, harems and seedy
coffeehouses. Though the Moorish Science movement survived the fallout, decades after
the Temple was founded, the WPA characterized the Temple as “thinly camouflaged with
religion for exploitation purposes.”289
The sexual exploitation of girls in ‘cults’ was a national issue, which caused
African-Americans, especially ‘respectable ones,’ to react with moral outrage and
provided a reason to judge these groups so harshly. Considering Chicago’s familiarity
with the seedy sides of fringe groups, the press did not spare the Moorish Science
community of sensational stories and accusations. The sex scandal led the Temple to
lose some credibility and esteem in mainstream Chicago. By presenting itself as a moral,
287
Chicago Defender, “Religious Cult Raided: Rescue Girls in Harem,” February 27, 1926.
288
Chicago Defender, “Black Jews in Clutches of the Law: Face Federal Trial in New York,” March 1934.
289
IWP, “…and Churches, part 2,” notes, NIP at VHAC, CPL.
131
economic and political force in the city and a supporter of the racial uplift system of
reacting to migrants, Moorish Science oddities and exaggerated claims were excused and
accepted. With the advent of the revelations of Ali’s behavior toward girls and teenage
women, the Temple was reduced to the status of the other ‘backwards’ and ‘phony’
religions the Defender often ridiculed. Yet, it is significant that the undoing of the
Moorish Science Temple organization is often attributed primarily to the murders of the
leaders and secondarily, the sexual misconduct of the leader, and the sexual exploitation
of girls. The Moorish Science ideologies were complicated in the contradictions
surrounding the role and proper treatment of women, opportunities for women’s
leadership and simultaneous masculinity and sexist discourses on control, right behavior
and surveillance. The Temple was yet another example of a place that failed to properly
protect girls and secure their physical safety. After the fall out over Ali’s relationships,
the Temple was still able to keep followers and there are no indications that the
authorities investigated the organization or sought information on other Moorish girls.
The Legacy of the Moorish Science Temple of America: The Nation of Islam and Girls
Followers of Ali’s processor and chauffeur, the Honorable John Gives-El, were
loyal to the Moorish Science Temple as Ali created it.290 Moorish Science Temples
outside of Chicago were also able to survive the organizational calamity, and Chicago’s
community of Moorish-Americans still exists today. The most significant legacy of
Drew Ali’s passing and the erosion of the Moorish Science Temple in Chicago, and
290
The story of John Gives-El states that after Noble Drew Ali’s death, John Give-El fainted. While being
examined, an observer noted that “the sign of the star and the crescent were in his eyes,” indicating the
reincarnation of Drew Ali. See Aminah Beverly McCloud, African-American Islam (New York: Routledge,
1995), 55.
132
nationally, was that it allowed the most important Black, Muslim separatist movement,
the Nation of Islam, to flourish in Chicago. The Nation of Islam’s founder, Wallace
Fard Muhammad, who had ties to the Moorish Temple, emerged under mysterious
circumstance similar to Ali, as his nationality and race were often questioned. Some
defectors from the Moorish Science community became members of the Nation of Islam.
As the fall of the UNIA created space for the Moorish Science Temple in Chicago, the
Temple’s fall allowed the Nation of Islam to rise. Between 1935 and 1946, the Nation of
Islam struggled to develop itself as both separate from the Moorish Science Temple and a
legitimate expression of Islam, and their efforts eventually led to the creation of strong
mosque communities nationally and the flourishing of Nation of Islam businesses. 291
One of the most important contributions of the Moorish Science Temple was that
it helped plant the seeds of the thinking about women and girls in the Nation of Islam, as
well as the ‘training’ of girls for Muslim womanhood, motherhood and Muslim nationbuilding. The various Moorish girls’ programs and their inclusion in the economic goals
of the Moorish community directly helped to define how future Black Muslim girls
would experience their religious communities. The employment of girls in Moorish
factories and businesses provided some of the guidelines for the Muslim Girls Training
program, which was tied to Lost-Found mosques and businesses throughout Black
Muslim communities in urban centers from the inception of the group in the 1930s to the
present. Similar to the Moorish Science Temples, Girls Training students were required
to dress modestly and wear the abbayah, a head covering, and long dresses. The Nation
of Islam conceived of Girls Training as a substitute for going to public schools, and
291
For more on the history of the Nation of Islam, see Steven Tsoukalas, The Nation of Islam:
Understanding the Black Muslims (New York: P&R Publishing, 2001).
133
academic instruction only lasted three hours. Boys and girls were taught the same
academic courses, but girls were required to take special courses in “basic domestic
skills—housekeeping, child-rearing and hygiene.”292
The girls’ programs were segregated by age, and at each stage, Muslim girls were
able to access higher levels of training, as well as more instruction toward marriage. The
junior girls program, developed for teenage girls, was originally called the General
Civilization Class, and it was designed to teach girls the rules and regulations of Islam.
The Nation of Islam’s girls, similar to rules regarding Moorish girls, were instructed to do
the following: “Do not use lipstick or make up, do not wear hair up unless wearing a long
dress, do not smoke or drink alcohol, do not commit adultery, do not use pork in any
form, do not cook in aluminum utensils, do not wear heels over 1.5 inches.” Girls were
also instructed to “not dance with anyone except one’s husband.”293 The Nation also
used the Muslim Girls Training program to make products, such as lace, clothing and
foodstuffs for fundraising purposes.294
The Muslim Girls Training Program reflected the stricter, more gender-bound
program of the Nation of Islam. The Moorish Temple’s sex scandals may have served to
push Black Muslims into a deeper conservatism about girls’ roles and purposes, as well
as cutting off the pipelines to beauty culture that the Moorish community allowed. The
earlier principles and practices of Moorish Science created possibilities for girls and
women to lead and flourish within the Moorish community and occasionally indulge in
292
Clifton Hugo Marsh, The Lost Found Nation of Islam in America (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2000),
44.
293
294
Ibid, 44.
See Louis E. Lomax, When the Word is Given: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and the
Black Muslim World (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1963).
134
the outside world of consumer goods and leisure culture. This new Black Muslim
movement did not care to fully capitalize on these energies and retreated into more fixed
and regulated perspectives on female roles and rights. Within the Black Muslim
communities of Chicago after the decline of Moorish Science, the ‘problem’ of sexual
exploitation was never adequately addressed or even challenged, and Black Muslim
organizations ceased to provide girls with role models and opportunities to develop
business skills or have a voice in the operations of Muslim community life, as women
were not given similar opportunities to open new mosques or lead Sisters clubs. With the
death of the Moorish Science movement, the Black Muslim community interpreted its
role as ‘training’ Black girls for Muslim womanhood in even more constrained gendered
terms. The new Muslim movement did not allow for the borders between their worlds
and the city remain porous, and they did not carve out spaces for women and girls to
develop identities as women leaders. All of these measures sought to restrain AfricanAmerican female sexuality, possibly in an attempt to distance themselves from Ali’s
sexual abuse scandals. Regardless of this move toward less freedom for girls and
women, the Nation of Islam could not and did not protect itself from future sex scandals
and accusations of polygamy and sexual exploitation of young women. In fact, Malcolm
X’s split from the Nation of Islam involved charges of sexual misconduct on the part of
his mentor, Elijah Muhammad, and led him to form the Muslim Mosque, Inc.
Ali’s passing may have done more for the Moorish Science movement than if he
had survived. The strange circumstance surrounding his death helped reify his status as a
savior, and his devotees helped the Moorish movement spread in light of the competition
with the new Nation of Islam. If the leader would have faced his charges of sexual abuse
135
and if the Chicago press made the lurid details available to a mass public, Ali’s
community would have most likely been further eroded in an attempt to protect girls and
teenage women from a sexual abuser. Although the allegations were made public, the
fact that Ali convinced his followers that the accusations were part of a conspiracy to
undermine him helped ensure that some members would not leave the Temple, and the
practice may have been acceptable to some of its members, who believed that the
Moorish religion’s standards were outside the purview of the moralistic culture of the
U.S. Therefore the movement was able to survive in the face of the Nation of Islam’s
success and continued to grow in the shadow of the scandals, even in the Chicago area.
In the 1930s, Temples were active in other parts of the Midwest, including nearby East
Chicago, Indiana.295
Scholars agree that Moorish Science was a critical precursor to the Nation of
Islam and that it helped fill a deep longing in the Black underclass to gain self-esteem and
motivated them to seek out the promises of their new lands. A brief look at some of the
activities and advice stemming from the Moorish Science Temple corroborates the
findings of other studies that claim that African-American nationalist groups, despite of
their radical calls for separatism and disavowal of Whites and their religion and culture,
bore a keen likeness to the ideologies of racial uplift. African-American Muslims and
Moors were equally, if not more invested, in seemingly ‘White standards’ of selfpresentation, work ethics and conservative values, even going so far as to recognizing
proper behavior as White. One scholar argues that the “politics of black respectability
and the politics of representation of North American Muslims at the time became
295
Chicago Defender, “East Chicago, Ind. Notes,” April 29, 1933.
136
mingled.”296 Although rooted in the politics of respectability, Moorish Science, and later
the Nation of Islam, still appealed to African-Americans because it provided a new
paradigm in which to view themselves, no longer victims and potential victors when they
adopted Black supremacy as their worldview. Some religious scholars argue that Ali’s
success in promoting Moorish Science was a general ignorance, on the part of all
Americans, of Islam and the Koran. Islam, as a representation of antithetical to
Christianity, exotic in its roots and possessing mystical knowledge only available to its
members were all alluring elements to African-Americans searching for an alternative to
Baptist or Pentecostal Churches in the city. In his famous work on Black Muslims, C.
Eric Lincoln observed similar issues between the Nation of Islam and Islam practiced in
the East. It was the brand of Islam that mattered, not Islam itself. Lincoln discovered
that, “the aegis of orthodox Islam means little in America’s black ghettos. So long as the
movement keeps its color identity with the rising black people of Africa, it could discard
all its Islamic attributes—its name, its prayers to Allah, its citations from the Quaran,
everything “Muslim” without substantial risk to its appeal to the black masses.”297
Conclusion
The Moorish Science Temple reflected the struggles, passions and intensity of the
Great Migration period. Southern migrants experienced city life for the first time and
they discovered greater freedom in determining the terms in which they would worship
and obey. For those who were alienated by the Salvationist perspectives of mainline
296
Susan Nance, “Respectability and Representation,” 647.
297
C. Eric Lincoln Black Muslims in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1961), 210.
137
Christianity as they grappled with the meager social conditions of the North, they could
turn to a new breed of cults and fringe groups. Fringe religious groups with nationalist
leanings and somewhat unusual practices gained popularity among African-Americans
who were frustrated by Protestant denominations. These groups were able to answer their
existential and social questions while instilling in them a deep sense of pride about being
Black. These new religious groups did not try to assure the masses that their suffering
was purposeful. Rather, religious, nationalist organization leaders were able to capitalize
on migrant dissatisfaction with both White supremacy and African-American elite,
religious leadership. The Moorish Temple’s success was due in large part to its
emergence as an entirely new entity shaped by the times. The Great Migration did not
require fringe religious groups to fundamentally change their organizational culture or
aims, as in the case of mainline churches like the Olivet Baptist Church. These
organizations grew out a sensibility and perspective that was distinctly contemporary and
suited for the populations it targeted.
Ali’s Chicago Moorish Temple was among an emerging network of Northern
nationalist organizations that not only celebrated African identity, but also preached
economic development and instructed its followers to resist social oppression at the hands
of Whites. The Moorish Temple and its peers, such as Marcus Garvey’s Universal
Improvement Association, spread their messages of economic and political selfsufficiency though institution building in Black centers and hubs. By creating businesses,
establishing schools for their children and making important contacts with Chicago
power brokers, they often best exemplified the Northern dreams of greater opportunities
and resources for African-Americans. The Moorish Science Temple stood at the
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intersections of four related shifts in Chicago during the Great Migration: the tensions
that arose between established African-Americans and newcomers in mainline Christian
churches, the emergence of Black nationalism and New Negro consciousness expressed
by groups like the UNIA, the rise of African-American women’s leadership in Northern
religious communities, and the growing relationship between fringe religious groups and
the new economic marketplaces for Black Northerners. Ali represented a Migration-era
sensibility—the freedom to simply create your own faith, the desire to cultivate Black
business, and a willingness to embrace the Black poor and working-class. He stood in
contrast to the pre-Migration sensibilities of leaders such as Amanda Smith. As the
previous chapter highlighted, African-American social, political and religious groups
praised Amanda Smith for her work, which was traditional, non-controversial and
thoroughly respectable by middle-class standards.
Through the examination of the Temple’s teachings, projects and warnings to its
members, we discover that the Temple did not exist completely at the margins of
Chicago’s Black society, nor were they immune from African-American racial uplift
thinking. Haddad and Smith’s research highlights the Temple’s participation in
Chicago’s racial uplift culture by emphasizing the Temple’s stated goals of
“charity…mutual assistance of its members in times of distress; aid in the improvement
of health and encourage the ownership of better homes; find employment for members;
and teach those fundamental principles that are desired for our civilization, such as
obedience to law, loyalty to government and unit.”298 Ali seriously took obedience to
financial and business laws. He ensured that the Temple filed incorporation papers with
298
Ibid, 88.
139
the state of Illinois and admonished followers to remain within the confines of the law.
Ali was well aware of Garvey’s troubles with the federal government, and he wanted his
members to remain compliant with the law. In one issue of The Voice reminded the
members to collect all their financial statements in order to pay their annual income
taxes.299 Obviously, Ali was selective in his own obedience to the law. Ali may have
preached Black supremacy to his followers, but he did not want to compromise his power
in Chicago. The Temple’s own racial uplift ethos privileged obedience to the state over
challenging individual Whites. The Temple was as invested in middle-class ideals of
respectability as any other mainstream African-American organization.
For women in particular, the new fringe religions provided opportunities for
leadership and institution-building outside of the framework of elite, women’s
organizing, allowing the illiterate and the working woman a chance to exercise power and
learn new skills. Within the Temple, women exercised great leadership skills and were
given an opportunity to manage and direct major projects, and to occupy positions
unavailable to them in the outside world. A Moorish woman, who may have been a
domestic in the secular world, could be a supervisor or newspaper editor in the Moorish
community. The nationalist angles of these groups also created an opportunity for women
to experience an exalted, if sexist, identity, as nationalism called upon African-American
women to embody the beauty and uncontested worthiness of the entire race. For women
who fled the South to protect their daughters from the Southern climate of sexual
exploitation and degradation, these hyperbolic expressions of love for Black women may
have been appealing and appeared safer for girls. The Moorish Science Temple created
299
Federal Bureau of Investigation File, “To All Members of the Moorish Science Temple of America,
Report 3A,” March 1943, 12.
140
gendered expectations for women and men, boys and girls, but did prove to provide space
for women and girls to develop skills not associated with mothering—business acumen
and industriousness.
The Moorish Science Temple attempted to create a safe environment for girls to
acquire skills, admire capable and pioneering women, and shelter themselves from the
dangers of the city—drinking, unsafe work environments and racial discrimination. By
providing opportunities for girls to undergo religious training alongside practical skill
development, the Temple was achieving some of the goals of women’s clubs, sororities
and industrial training schools. Though not entirely rid of Christian elements, racial
uplift notions or social sciences discourses, the girls’ programs were innovative and
helped raise the profile of and respect for a fringe group. For girls, the Moorish
experience allowed them to see African-American women engaging in non-traditional
forms of labor, while still living within the parameters of traditional Moorish life.
Moorish girls experienced a bit of both African-American worlds in Chicago. On one
hand, the conservative views of Moorish life, the preoccupation of proving their
citizenship by modeling ideals and concern about public image plunged girls into the
racial uplift mode of doing things. Compared to the messages of mainstream churches,
settlement houses and industrial schools, Moorish Science teachings were consistent with
the racial uplift institutions of the Great Migration period. On the other hand, the Temple
experience made room for girls to develop wage-earner skills, interact with female
religious leaders and participate in the emerging beauty culture of the time without fear of
reprisal. The Moorish community provided an insulated space for Moorish girls to come
into a greater understanding of themselves, their identities and their new religions without
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maligning their African-American identity or rejecting everything from the secular world.
The Moorish Science community also provided girls controlled access to the enticements
of modern, city life—consumer products, beauty and hair treatments and hetero-social
entertainment. These spaces came at a very high price, as girls were also vulnerable to the
same types of sexual exploitation that drove their families out of the South.
Although a key element of Black supremacist teaching included a deep reverence
for Black womanhood and girlhood, the Temple’s story reminds us that the institution’s
beliefs did not always manifest in practice. The tragedy and the irony of the Moorish
Science Temple was that it created a carefully constructed world to celebrate AfricanAmerican girls as pure and respectable. These aims were undermined by the sexual
proclivities of the Temple founder, and it is likely that Ali was not alone in the practice of
providing girls ‘the opportunity’ to connect with the sexual divinity of Moorish Sheiks
and leaders. Regardless of the extent of the abuse, the fact that there was no unanimous
or unified outrage over the marriage of girls and teenage women to much older men,
including Ali, indicates the contradictions and shortcomings of this particular nationalist
movement’s claim to protect African-American girlhood and the emptiness of the
promises. Ali may have believed that his relationships with Black political figures and
leaders could protect him from the scrutiny that fell upon other nationalist leaders.
Although Ali often appeared in ‘traditional’ Moorish garb in public, he was also cleanshaven and well mannered. Before the scandal, he was not linked so closely to the other
fringe group eccentrics. The scandal created deep concerns within African-American
leadership in Chicago. The Temple’s sex scandals were shocking to the readers of the
Defender, because Ali had earned a place among the ranks of the respectable of
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Chicago’s new Black power structure. Previous to the murders and the allegations,
stories of girls and exploitation in other fringe groups appeared in both the sensational
and tame press. News stories about faux sheiks and fortunetellers costumed in silks
luring girls into harems filled the pages of Chicago’s black and White newspapers long
before the Moorish Temple scandal.
The work of the Moorish Science Temple of America reminds us that racial uplift
projects targeted toward girls occurred in various political, social and religious sites.
Although racial uplift was bound up in the middle-class of Black Chicago, they were not
the exclusive owners of the complex emotions and ideals that inspired morals and
manners as a political strategy and a way of life. A number of the Moorish-Americans
followed Ali initially because they were marginalized along class lines from mainline,
Northern churches, and they desired a respite from the moralizing of Christian
communities. The moralizing, racial uplift sensibilities and judgments did not end when
they donned their red fez hats or began to exalt Allah instead of their precious Lord. In a
number of ways, Moorish religion helped reify those very dynamics, thoughts and ideals.
Within the larger framework of their nationalist ideology, they created a precarious space
for girls and young women by including them in the economic mission of the
organization but restricting them through gender bias, and in some cases harming them in
the name of divine right.
Most young girls and teenage women did not often have the choice of which
religious groups they would join when they arrived in the North, nor did they have a
voice in their spiritual communities, but these forces of change shaped their experiences,
influenced how women’s racial uplift work responded to them, and taught them
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invaluable lessons about the harsh realities of the African-American dream of a modernday Exodus. In the case of the racial and religious landscapes of Chicago during the
Great Migration, we see these unstable categories and constantly shifting boundaries
when we examine fringe and mainstream religious groups. And, in this case,
understanding these limits helps us see how the struggle for gender equality, girls’
advocacy and accompanying challenges, as well as how some nationalist racial uplift
platforms ultimately fell short of providing safety, and refuge alongside opportunities for
African-American girls. When considering the fates of some girls within the structure of
the Moorish Science Temple, we find that the Temple was a source of great power and
energy for girls, as well as abuse and exploitation. In the end, we see the complications
in assessing whether or not a particular institution worked on behalf of girls when we
must consider more than the individual actions of people. We can, however, examine the
overarching ideologies and frames of an organization. When we do this in the case of the
Moorish Science Temple, we see how the bombastic rhetoric of African-American
girlhood and purity amounted to no more than just talk in the minds of some of its
greatest proponents. The nationalist turn to the exaltation of African-American
womanhood did not always translate into procedures, behaviors or support structures that
protected vulnerable female youth from the sexual purview of older men.
Chicago’s African-American women’s club members may have hoped that the
Temple’s scandals would lead to the end of the nationalist group. At the very least, they
had one less force to contend with in their work to help migrants and uplift girls.
Scandals aside, the work for girls continued. Although the industrial school presented
serious challenges and competition for African-American constituents grew, women’s
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groups inside and outside of Christian churches were still committed to helping girls
through Sunday schools, special girls’ clubs, and organized leisure activities. For
Southern girls who had little contact with African-American professional women or
exposure to urban, African-American culture, women’s groups provided vital contact
with people of ‘better classes,’ which racial uplifters considered valuable and necessary
for their poor brothers and sisters. In the next chapter, we again examine the limits of
proximity and racial uplift in another program geared toward girls.
CHAPTER THREE: THE ALPHA KAPPA ALPHA SORORITY, INC.
Chicago’s ‘respectable’ African-American women may have felt a bit vindicated
as the Moorish Science Temple community was fighting its own internal demons and
trying to redeem itself with the African-American public. Time and again, AfricanAmerican women had ‘proved’ that they were the most capable in reaching out and
serving the members of their communities, especially girls. In the conventional wisdom
of racial uplift thinking, success in community work and activism correlated with
refinement, education, and social status; therefore, the most elite African-American
women could meet the challenge of inspiring and guiding girls. So, as more AfricanAmerican women earned college degrees and attended graduate and professional schools,
formally educated women became leading figures in the Migration era efforts to provide
greater educational and career opportunities for girls.
In this chapter, I examine the Chicago branches of a powerful African-American
women’s organization during the Migration era—the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority
(A.K.A). A.K.A. was the first of the four African-American national sororities founded
between 1908 and 1922.300 Black sororities provided critical support to the handfuls of
African-American college women during the time by providing housing, educational
support, leadership opportunities and sisterhood to its members. Previous scholarship on
African-American sororities has focused on those aforementioned aspects, and scholars
often critique the ways in which Black sororities promoted elitism and class divisions
300
The national African-American fraternities and sororities represented by the National Pan-Hellenic
Conference (including the founding date and location) are: Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, 1906, Cornell
University; Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, 1908, Howard University; Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, 1911,
Howard University; Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, 1913, Howard University; Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity,
1914, Howard University; Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, 1920, Howard University; and Sigma Gamma Rho
Sorority, 1922, Butler University. The last national organization, Iota Phi Theta Fraternity was founded in
1963 at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
145
146
among African-Americans.301 Although these insights are helpful in understanding Black
sororities, I turn attention toward a sorority’s specific work on behalf of girls through an
analysis of its first national project—the vocational guidance movement—and the ways
in which Chicago’s sorority chapters and leaders implemented it locally. The A.K.A.
national office formally established vocational guidance as its sorority initiative in 1927.
A.K.A. defined vocational guidance to include programs, which provided educational and
career counseling to female students, raised monies to offer scholarship assistance for
high school girls to attend college, and educated students on professions, especially those
with few African-American women in it. The sorority believed that its members could
assist African-American high school girls in identifying the right educational pathways to
secure career success by using their collective educational experiences and various social
connections.
After providing a brief history of A.K.A.’s founding in 1908 at Howard
University, I provide a brief sketch of Chicago’s Beta chapter, founded at the University
of Chicago. The Beta chapter also worked with Chicago’s Theta Omega alumnae chapter
and the Gamma chapter at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. The Beta and
Gamma chapters were the second and third A.K.A. chapters established after Howard’s
Alpha chapter, respectively. I discuss how the local chapter worked with the national
301
For an analysis of African-American fraternities and sororities, see Tamara L. Brown, Gregory S. Parks,
and Clarenda M. Phillips, eds., African-American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and Vision
(Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 2005), Lawrence Cross, The Divine Nine: The History of
African-American Fraternities and Sororities (New York: Kensington, 2001) and Paula Giddings, In
Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement (New York:
William Morrow Company, 1988). Susan L. Smith does provide an analysis of a specific sorority project
in her monograph on African-American women’s activism for better health programs. She provides a
thoughtful chapter on the A.K.A. Mississippi Health Project, see Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being
Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890-1950 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 149-167.
147
body to create vocational guidance programs in the late 1920s and its development into
the 1930s. I analyze the program in light of Chicago’s educational and career
opportunities for African-American girls and teenage women. I also consider how
vocational guidance spoke to the sorority’s hopefulness about the role young women
could play in the future of African-American people within the context of the group’s
investments in their own brand of racial uplift strategies, the educational influences of the
movement’s leadership, and the harsh socioeconomic realities of the post-Great
Depression period.
The Birth of a Sisterhood
The sorority movement in the United States, for college women of all colors,
played an integral role in aiding the small numbers of female college students on coed
campuses create residential, social and service communities. The first national sorority
for White women, Kappa Alpha Theta, was established at DePauw University in 1870; it
was known as a women’s fraternity at the time. By 1902, seven national sororities met to
form the National Panhellenic Council (NPC) to standardize sorority procedures and
represent national sorority members’ interests. The NPC eventually grew to comprise 26
national sororities. As educational barriers for White women gradually lessened, the
desire for more sororities increased and the movement grew through the creation of local
and international chapters. 302 By the time Kappa Alpha Theta celebrated its fiftieth
anniversary, “nearly 77,800 other women had joined them in the collegiate Greek
system,” and the number of national, multi-branched women’s fraternities increased to
302
For more on White women’s organizing of sororities see Diana B. Turk, Bound by a Mighty Vow:
Sisterhood and Women’s Fraternities, 1870-1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
148
more than twenty.303 From their inception, White women’s sororities excluded AfricanAmerican college women.
Although separated by the color line, African-American and White sorority
founders shared similar experiences and motivations for seeking sisterhood. Alpha
Kappa Alpha’s foremothers founded the sorority at Howard University in 1908 as a
response to the sometimes stifling conditions placed on women students. Howard’s
women students, usually concentrated in the Teacher’s College, were held to a high
standard of conduct, and Howard appointed matrons and senior students to supervise
them constantly. One scholar of the Black sorority movement describes Howard in its
early years as “tolerant of ideas when it came to race,” but “behind” when dealing with
women students, faculty and staff.304 Another scholar has noted that African-American
colleges often deemed women students as deeply flawed and school policies “were
infringements upon their independence and freedom and prevented them from maturing
and taking advantage of all that college life had to offer.”305 Many Howard women were
frustrated with these conditions and believed that they needed a women’s organization to
represent their interests.
After the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity appeared on the Howard campus in 1908,
curious students of both sexes started to explore their options for establishing similar
303
Turk, 6.
304
The women’s dormitory was heavily monitored by a matron, who screened the incoming mail, enforced
rules against male visitors and ensured that ‘ladylike’ behavior remain the standard at all at times.
Giddings, 43.
305
Linda M. Perkins, “Lucy Diggs Slowe: Champion of the Self-Determination of African-American
Women in Higher Education,” Journal of Negro History 81:1-4 (Winter/Autumn, 1996), 95.
149
groups on campus.306 St. Louis native Ethel Hedgeman took the lead, and she
investigated starting a fraternal organization for women. Hedgeman found inspiration to
create the sorority from her high school sweetheart and college boyfriend, George Lyle,
who helped create the Alpha Phi Alpha’s Beta chapter at Howard.307 As the winter
months of 1908 progressed, Hedgeman and the eight other women enrolled at the
University’s School of Liberal Arts, gathered to create the blueprint of a new sorority.
The women chose a name, secret motto, colors, and, finally, sought university
recognition for the blossoming organization. After a year of framing the group, the first
sorors (sisters) of Alpha Kappa Alpha were initiated in the attic of Miner Hall, the
women’s dormitory, on February 11, 1909.308 A.K.A. women flourished in the sorority’s
first four years. Sorority members became leaders in athletics, leadership and dramatics
at Howard. The newly formed organization was also successful in helping the members
combat feelings of isolation, and they used their growing power and clout to effect
change at Howard and the surrounding Washington, D.C. area.309
The enthusiasm that fueled the founding of A.K.A. and the sisterly goodwill that
helped the membership expand slowly dissipated as the sorority’s new members began to
ask questions about the direction of the only sorority on Howard’s campus. In the fall of
1913, divisions began to grow between younger and older members. Age was not the
306
Howard was an important site for Alpha Phi Alpha, as they created their ritual and elected their first
national president on the Washington, D.C. campus.
307
For more on the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, see Darrius Jerome Gourdine, Jewels: The Story of the
Founding of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity (New York: Artisan House Publishing, 2006).
308
309
Andre McKenzie, “In the Beginning: The Early History of the Divine Nine,” in Brown, et al., 184.
For more on Howard University’s history and notable A.K.A. women, see the personal memoir of a
distinguished professor of history, Rayford W. Logan, Howard University: The First Hundred Years, 18671967 (New York: New York University Press, 1968).
150
only dividing line. In the years following the founders’ initiation, the sorority began to
include Teachers College enrollees, who often disagreed with their School of Liberal Arts
sorors on policy issues. The teachers-in-training created a voting bloc on sorority issues
and often voted against the other members. Growing resentments, tensions and disputes
among the young women threatened to unravel the entire group. The dissenting women
also feared that the sorority lacked “no legal entity, was unincorporated, and had neither a
charter nor the power to form other chapters,” according to sorority historian Edna
Morris. 310 The dissatisfaction with the direction of A.K.A. prompted a resolution to
disband and reorganize. The entire group could not agree whether to abandon their
sorority and create a new one, or to simply try to repair the rifts among them. Eventually,
the women disagreed so much that they split into two camps. This ideological schism led
to the creation of the second African-American women’s sorority in the United States,
Delta Sigma Theta.311 Naomi Richardson, one of the twenty-two founders of Delta
Sigma Theta, reflected that the Delta founders, “had broader views” and a desire to
“reach out to the community.” She added that the Deltas “were more oriented to serve
than to socialize.”312 Morris, who joined the Delta defectors, described this change as
being inspired by “the nation-wide feminist movement of 1912.”313 The creation of a
new sorority did not heal all the ill will among the women and the move sparked an
310
Giddings, 48.
311
Twenty-two A.K.A. members became Deltas on January 13, 1913. Exactly two months from its birth
date, the new sorority participated in its first public act. While carrying a banner proudly displaying their
Greek letters, the Deltas marched along Pennsylvania Avenue in the historic 1913 march for women’s
suffrage, the day before President Woodrow Wilson would be sworn into office.
312
Giddings, 49.
313
Ibid, 49.
151
intense rivalry between the two groups. Yet, the break was an important legal and
organizational moment for A.K.A. The splintering of the sorority prompted a group of
A.K.A. loyalists to file incorporation papers on behalf of the sorority in 1913, allowing it
to “organize, institute and charter subordinate chapters.” 314
Chicago’s A.K.A.s: A “High Standard of Membership”
Incorporation ensured the growth of the previously embattled sorority, and it
opened the door for women at the University of Chicago to create the Beta chapter that
same year. In the fall of 1913, six of the University’s brightest African-American women
students elected to establish an A.K.A. chapter. They were probably motivated by the
lack of housing options for African-American women students and the dearth of social
options for the small minority.315 In May of 1914, a sorority founder and national A.K.A.
officer Beulah Burke supervised the founding members’ initiation.316 The circle of six
expanded each year after the founding, and the sorority grew to 39 members by 1920.317
On June 3, 1914, Burke returned to the Midwest to help initiate eight women at the
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign into the Gamma chapter. Burke oversaw the
314
McKenzie, 186.
315
Prominent A.K.A. alumna Georgiana Simpson battled the University for the right to live in campus
housing in 1907. Sociologist Sophonisba Breckinridge was the University’s assistant dean of women at the
time and she allowed Simpson to move into a women’s residence hall. When the University President Pratt
Judson demanded Breckinridge remove Simpson from the hall, she reflected that, “I pointed out that the
announcements distributed by the University with reference to the Houses said nothing of this, but he was
immovable and Miss Simpson moved out.” See Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social
Scientists and Progressive Reform (Oxford: Oxford University, 1994), 182.
316
Chicago Defender, “University of Chicago,” March 13, 1915.
317
“Beta Chapter Wins Scholastic Honors,” The Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf (1920): 16.
152
ceremony and hosted a “dainty five course luncheon” afterwards to celebrate.318 In 1922,
Beta chapter alumnae members formed the Theta Omega alumnae chapter for women in
Chicago. The Theta Omega chapter, the eighth A.K.A. graduate chapter, celebrated its
founding with a reception for approximately 200 people at Chicago’s famed Black social
club, the Appomattox Club. The Defender, which was often enamored with the A.K.A.
women, reported “Chicago is duly proud of the accomplishments of these young ladies
and welcomes the advent of the new chapter with its high standard of membership.”319
Theta Omega incorporated older, more established women within the organization and
provided professional role models for younger sorority members. Graduate sorority
chapters played key roles for African-American sororities, and helped to organize
disparate alumnae in major cities for social and service activities.
The early members of Chicago’s A.K.A. chapters were listed among the most
notable African-American women in the annals of University of Chicago and city history.
The first African-American woman to earn a master’s degree in Sociology, the only
African-American woman lab technician in the U.S. in 1920, the first African-American
woman to earn a Ph.D. in a ‘university of first rank’ and to be appointed as a teacher by
the Chicago Public Schools all wore their salmon pink and apple green A.K.A badges
with pride.320 In order to appreciate A.K.A.’s successes, it is important to note how few
professional African-American women existed in the U.S. One study of Chicago’s
Migration found that in 1930, the number of Chicago’s African-American women in
318
Chicago Defender, “Champaign-Urbana,” June 13, 1914.
319
Chicago Defender, “Chapter Receives,” November 11, 1922.
320
“Beta Chapter Wins Scholastic Honors,” Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf, (1920): 16.
153
“clean occupations” amounted to less than one thousand women out of a population of
more than 100,000. Clean occupations included a wide array of non-domestic labor,
creative and professional fields such as social work, acting, restaurant ownership,
medicine and decorative arts.321
African-American sorority members balanced their careers and sorority
responsibilities—chapter meetings, volunteer projects and conferences, called boulés—
with membership in other African-American organizations. This allowed the women to
broaden their sphere of influence and networks. The national sorority applauded
Chicago’s A.K.A.s for their additional community activity. In the 1921 Alpha Kappa
Alpha Ivy Leaf, the sorority’s official publication, an article on the Beta chapter noted that
Beta “girls have been very successful as Y.W.C.A. [Young Women’s Christian
Association] group leaders, as volunteers for the United Charities, and as solicitors in the
financial drives of the Urban League and the NAACP.”322 Although A.K.A. members
expressed interests in a wide array of community issues and organizations, as a collegiate
women’s organization, they committed themselves to the plight of girls and teenage
women first. The vocational guidance program and scholarship competitions were a
means of reaching out to girls to inspire them to reach the levels achieved by A.K.A.
women.
The sorority served as a training ground for girls and women’s advocacy, and
many Beta members continued to do this work outside the confines of the sorority and in
their careers. Adelaide Turner, a University of Chicago alumna, worked for the Phyllis
321
Horace W. Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis: A Study in the Negro Life in the Northern City
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co: 1945), 220.
322
“Beta Chapter,” Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf, (1921): 18.
154
Wheatley Homes in Muncie, Indiana, and she later established the first African-American
girls’ camp in the area. She also helped establish similar Y.W.C.A. affiliated camps in
Athens, Georgia and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1929, she became the camp
director of the Wheatley Y.W.C.A. Camp in Asheville, North Carolina.323 Annabel
Prescott, another fellow University of Chicago alumna, earned the highest score on the
Chicago Board of Education’s special exam for the position of dean of girls. Prescott
was the “youngest dean of girls in the Chicago high schools and perhaps the youngest in
the country,” in 1927. She worked at the predominately African-American Wendell
Phillips High School, where she taught French before her promotion. The Defender
praised her work with Phillips’ girls, noting that “those who know her best declare that
she puts most of herself into her school work, as she enjoys the big and varied
opportunities it gives for work with young girls, influencing them, encouraging them,
shaping their lives a bit, sometimes lending a vision where there is none.”324
The Roots of the Vocational Guidance Movement
A.K.A. on the whole wanted to provide girls with grand visions for their future on
a national scale, and as the sorority grew on campuses. A.K.A.’s local chapters and
leadership looked to its informal brother fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, for ideas on
determining crafting sorority projects. In the early 1920s, the Alphas established the ‘Go
to High School, Go to College’ Program to “encourage Negro youths to continue their
323
324
Chicago Defender, “Mrs. E. Frank Turner Jr. to Direct Girls’ Y Camp,” August 10, 1929.
Chicago Defender, “A Scrap Book for Women in Public Life, Mrs. Prescott is Most Youthful of Deans”
August 24, 1929.
155
education.”325 The program was wildly successful, and in 1923, President Warren G.
Harding lauded the Alphas efforts in addressing “the need for effective work to reduce
illiteracy among the Colored people…through the equipment of members of the Colored
Race to do educational work.”326 Chicago’s Alpha Phi Alpha Theta chapter hosted many
‘Go to High School and College’ meetings, which were organized “for the purpose of
stimulating the interest of the young people in going to school and college” and Beta
chapter women often served as ushers at the events.327 As the Alphas gained more
visibility for their program, the national A.K.A. officers began to seek ways to
institutionalize a similar program. At the 1924 sorority boulé in New York City, A.K.A.
formally adopted the “observances of a vocational guidance week as a part of its national
program.” The sorority decided, “The week of May 23-30 would be devoted to this
purpose.”328 Three years later, after several chapters initiated their own informal
programs, the national body officially decided to devote itself to vocational guidance as
an official program of all A.K.A. chapters329
Prior to Black Greek interventions in vocational guidance, the field was already
well established among Northern schools serving White students. The first school-based
vocational guidance program began at Central High School in Detroit. Jesse B. Davis,
recognized as the founder of school guidance, provided career counseling to 11th graders
from 1898 until 1907, when he became a school principal. While serving as a school
325
Chicago Defender, “2500 Alphas Launch 3rd Annual Education Drive,” April 7, 1923.
326
Ibid and Chicago Defender, “Go to High School and College Meeting,” May 29, 1920.
327
Chicago Defender, “Go to School and College Meeting,” June 5, 1920.
328
Chicago Defender, “Sorority to Have Vocational Week,” May 24, 1924.
329
Ibid.
156
principal in nearby Grand Rapids, he required the school’s seventh graders to write an
essay on a career interest each week. Other teachers and schools adopted this model. In,
1913, Davis helped establish the National Vocational Guidance Association (NVGA),
and served as its first president. The organization’s major goal was in “assisting the
individual to choose an occupation, prepare for it, enter upon and progress in it.”330
Public schools across the country began to institute vocational counseling programs at
various levels of schooling to ensure that young people could make thoughtful decisions
about their life’s work. Vocational guidance activists conducted a plethora of surveys,
research studies, conferences and special meetings across the country on the subject.
A.K.A. leadership also believed in the vocational guidance movement’s
commitment to using research methods in counseling students. One sorority proponent
declared “the problems peculiar to girls are no longer those of right or wrong, but they
are such problems as call for scientific solution.”331 Instead of relying solely on
traditional racial uplift rhetoric about the relationship between work and moral elevation,
the first ‘scientists’ of the early program hoped that by providing uniform standards on
advising girls and teenage women on careers they could develop women’s leadership for
the future. The sorority asked chapters to work on two levels in order to promote their
version of a comprehensive vocational guidance for African-American girls. First,
chapters had to connect to local resources and build relationships with schools, churches
and community organizations to identify girls in primary and secondary grades to work
with on choosing a vocation. Second, after making contact with local girls, the chapters
330
Richard W. Stephens, “Birth of the National Vocational Guidance Association,” Career Development
Quarterly 36, no. 4 (June 1988): 293-306.
331
Harriet Brooks Allen, “Soror to Arms,” Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf (1927): 35-36.
157
looked to the national office to provide them with procedures and oversight to ensure the
quality of the program. The Delta Omega chapter helped to create guidelines for the
vocational program that further reflected scientific sensibilities and encouraged the use of
measuring tools, emphasized procedural uniformity and required data collection. The
national office advised: 1) chapters to study the “nature, needs, and possibilities of
Vocational Guidance,” 2) appoint standing committees on the topic and plan a local
Vocation week, 3) offer guidance to nearby secondary schools and colleges, 4) entrust
specially selected girls’ counselors for guidance, 5) keep records of such activity, and 6)
present ideas for a National Vocational Guidance Week at the sorority’s next
conference.”332 The sorority also enlisted other bodies to help them assess the
effectiveness of the effort. The A.K.A.s commissioned a “detailed study of Vocational
Guidance” and committed to giving their reports to the United Negro Youth of America
organization, where files were “made for follow-up work so as to tabulate and ascertain
results.”333
Although the A.K.A. program highlighted the development of objective standards
for implementing and evaluating the program, the leadership intimated that there was a
moral force underpinning the vocational guidance movement. The sorority insisted that
choosing one’s profession had implications for the betterment social order, and that girls
could play a crucial role in this process. Supreme Basileus (President) Pauline SimsPuryear prefaced the national office’s instructions on vocational guidance with a warning
about the importance of making career choices. She asserted that working at the wrong
332
“Our National Program,” Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf (1927): 26.
333
Ibid, 26.
158
vocation resulted in a “failure of adjustment, failure to realize that the environment can
be modified to meet one’s needs and capacities, in short, failure to recognize…
possibilities.”334 In another address to the membership about the importance of guidance,
she again framed the issue in terms of the greater good, and she reiterated how careers
could serve as a vehicle for ensuring African-American girls developed into ‘normal’ and
productive members of society. “It has been repeatedly stated that the tragedy of our
present-day life is the misfit. Some Scullery Maid may have become a Madame
Curie…had they had scientific advice on the matter of choosing a vocation.335 SimsPuryear concluded that vocational guidance would “make a unique contribution to
hundreds of young girls facing the necessity of making decisions regarding their life’s
work.” 336
Chicago’s A.K.A. members, as a result of their ties to the University of Chicago’s
sociology and education departments were at an advantage in implementing the guidance
project because many of the members were trained in the methodologies the sorority’s
program required. Lorraine Richardson Green, a Beta member who served as A.K.A.
Supreme Basileus from 1919-1923, earned a master’s degree in sociology. Her 1919
thesis, entitled “The Rise of Race Consciousness in the Negro,” utilized the emerging
techniques of the Chicago School of Sociology and Urban Ecology, which emphasized
how social and physical environment informed how people perceived their own selves,
communities and social structures. The University also trained students in data
334
Ibid, 26.
335
Pauline Sims-Puryear, “Address Delivered in University Hall, Ohio State University: On Occasion of
Public Meeting Boulé, Alpha Kappa Alpha Society, December 28, 1926,” Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf
(1927): 7.
336
“Our National Program,” 26.
159
collection, compiling oral histories and creating ethnographies of urban life. The
program brought Green, and other students, close to the problems in Chicago’s Black
Belt. Green’s colleague Maudelle Bousfield, a Beta chapter founder who also became
Supreme Basileus a decade after Green, studied education and advocated for reform in
Chicago Public Schools. Her training prepared her to serve as the first Black school
principal in Chicago; she led Phillips High in the 1940s.337
A number of women in the Theta Omega chapter were also ready for this mission.
Theta Omega women often worked as teachers or education researchers, helping inform
their work with vocational guidance. One of the most valuable assets of having so many
teachers in the organization was the sorority’s close connection to Phillips High, which
allowed for considerable access to African-American youth. Theta Omega’s Jackson
women helped build a bridge between the sorority and Phillips High girls. Mother Ruth
Jackson served as the principal of the school. Jackson’s two daughters graduated with
master’s degrees from the University of Chicago, and a third daughter studied Spanish at
the University of New Mexico. Other Theta Omega members worked at the school also.
In 1935, four out of five of the new African-American teachers at Phillips were members
of the sorority—the librarian, the botany teacher, the English teacher and the Spanish
teacher.338
Armed with extensive experience with the city’s Black institutions and a great
deal of knowledge in the field of education, Chicago’s A.K.A.s looked forward to
337
See Adele Hast and Rima Lunin Schultz, “Maudelle Bousfield,” Women Building Chicago 1790-1990:
A Biographical Dictionary, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) and Dionne Danns, Something
Better for Our Children: Black Organizing in Chicago Public Schools, 1963-1971 (New York: Taylor and
Francis, 2002).
338
“Our School Teachers,” Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf, (April 1935): 14.
160
developing larger vocational guidance events. Prior to the national call, Beta and Theta
Omega chapter members conducted their own guidance events. They often tied
vocational guidance activities to social events to fundraise for the chapter’s scholarship.
A.K.A. dances, plays and recitals were annual events on the social calendars of Chicago’s
Black elite. The A.K.A. 1925 dance at the Renaissance Casino was expected to “open
the season with a bang,” and the proceeds of the dance would help “the worthy young
women of our Race who are clamoring for an education and deserving of the help.”339 At
the conclusion of the 1926 Vocational Guidance Week, the Chicago chapters produced a
play to raise funds and celebrate the event. The annual week was described in the press
as working to “assist the coming generation of college youth to even greater
achievement,” and “eliminating the wasted energy that goes with blundering into wrong
careers and into occupations where the girl finds herself a misfit.”340 The newspaper was
using the language of Sims-Puryear about the potential problems of poorly guided girls.
The newspaper report praised the sorority for “employing the very same methods that are
being used by the largest universities,” by “bringing ambitious school girls into contact
with these older girls and young women who can best advise them and encourage them.”
The article also applauded Beta for “endeavoring to iron out the financial problems of the
girls it meets by making possible liberal scholarship awards” and declared “since the
founding of the chapter in 1913 it has been able to bring several girls from high school
into college.”341
339
Chicago Defender, “Sorority Plans to Give Big Scholarship Dance,” October 31, 1925.
340
Chicago Defender, “Sorority Helps Girls Pick Work, A.K.A. Observes National Vocational Guidance
Celebration,” May 15, 1926.
341
Ibid.
161
The chapter’s scholarship played an integral role in fulfilling one part of the
vocational guidance mission, as college attendance for African-Americans was often cost
prohibitive. The Beta chapter’s scholarship supported some of Chicago’s most promising
young women. In 1923, the sorority awarded Dorothy Clark Jackson a scholarship to the
University of Chicago. She was one of the youngest recipients of the award at fifteen
years old, yet “she maintained the highest average of the girls graduates of the various
Chicago high schools.”342 In June 1929, the Gamma chapter announced that Emma
Henrine Herndon won the chapter’s annual essay contest with a paper entitled, “My Plans
for the Future.” She was a graduate of Champaign High School and served as an
occasional contributor to the Defender.343 The next year, the Beta chapter’s scholarship
recipient was involved in a number of extracurricular activities. Ruth Marian Jackson
was a member of the Women’s Athletic Association, the senior basketball team and a
Y.W.C.A. Girl Reserves honor member. She also used the scholarship to attend the
University of Chicago, where she developed an interest in “social service work,
especially the medical feature of it.”344
In addition to heeding the suggestions of the national office, the Chicago sorors
incorporated two powerful segments of Chicago’s African-American community in their
vocational guidance projects: Black businesses and the Black press. One of the sorority’s
goals in creating vocational guidance was to expose girls to the possibilities of working in
fields where African-American women were underrepresented. A.K.A. wanted to make
342
Chicago Defender, “Wins Scholarship,” October 6, 1923.
343
Chicago Defender, “Prize Winner,” June 15, 1929.
344
Chicago Defender, “A Scrap Book for Women in Public Life, Girl Receives Degree from Chicago U.,”
April 5, 1930.
162
explicit the connections between higher education and financial gain. Sims-Puryear
claimed that she was drawn to vocational guidance because it demonstrated “that
education increases the cultural content of life” and “dollars and cents.”345 In May of
1928, the Beta chapter began to take their message out of their guidance meetings and
into the larger city to raise awareness about how the movement can work for the business
community. They ended the year’s Vocational Guidance Week with tours of various
Chicago businesses, including the Defender’s main printing plant, where editor Robert
Abbott personally greeted the women.346 A few years later, Chicago’s beauty college
empire Poro College, helped support the aims of the vocational guidance project. After a
six-week vocational guidance series, the A.K.A.s hosted a conference and ‘getacquainted’ tea party at Poro.347
The trips to the local businesses, as well as the many A.K.A. social events, were
covered in the society or women’s pages of the Defender. The Defender didn’t merely
report on events, the newspaper served as a sounding board to promote the vocational
guidance program and to educate African-Americans on the aims and goals. In addition
to their national magazine, A.K.A.s could rely on African-American editors and
newspaper writers to champion their involvement with guidance. In the spring of 1926,
the Defender announced that “young girls of high school and college age in every large
population center in the country during the week…will be brought under the influence of
one of the most interesting movements for Race advance that has ever been inaugurated
345
Lorraine Richardson Green, “To the Sisters of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Greeting,” Alpha Kappa
Alpha Ivy Leaf (1922): 13.
346
347
Chicago Defender, stand-alone photograph, May 26, 1928.
“Vocational Guidance Programs,” Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf (1935): 4. Also see Chicago Defender,
“Alpha Kappa Alphas Sponsoring Youth Week,’ May 4, 1935.
163
by the youth of our group—the vocational guidance movement.”348 The newspaper
asserted that the program was a result of the sorority, “realizing that the large proportion
of our youth power is going to waste for lack of proper guidance in picking a life’s
work,” so “the A.K.A. girls have united in a helping hand program.” The program
promised “free advice as to vocation,” and the “granting of scholarship awards.” The
Beta chapter was also credited for providing “substantial financial aid” to deserving
girls.349 Sorority leadership also used Chicago’s Black media to publish their own
editorials about guidance in order to ensure that African-Americans would receive their
distinct perspective on the issue. The sorority’s occasional papers and essays appealed to
the Black press’ desire to celebrate African-American achievement and the more
‘modern’ lives of African-Americans in northern cities. Baltimore-based sorority
member, Vivian J. Cooke, made this connection between guidance and African-American
progress in a position paper in the Defender. Cooke argued that vocational guidance
emerged as a result of the changes in African-American life due to the Migration.
African-Americans children were no longer “rural and both boys and girls had the
opportunity to see the fundamental work of the world in progress.” 350 Cooke
emphasized that vocational guidance was about “specialization,” not just skill
acquisition.351 Cooke wrote, “Along with other fundamental changes came a new day for
women imposing upon them a double duty that of home life and the likelihood of
employment before and after marriage. She must meet both situations in her choice of
348
Chicago Defender, “Sorority Helps Girls Pick Work,” May 15, 1926.
349
Ibid.
350
Chicago Defender, “Alpha Kappa Alpha in Vocational Guidance,” May 5, 1928.
351
Ibid.
164
occupation.”352 Cooke’s discussion of the urbanization of African-American women
indicated that the modern woman could enter the working world without compromising
gendered expectations of marriage and family life. This assurance probably made
women’s advocacy of careers for girls more palpable to male leadership, including
Abbott and the editorial board of the Defender. Cooke also lessened any perceived threat
of African-American women gaining too much power by pointing to women’s growth in
feminine professional fields. “Statistics of vocational life show that women are engaged
in practically all of the nine divisions of gainful occupations,” and the “ever growing
callings” specifically “library work, social service and various phases of the teaching
profession.”353
Chicago and the Challenges to the Guidance Movement
The A.K.A. Beta chapter enjoyed the advantages of the national office’s direction,
educational training and community support, but there were many challenges to
implementing a successful guidance program in the Migration era. The A.K.A. women’s
enthusiasm for guidance was tested by two key issues that complicated spreading the
gospel of higher education and career building. The sorors had to confront the
educational difficulties faced by Chicago’s African-American children, especially girls,
and the strong support for industrial education for girls instead of a formal college
curriculum in the city.
Migrant parents were often motivated to move to Chicago and other urban areas
because of reports of greater educational opportunities for African-American children.
352
353
Ibid.
Ibid.
165
More schools open to African-American children also helped working parents adapt to
Northern jobs. Parents in the South often brought children to work alongside them or
keep them company in Southern workplaces, particularly in fields and on farms.
Children in the cities could be cared for by schools while parents worked in private
homes or in factories that only employed adults.354 All children were also required to
attend school in Chicago until age sixteen under the state of Illinois’ mandatory school
attendance policy. African-American clubwomen, social workers and truancy officers
helped to ensure children attended school regularly.355
Despite the support for regular African-American school attendance, migrant
children still encountered challenges to actually receiving an education because of the
poor quality of schools in the Black Belt and their general lack of preparation for
Northern schools. One Migration scholar discovered that, “it was unlikely…any migrant
would attend Chicago’s best schools. Relative to schools in other parts of the city,
schools in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods tended to be old, poorly equipped, and by
1918, overcrowded.”356 The Chicago Public Schools did not feel compelled to renovate
or upgrade Black elementary schools, and they fell into deeper disrepair as the Migration
progressed. All of the predominately Black grade schools in 1920 were constructed
354
Valerie Grim, “From the Yazoo Mississippi Delta to the Urban Communities of the Midwest:
Conversations with Rural African-American Women,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22, no. 1
(2001): 133.
355
For more on African-American women’s work with issues of truancy and juvenile justice see Ann Meis
Knumpfer, Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African-American Women’s Clubs in
Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New York: The New York University Press, 1996) and Sandra M.
O’Donnell, “The Right to Work is the Right to Live:” The Social Work and Political and Civic Activism of
Irene McCoy Gaines,” Social Science Review, vol. 75 (2001): 456-478.
356
James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 246.
166
before 1900; some were even built before 1890.357 The majority of White schools were
newer and adapted to modern standards of school building and construction. Many
migrants still took advantage of Chicago’s schools no matter how dilapidated they were,
because they were usually much better than the dusty, one-room schoolhouses of their
Southern homes. In 1912, Chicago’s predominately Black Third and Fourteenth Wards
had more than a thousand students in Chicago schools, and the Second Ward had nearly
3,000 African-American pupils.358 By 1920, more than 90% of African-American
children between the ages of 7 and 13 attended school regularly. For the majority of
Southern students who enrolled in school, progressing through the grades presented a
challenge because they often found themselves unprepared to attend Northern primary
schools. Schoolteachers often placed them in remedial courses or required them to repeat
grades. Admission to Chicago’s secondary schools was also difficult for Southern
children. According to one study, “few had children with sufficient education to attend a
Chicago high school immediately upon arrival.”359 Some students and parents may have
become discouraged by the obstacles to entering school and elected to bypass the system.
Southern children were also isolated from both White and Northern-born Black children.
Sociologist Allan Spear reported that, “their inferior educational and cultural background
retarded their scholastic achievement and frequently created disciplinary problems.”360361
357
Ibid, 246-247.
358
Note on Chicago School Census, dated May 2, 1912, Illinois Children’s Home Aid Society Papers
(ICHASP), Box 30, Folder 6 (30/6), Richard J. Daley Library (RDL) at University of Illinois-Chicago
(UIC). For more on African-American education during the Migration era, see Michael W. Homel, “The
Politics of Public Education in Black Chicago, 1910-1941,” The Journal of Negro Education 45:2 (Spring
1976): 179-191.
359
Grossman, 246.
167
Girls presented a specific set of problems in gaining an education. Even if parents
wanted their children to attend school, economic hardship often led girls to miss school to
help their parents with childcare. Chicago’s day nurseries and public schools were
legally opened to all people yet, in practice, few African-American children were
admitted to kindergartens or schools because of their race. In a report from the Hull
House-based Juvenile Protective Association, researchers noted that “race prejudice
found even in day nurseries” and “school irregularity common among colored children.”
The report also cited a case in which a woman did not send her children to school
because they often cared for younger siblings, who were refused entry to a day nursery.362
The lack of available childcare affected girls disproportionately, as sisters were more
likely to take care of siblings and help mothers with household chores. As girls matured,
they could be counted on to undertake more responsibilities at home, secure employment
to help with family expenses, so education became less and less accessible. In 1930,
more than 90% of African-American girls between 14 and 15 years old were enrolled in
high school. The numbers were also high for 16 and 17 year olds, who had an attendance
rate higher than 70%. Yet, the number of girls who remained in high school for their
senior year, at age nineteen, only represented 30%, indicating that with each year of
education completed a girl was less likely to make it to the next grade. Even if a girl
360
Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1967), 203-204. Often, adults unexpectedly benefited from Chicago’s educational system
more so than their children. For instance, the Phillips High School established night schools, which
allowed adults to enroll in remedial courses for elementary grades for one dollar and attend high school for
two dollars. By 1921, four thousand African-Americans enrolled in these courses. See Grossman, 246.
362
Sophia Boza, A.P. Drucker, A.L. Harris, Miriam Schaffner, ed. and text by Louise DeKoven Bowen,
“The Colored People of Chicago: An Investigation Made for the Juvenile Protective Association,” Juvenile
Protective Association: 1913.
168
made it through high school, she was not likely to attend college, even if there were
options open to her in Chicago. In 1930, less than 10% of all African-American women
between the ages of 20 and 24 years old were enrolled in college.363
For African-American girls and teenage women, the issue of dreaming of a career
was doubly poignant because of the educational barriers coupled with the paucity of
occupational choices. Considering the race and gender barriers to the cleaner fields of
work, the majority of African-American girls rarely had avenues to pursuing work
outside of the realm of domestic service when they were ready to enter the work force.
Therefore, many African-American activists and organizations promoted programs,
which attempted to dignify domestic work by professionalizing its practice and
redefining the terms of the work. Chicago activist Fannie Barrier Williams implored
African-Americans to change their perceptions of domestic work in order to encourage
young women to capitalize on the market for household help during the Migration period.
Williams believed that if domestic workers were good at their jobs, than they could give
Whites a favorable impression of Black women. She wrote in The Voice of the Negro,
“When intelligence takes the place of ignorance, and good manners, efficiency, and selfrespect take the place of shiftlessness and irresponsibility in American homes, one of the
chief causes of race prejudice will be removed.”364 Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman,
another frequent contributor to Voice of the Negro reflected similar sentiments. In an
essay entitled “Paying Professions for Colored Girls,” Tillman advised, “it is wise for
them to consider what work is open to them and what their chances of success are in their
363
364
Cayton and Drake, 257.
Fannie Barrier Williams,” The Problem of Employment for Negro Women,” in Mary Jo Deegan, ed. The
New Woman of Color: The Collected Writings of Fannie Barrier Williams (DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2005), 56.
169
chosen field.”365 Tillman supported nursing as a means of providing not only
opportunities for individual young women, but also for creating ways for the entire race
to demonstrate the intelligence and skill level of African-Americans when working with
Whites as they helped to ‘save’ members of the race when working in Black hospitals.366
The A.K.A. message was markedly different. The sorority did not want girls to be
discouraged by the color ceiling in professions.
Some influential Chicago organizations concurred with Williams and Tillman,
and they invested considerable time and money into promoting domestic training. The
Chicago Urban League helped register girls at their offices for the Chicago School of
Domestic Science and Arts. The League also offered scholarships for the Domestic
Science courses. In order to promote a more positive outlook on domestic labor, the
School promised to help girls “command better pay and more agreeable conditions as
domestic assistants.” 367 Domestic assistant sounded far more appealing than laundress,
cook or maid. The courses included information on the “chemistry” and cooking of
foods, nutrition, and modern ways of doing household work. The school described
domestic work as a “vocation” and focused on efficiency as the key to better wages in the
field.368 The program was so successful in its early years that a White benefactor donated
money for more scholarships for “colored girls who expected to engage in domestic
365
Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman, “Paying Professions for Colored Girls,” Voice of the Negro (JanFeb. 1907): 54-56.
366
Ibid.
367
“Attention Girls,” Chicago Whip, October 4, 1919.
368
Ibid.
170
service.” 369 The League also helped secure jobs for teenage girls through their
employment services, although they acknowledged the challenges in finding work for
them. An institutional history of the Chicago League reveals that, “in some jobs, like
washing and polishing taxicabs, they were used to replace men,” and that “even
employers who had trouble finding workers were reluctant to hire Negro women.”370 No
matter how much emphasis was placed on dignifying domestic work, it was still difficult.
Domestic workers in Chicago knew the strains of the work on their own physical and
emotional lives, and they hoped that their daughters would have better chances for other
types of employment. Unfortunately, the web of poverty made it difficult for the
daughters of domestics to achieve any better. One survey found that “domestic workers
often expressed the hope that their children would be able to find other types of work.”371
One domestic worker described her oldest daughter as “quite bitter against what she calls
the American social system and our financial insecurity,” and she hoped that her
daughter, who held a job, could “escape a life as domestic worker, for I know too well the
things that make a girl desperate on these jobs.”372
For women who set their sights on white-collar work that didn’t require four years
of college or an advanced degree, the ‘colored’ Wabash Avenue YWCA offered a
training course to prepare teenage women to become secretaries. The YWCA’s Colored
Secretaries training program was not free, and positions as secretaries were contingent
369
“Domestic Science and Art,” Chicago Whip, September 20, 1919.
370
Christopher Robert and Arvarh E. Strickland, History of the Chicago Urban League (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press), 49.
371
Cayton and Drake, 246.
372
Ibid, 246.
171
upon the establishment and financial solvency of Black professional offices, which were
few and far between in Chicago’s Black Belt.373 The League was also able to lobby the
retailer Sears, Roebuck and Company for some pink-collar jobs; the retailer hired 600
African-Americans as temporary shop girls during the Christmas season of 1918. Later,
Sears employed an additional 1,400 African-Americans in a “special division suitable for
females.”374
Researchers of African-American employment issues discovered that one of the
tragic ironies of the Northern color line was that educated girls were also represented
among the toiling masses of domestic workers. Their study concluded, “colored girls are
often bitter in their comments about a society which condemns them to “the white folks
kitchen.” They also discovered that “girls who have had high school training, especially,
look upon domestic service as the most undesirable form of employment.”375
Although a number of other vocational guidance programs did not necessarily
favor college over domestic training, the A.K.A. agenda ultimately preferred to focus on
how girls could complete high school and college. Some members recognized the
highest forms of domestic training. For instance, in her essay on guidance, Cooke did
include “tea room managers, scientific housekeepers, institutional dietitian…management
of art shops and interior decoration,” among the list of “attractive” fields for AfricanAmerican girls.376 One of the reasons why the A.K.A. leadership was drawn to the ‘Go
373
Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) pamphlet, “Extension Training Course for Colored
Secretaries,” 1920. Irene McCoy-Gaines Papers (IMGP), Chicago History Museum (CHM), Chicago.
374
Robert and Strickland, 50.
375
Cayton and Drake, 246.
376
Chicago Defender, “Alpha Kappa Alpha in Vocational Guidance.”
172
to High School’ program initially was because it countered claims that a college or
university education for African-Americans was frivolous and unproductive, as asserted
by some industrial training advocates such as Booker T. Washington. ‘Go to High
School’ also linked educational attainment to improving the economic conditions of
African-Americans on a whole and encouraged girls and young women to think in terms
of careers, not simply jobs.
A.K.A.’s message on the importance of a girl choosing her vocation also
represented a departure from earlier notions of girls and work encouraged by leaders like
Amanda Smith. Smith believed that work was a means of making oneself financially
independent, morally upright and immune from vice. Smith’s concern for her orphans
grew out of a Biblical sensibility that tied laboriousness to virtue. In addition to her
religious motives for encouraging industrial labor, Smith believed that Whites needed to
see African-Americans as productive and counter stereotypes about African-Americans
as lazy and unreliable. African-American workers could establish their economic
viability while simultaneously elevating the race’s image. Stephanie Shaw’s historical
analysis on African-American workingwomen of the Jim Crow era highlights the use of
work as a tool of racial elevation and gaining respect in all communities. Shaw studied
the strategies parents employed with their daughters to train them on how to behave
outside and inside the home. Parents took as much care in instilling the value of
education and hard work in their daughters, as they did in reminding them of the
importance of their public image in the eyes of both White and Black people. Shaw
argues, “Public expectations were…very important. Parents understood that if their
173
daughters were to receive the best and the most opportunities…they would have to be
extremely circumspect and never give even the slightest hint of impropriety…”377
Although A.K.A.’s message included rhetoric of the moral obligations of race
women and dignified behavior, their vision for girls and teenage women was constructed
out of the hope that women could redefine their roles in society. In a radical departure
from the tradition of trying to imbue domestic work with various levels of spiritual or
social meaning, A.K.A. women encouraged girls and teenagers to see themselves as
pioneers in the fight to establish new spaces for Black women’s work—work that rested
in the mind and not in the hand. As A.K.A. women broke ground in their respective
fields and developed their own feminist identities, they began to promote work as a
means of asserting independence and women’s value in sophisticated fields, beyond
domestic labor and other working-class areas of employment. One A.K.A. Supreme
Basileus advocated entry into such unusual fields as “bacteriology, creative writing and
forestry.”378 A.K.A. women knew what it was up against when it adopted vocational
guidance as its national program. The organization comprised mostly educators and
social workers, so they were aware of the problems and pitfalls of African-American
girls’ education and career counseling.
The Great Depression and New Directions
A.K.A. women were intellectually gifted and politically savvy, but nothing could
have prepared them for the crushing economic downturn of the Great Depression in the
377
Stephanie Shaw, Doing What a Woman Ought to Be and Do: Professional Women Workers During the
Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
378
Chicago Defender, “AKA’s National Basileus Talks Guidance in Drive,” May 15, 1937.
174
fall of 1929. A couple of years after the formal launch of the vocational guidance
initiative, A.K.A. had to divide its energies between their beloved program and the
devastating course of events. The nation’s economic crisis displaced workers and
professionals of all social classes. The Depression also served to dismantle some
African-American women’s organizations, namely the NACW, and their fundraising and
expansion efforts. Historian Deborah Gray White has noted that when the Depression
began, “creeping through black neighborhoods…local clubs would struggle to meet local
and national financial commitments.”379 The Great Depression fundamentally changed
the nature of African-American women’s activism across the board because of the new
responsibilities to communities, and the national crisis served to reconfigure, and in some
ways enhance the A.K.A.’s national initiative.380
The A.K.A.s organized to meet the challenge of the Great Depression. The
sorority devised strategies to increase African-American employment, continued some of
their guidance programs, and partnered with New Deal-era programs designed to promote
vocational guidance and opportunities for African-American youth. The Depression
undoubtedly compromised some of the sorority’s vision for vocational guidance
programming, but the economic tragedy helped reify their message that AfricanAmerican girls would play an integral part in the future of African-American people if
only given the right amounts of support and guidance.
379
Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1896-2000 (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 113.
380
For more on African-Americans and the Great Depression, see Cheryl Greenberg, Or Does it Explode?:
Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Joe W. Trotter,
From a Raw Deal to a New Deal: African-Americans 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996).
175
The A.K.A. national body addressed the Great Depression by adding job services
for African-Americans to its annual boulé. A.K.A. Supreme Basileus Maude E. Brown
announced that at the 1932 boulé in Cincinnati, the sorority “established a clearinghouse
for the unemployed.”381 Brown acknowledged the leveling effect of the Depression and
noted that “no country, no people, no race, no class is safe from the great crisis.”382
Chicago, like Cincinnati, was a hub of African-American job opportunities starting
around World War I, and the Depression single-handedly obliterated many of the
positions that attracted migrants to the area. By 1932, 50% of African-American
Chicagoans were unemployed, with 130,000 of the city’s Black residents on relief, or
governmental financial assistance. Chicago’s major industries, once famous for offering
an array of jobs in manufacturing and commerce, cut 700,000 jobs by 1932.383 AfricanAmerican men, women and youth were often the first to lose jobs or were removed from
positions to accommodate White jobseekers. The Depression also compromised the
lowest rung of African-American jobs, domestic work. African-American female
workers became the greatest casualty in the reshaping of household budgets and the
cutting back on family expenditures such as laundry service and baby-sitting.
Job-seeking African-Americans could no longer rely on Whites for a steady
supply of employment. A.K.A.s responded to Chicago’s employment predicament by
adopting more activist strategies to help employ people as soon as possible, yet they
maintained their advocacy for lighter collar jobs. The sorority partnered with other Black
381
Maude E. Brown, “A Message From Our Basileus,” The Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf, (March 1932): 2.
382
Ibid, 2.
383
Christopher Robert Reed, The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of the Black Professional Leadership,
1910-1966 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 74.
176
organizations to boycott White-owned businesses in African-American neighborhoods
unless they started to hire African-Americans. The Alpha fraternity, with support from
other sororities, joined in the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns in Harlem,
and this model influenced organizing in Chicago. Chicago A.K.A.s joined in the fight
that called on Black Belt residents to: “Spend your money where you can work.”384 The
campaign targeted South Side stores almost exclusively. This measure proved helpful if
not entirely redemptive for African-American girls, as stores were more apt to hire
attractive older teens and young women to work in retail shops as store clerks. The
radical Chicago Whip newspaper whole-heartedly championed the cause, which directly
lead to the hiring of three African-American girls at a grocery store. Major retailer
Woolworth’s and Company also gave in to the campaign’s pressure and hired 21
“colored girls” to work at their shops.385 Although the organizers of these campaigns
rejoiced at their victories, the reality of the Depression’s scourge could not be sated by
the 2,000 jobs the campaign yielded; of those, only a few hundred were well-paying,
white-collar jobs. African-American salesgirls or clerical workers in the Black Belt after
the Depression accounted for only 1500 workers.386 Outside of the Black Belt, nativeborn White women dominated in these positions. Although social scientists Cayton and
Drake reported an optimistic figure: “Negro girls, however, in increasing numbers during
384
For more on the politics of these types of initiatives see Greenberg, “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t
Work,” in Or Does it Explode?: Black Harlem in the Great Depression. Prior to the Great Depression,
access to simply buying at Chicago stores was a hot-button issue among African-American activists. In an
article in the Chicago Whip, the newspaper reported that a Miss Viola Penn was refused service at the
famed Marshall Field and Company department store. The newspaper took “the matter up with the
management of the stores, to find out why our people cannot spend the coin of the realm in their
establishment.” Penn planned on bringing suit against the retailer. “Marshall Field & Co. Again Refuses
to Sell to Colored Girl,” Chicago Whip, 1919.
385
Cayton and Drake, 84.
386
Ibid, 84.
177
the last twenty years [between 1920 and 1940], have been attending high school and
college,” these same girls did not experience gains in accessing white-collar jobs.387
Some women were able to survive the Depression by registering with work bureaus,
which provided day assignments and temporary work. Other girls who were more
desperate for work put themselves up in the ‘slave markets,’ as they were called on the
city’s West Side. The area between 12th and Halsted Streets was described as where, “a
large number of girls [who] go there daily and hire themselves by the day to the highest
bidder. The more enterprising would solicit—others would wait to be approached.”388
One domestic who visited the ‘market’ during the Depression was forced to work for low
wages. She testified that, “Many days I worked for 50 cents a day and no carfare—one
meal was given. I then applied for relief.” The woman was not eligible for relief because
the bureau determined that she could always find employment at the market.389 The
Chicago Citizens Committee (CCC) tried to intervene in the markets and start a training
school for domestic workers. The movement failed to gain momentum among domestics,
because, as one organizer expressed, they “didn’t take up the problems of the girls. We
took up the problem of inefficiency and would criticize the girls for untidy appearance,
dirty nails, and such things.”390 The organizer concluded that, “I think girls should be
taught that domestic work is an occupation and not a profession,” revealing that earlier
387
Ibid, 258-259.
388
Ibid, 246.
389
Ibid, 246.
390
Ibid, 247.
178
strategies of trying to dignify domestic labor and criticize workers on their respectability
could not inspire young women; the Depression climate was just too brutal.391
The desperation to find work and the scarcity of jobs, although devastating, did
not deter A.K.A. from continuing vocational guidance programs; the Depression
appeared to only strengthen the call for vocational guidance. Beta chapter foremother
Bousfield inherited the presidency of the group during the Depression. In 1929, A.K.A.’s
seventy-one chapters unanimously elected her to the post of Supreme Basileus.392 She
was familiar with the challenges facing African-American students after spending years
studying children for her master’s thesis entitled “A Study of the Intelligence and School
Achievement of Negro Children.”393 Bousfield later became “Chicago’s only Race
school principal.”394 Under Bousfield’s leadership, the national office tried to maintain
interest in guidance by initiating a national youth essay contest to “stimulate clear and
intellectual understanding of problems of labor, and particularly of those labor problems
which affect Negroes as such.” The $100 Nellie M. Quander prize was one step in
raising awareness of the devastating effects of the Depression. The essay’s subject was
“Negro Labor-Present Day Problems.”395 The vocational guidance essay contests were
also popular programs for the local sorority chapters.
391
Ibid, 247.
392
Chicago Defender, “A.K.A. Select Chicago as Sorority Head,” January 11, 1930.
393
See Maudelle B. Bousfield, “The Intelligence and School Achievement of Negro Children,” Journal of
Negro Education Vol. 1, no.3/4 (Oct. 1932): 388-395.
394
Chicago Defender, “A.K.A. Sorors on Founder’s Day Program, Maudelle B. Bousfield Principal
Speaker,” February 8, 1930.
395
Chicago Defender, “A.K.A. Sorors to Award and Annual Prize, Best Essay on Labor Contest Factor,”
September 27, 1930.
179
Despite the financial hardships felt by other women’s organizations, Chicago
A.K.A. chapters were still able to support its scholarship program. In the winter of 1931,
the Theta Omega chapter won a “beautiful silver loving cup” for their philanthropy. 396
The scholarship supported Chicagoan Geneva Howard, who had graduated from Phillips
High. Howard decided to spend the first two years of college at Howard University, and
then decide to complete her studies in sociology at the University of Chicago. In their
characteristic editorializing tone, the Defender lauded the sorority for using “this means
to aid girls of promise and ability who are unable to further their education without
outside assistance.” 397 The Depression could not kill the spirit of refinement or the
sorority’s motto, which mandated that sorors lead “by culture, by merit.” The sorority
continued its society fundraisers, and in 1932, the Chicago A.K.A.s presented a concert
featuring opera signer Marian Anderson to fund the scholarship.398 The Beta chapter also
proudly reported that they were able to host senior high school girls at Chicago’s Ida
Noyes Hall for a day of musical numbers performed by the members that year.399
The Depression stifled some parts of A.K.A.’s mission, but the upheaval also
helped the sorority leverage their message on vocational guidance. The Depression
helped initiate a discussion on the role of African-American women could play in
addressing the new economic order through the careful attention to vocational guidance
and business leadership. Bousfield’s processor, educator Maude B. Porter, reaffirmed the
sorority’s concern with serving girls and young women first and foremost, and declared
396
Chicago Defender, “Theta Omega Chapter of A.K.A. Sorority Wins Cup,” January 24, 1931.
397
Chicago Defender, “Theta Omega Chapter of A.K.A. Sorority Wins Cup,” January 24, 1931.
398
“Beta Chapter,” The Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf (March 1932): 4.
399
Ibid, 4.
180
that women and girls would lead the recovery effort. In a 1932 radio address in
Hollywood, Porter declared “the growth of sororities today as a potential factor in the
development of girls and young women was inconceivable at the time of their
organization.” 400 She added that sororities served to “encourage girls and the teen age to
remain in high school by fostering vocational guidance or some similar program.” They
did this through discussing, “stages and disadvantages of various vocations. They also
urge them to prepare themselves for the one toward which they are most inclined and in
which they may render the most efficient service.”401 Porter highlighted the sorority’s
work with “local scholarships amounting to thousands of dollars” and encouraging
“intensive study in specific fields of education.” Porter also intimated that the sorority
had to play a role in helping girls gain meaningful employment by creating more AfricanAmerican businesses: “Sororities must also aid in establishing sound business institutions
where girls and young women may be gainfully employed.” Porter believed that
businesses could remedy the distrust felt by African-American who lost work and help
“in re-establishing confidence in their fellow beings.” Porter remained true to the racial
uplift roots of the organization by reminding the audience “the sororities must aid them
[the masses] in living simple and wholesome lives and in building character out of the
mass of wreckages in which they find themselves.”402
Chicago’s A.K.A. chapter members may have listened closely to Porter’s message
as they prepared to host the next year’s boulé and twenty-fifth anniversary celebration.
400
Maude Porter, “Four Minute Speech of Supreme Basileus Over Station KNX from Hollywood:
Sororities,” Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf (September 1932): 16.
401
Ibid, 16.
402
Ibid, 16
181
Four years into the Depression, the Chicago chapters tried to maintain their focus on
guidance for girls and the advancement of women. At the boulé, the sorority gathered at
the University of Chicago’s International House and the House’s first lady “spoke high in
praise of the part college women [were] playing in solving, not only Race problems, but
other problems peculiar to women.”403 One ‘peculiar’ problem for the sorority was how
to assess the vocational guidance programs’ aims. Although the chapters kept careful
records of their activities, the sorority began to reveal the limitations of the program,
while still promoting it. In 1934, The Ivy Leaf, declared that vocational guidance was
“one of the greatest projects supervised by the national body of A.K.A. sorority and
carried out by the various chapters individually is that of helping the high school girl to
find herself her proper field of endeavor.”404 Although Supreme Basileus Ida L. Jackson
dedicated 1934 to the “growing need for guidance,” her message on vocational guidance
may have inadvertently revealed some skepticism about the effectiveness of the program
itself. 405 Jackson declared that “never before has there been so great a need for
encouraging the youth to prepare in spite of obstacles and current appearances of
instability.”406 Jackson pointed to “the changes in social and industrial life have long
been in process, yet the suddenness and shock of the interruption of normal conditions
have so upset the world that a review and revamping of all our past concepts of
403
Chicago Defender, “Chicago is Host to Alpha Kappa Alpha,” August 12, 1933. The sorority celebrated
its annual meeting in Chicago that year in order to coincide with the Century of Progress fair that was also
occurring in the city. This was a celebration of the one hundred years since the Columbia Exposition or
World’s Fair of 1893.
404
The Ivy Leaf, “Vocational Guidance,”10.
405
Ida L. Jackson, “Supreme Basileus: Growing Need for Guidance,” Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf 3:34,
(1934).
406
Ibid.
182
education, government, morals, business and personal relations have been necessary.
“For the first time, a national A.K.A. leader discussed the related barriers to educational
advancement and choice in vocation on the part of African-American youth. Jackson
chastised segregation and “the separate schools in a restricted environment.”407 Although
she discouraged the “tendency to discourage a child who wants to pursue a course
because, ‘there are no openings for Negroes,’” Jackson acknowledged that vocational
guidance was only as sound as political transformations. “These guidance problems that
have resulted from political and economic changes are merely an indication of conditions
in many of the occupations of today.” The more realistic message did not shake the level
of commitment; sorors may have felt relieved that their work was evaluated with
consideration to contemporary social problems. With the enthusiasm for vocational
guidance reignited, the Chicago chapters expanded their vocational guidance offerings.
In the spring of 1934, junior and senior high school women were invited to submit
posters reflecting “the occupation they expect to make their life’s career after necessary
preparation” as part of a full six-week course on the topic.408
While A.K.A. was recommitting itself to vocational guidance, the guidance
community was raising questions about the efficacy of such a program. Despite the
enthusiasm over the vocational guidance, especially during the post-Depression recovery,
the ideals of the program were not infallible and uncontroversial. At the 1934 meeting of
the NVGA in Cleveland, Columbia Teachers College researcher Irving Lorge declared
that, “Vocational guidance today is no better than guessing and considerably less
407
Ibid.
408
“Vocational Guidance,” Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf (June 1934): 10.
183
honest.”409 Three years later, researcher Ambrose Caliver authored a study entitled The
Vocational Education and Guidance of Negroes, sponsored by the U.S. Office of
Education. The study examined the career goals and outcomes of African-American
youth in 33 states and the District of Columbia. Researchers interviewed approximately
22,000 African-American high school students, and the statistics for young women reveal
the deficiency of opportunities for girls. Nearly half of the girls in the study dropped out
of high school by the 10th grade. Thirty percent of the girls said that they could no longer
afford to stay in school. The survey included 1,932 high school students; nearly half of
the women went straight to work after the courses ended, unable to pursue further
education. Chicago’s migrant girls reflected the trends observed in the guidance study, in
which girls were able to gain an education for a short period of time, but then they had to
cut schooling short and enter the job force.
The study also assessed the number of institutions providing vocational guidance
to African-American youth. The research surveyed 2,578 institutions, and found that less
than a fourth of them had guidance services. Of that remaining group, the study was only
certain that 159 high schools and 44 colleges had fully functioning guidance programs.
The study criticized African-American organizations for not fully understanding the aims
or the procedures of vocational guidance and merely glossing over its importance. In an
article about the research, one writer commented, “what is most disturbing about the
409
As quoted in Time Magazine, “Vocational Guidance”, May 5, 1934 Vocational guidance research
attempted to link guidance with positive career outcomes. Lorge, and his co-researcher psychologist
Edward Lee Thorndike, conducted a survey of 2,500 fourteen-year-old students and tested them on
“intelligence, clerical ability and mechanical adroitness.” The students in the sample were then followed
for several years afterward, and the research team assessed their careers when the students reached
adulthood. Lorge concluded that vocational guidance tests were essentially worthless. “Using the big tests
and skills the counselor now have, his predications at best will have 95% as much error as guess.” NVGA
members tried to defend themselves, including the director of Columbia’s vocational guidance program.
He responded: “Vocational guidance is not fortune telling.”
184
guidance objectives reported is their platitudinous disregard for some of the most basic
considerations which affect the vocational adjustment of Negro youth.”410 Wilkerson
argued that although African-American organizations often tried to develop morals, race
pride and character-building, they lacked the basic knowledge about “the implications of
class structure for vocational adjustment, …labor legislation, …principle of collective
bargaining and the labor movement, to basic economic trends as they affect vocations.”411
Wilkerson believed that union organizing, not career counseling, was where the future
leaders of African-Americans rested. He predicted that, “increasing numbers of Negro
workers are emerging from the traditional occupational caste.” In short, he determined
that “these programs of guidance do not reflect any fundamental and progressive social
philanthropic philosophy of education.”412
A.K.A. leaders may have been aware of the criticisms of guidance, but it did not
change the sorority’s position on the topic. Yet, in order for A.K.A. to address the many
problems faced by African-American girls during the Great Depression, they soon
learned that they needed to pool their resources with other African-American
organizations and capitalize on the new government initiatives to respond to the
Depression.
As President Franklin Roosevelt and the federal government began to draft the
New Deal to revitalize American industries and infrastructures, African-American
organizations appealed to Washington to be included in these innovative programs. With
410
Doxey A. Wilkerson, “The Vocational Education, Guidance and Placement of Negroes in the United
States,” The Journal of Negro Education 8, no. 3 (July 1939): 462-488.
411
Ibid.
412
Ibid.
185
the decline of the NACW, African-American women needed another broad-based
organization to represent their needs. The sororities could not speak for all women, and
some women leaders did not want to have to compete with African-American men for
resources. Fortunately, in 1935, Florida-based education Mary McLeod Bethune
organized the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) as an umbrella organization
of representative women’s organizations. The Council “aimed to increase black female
employment and economic opportunity,” and all of the major African-American
sororities and professional organization joined the Council to strengthen its own position
on their respective platforms.413 Bethune was a key figure in representing AfricanAmerican interest in the New Deal, as she was a member of the Roosevelt’s Federal
Council of Negro Affairs, nicknamed the ‘Black cabinet.’ Bethune was one of forty-five
African-Americans appointed to the New Deal programs administration.414
The most noted program for youth among New Deal programs open to AfricanAmericans was the National Youth Administration (NYA). The NYA was established in
1935 under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The NYA
employed high school and college students in various work study programs, and provided
part time jobs for children whose parents were ‘on relief.”415 In 1936, President
Roosevelt appointed Bethune as the Director of the Division of Negro Affairs for the
NYA.
In appreciation for her commitment to civil rights, the A.K.A.s made former first
lady Eleanor Roosevelt an honorary member of A.K.A. in 1949.
413
White, 150.
414
See Audrey McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World, Essays
and Selected Documents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
415
For more on the NYA, see Betty Grimes Lindley and Ernest K. Lindley, A New Deal for Youth: The
Story of the National Youth Administration (New York: The Viking Press, 1938).
186
All of the national sororities benefited from NYA resources, and the NYA relied
on the sororities to bring them in contact with African-American youth. A.K.A.s were
represented at major meetings of the NYA, both in Chicago and at the center of New
Deal decision-making, Washington D.C. The flailing NACW hosted Bethune in 1936 at
their D.C. office, so she could inform members of the sorority, among others, on the work
of the NYA. Bethune proudly declared, “$56,000 already had been spent among Race
youth, and more than 20,000 of them had been given aid.”416 A.K.A.’s Chicago chapter
worked closely with the NYA in the city, which maintained a strong presence there
during its seven-year history.
The greatest collaboration between Chicago’s A.K.A.s and the NYA yielded an
innovative experiment in vocational guidance for girls. In January of 1936, “twenty race
girls,” were selected from across the state to attend the NYA School for Girls, located
few blocks east of the University of Chicago campus.417 The girls, all hailing from relief
or WPA families, were mostly high school graduates, and the program may have
substituted for a costly college education. The Chicago NYA School also accepted
African-American students from outside of the state; girls from cities as far South as St.
Louis and an East Coaster from Pittsburgh joined the school’s inaugural class.418 The
school operated out of a converted orphanage and it provided a board for 102 girls. The
school was one of the few of its kind, “where girls of both races live and work together
416
Chicago Defender, “News of the Heart of the Nation: Washington, D.C.,” October 24, 1936.
417
Chicago Defender, “20 Race Girls are Studying at NYA School,” January 25, 1936. The NYA created
a similar program focusing on training boys in trades in Chicago. See Chicago Defender, “ChampaignUrbana,” February 18, 1939.
418
Ibid.
187
with no distinction as to color or creed.”419 The interracial boarding school set a goal of
better understanding between Black and White students among its educational aims. The
school provided three-month training programs to become “a community leader.”420
Although the school used some of the similar strategies as domestic training institute, the
course offerings were geared toward leadership roles. The school’s courses included
training to become a health educator, and courses in “music, folklore, physical education,
art, handicraft [and] dancing.”421 The School also wanted to train a corps of young
women who were able to manage and direct “recreational work,” and other programs that
could save girls from “the insidious deterioration of idleness.”422 Some NYA graduates
went on to fulfill the group’s mission immediately after leaving the School. By the
summer of 1936, two NYA School alumna were “conducting special programs in
recreation,” for African-American children in the southern Illinois towns of Cairo and
Harrisburg.423 Similar to the vocational guidance program, the NYA provided
opportunities for African-American women educators, as the faculty was also mixed and
the school hired “a good representation of Race teachers.”424 The A.K.A.’s support of the
NYA School project signaled the sorority’s growing reliance on collaborative efforts with
governmental agencies, particularly New Deal ones. The work of vocational guidance
was financially costly for individual chapters to manage and expand while also helping to
419
Chicago Defender, “NYA School Here Offers Fine Opportunity for Girls,” February 1, 1936.
420
Ibid.
421
Ibid
.
422
Ibid.
423
Chicago Defender, “Asst. NYA Agent Makes State Tour,” May 30, 1936.
424
Chicago Defender, “20 Race Girls.”
188
address Depression derived issues and explore other issues important to ‘the race.’ After
growing criticism of the program, the NYA ceased its activities in 1943.425
Gradually, as the nation slowly recovered under the New Deal and the nation
prepared for its involvement with Word War II efforts, A.K.A. spent less time on
vocational guidance. Starting in 1934, the A.K.A.s began to turn their attention to public
health initiatives in the South. During the summertime, groups of sorority members
organized mobile clinics and education programs as part of the A.K.A. Mississippi
Health Project.426 Although as late as 1939, the Defender’s society page noted that the
launch of the annual vocational guidance program was “stronger this year than ever,” and
named more than a dozen women who served on the program’s committee, the program
began to fade in the annals of the national publication.427 By 1939, when the Health
Project’s director Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee was elected the Supreme Basileus,
A.K.A. changed its primary focus to health activism.428 The sorority remained
committed to girls and women’s education, but the Health Project, eclipsed vocational
guidance as the sorority’s main focus and no one lamented the end of the era. Vocational
guidance became a tertiary agenda item for the membership, and its gradual fading away
from the national sorority platform may have been an acknowledgement of the limits of
the message and the time period.
425
See Lindley, et. al. and Richard A. Reiman, The New Deal and American Youth: Ideas and Ideals in a
Depression Decade (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).
426
See Smith, Sick and Tired, 153-167.
427
Chicago Defender, “Preface by Consuelo Young-Megahy,” May 28, 1938.
428
Susan Ware, ed. “Dorothy Boulding Ferebee,” Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary
Completing the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2004), 203-205.
189
Although the sorority garnered some success and continued to guide girls and
provide scholarships, the programs could only do so much. By 1940, fifty percent of
White girls in Chicago attended high school; this rate was the same for African-American
girls. Yet, 60% of White girls could expect to gain a white-collar position, and only 10%
of African-American girls would have that same chance. One African-American high
school student reflected on this problem: “Teacher said not to take a commercial course
because there were no jobs opening up for a colored. So there’s nothing but housework
and cleaning left for you to do.429
Conclusion
The Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority began as the vision of nine Howard
undergraduates and, long after the end of the vocational guidance program, the sisterhood
continued to flourish. As more African-Americans gained access to higher education, the
sorority could draw more members into it and establish more chapters. The sorority has
grown to an international membership organization comprising nearly 1,000 chapters and
49,000 members, with its national headquarters on Chicago’s South Side.430 Unlike
African-American orphanages, industrial schools, local women’s clubs or nationalist
religious movements, Black fraternities and sororities adapted and adjusted their
programs to contemporary social and political issues in order to remain relevant to their
members and constituencies.
429
Cayton and Drake, 258.
430
“Membership,” Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, www.aka1908.com, accessed April 5, 2008.
190
The majority of the scholarship on sororities tends to focus on how sorors used
their educational and class positions to buttress racial uplift agendas. Sororities were one
of the few ways African-American women were explicitly identified by the completion of
a formal education in relationship to other race women who did not have the same levels
of education. Women graduates of training schools or continuing education courses,
programs that were far more accessible to African-American women at the time, were not
eligible for membership. This distinction helped to differentiate the critical mass of
African-American women leaders. In an analysis of Black Greeks, scholars claim that
fraternities and sororities used “the yardstick of White values” to guide their interactions
with the African-American underclass and create more distance between them and the
masses.431 The scholars continue, “Despite the special angle of vision that allowed elite
Black women reformers to see the crucial nexus of race and gender, they shared with
their White counterparts a tendency toward class myopia. They couched their charity in
paternalistic language that reflected their elitist identity and reinforced both patriarchal
norms and prevailing assumptions of Black inferiority.”432 Sweeping indictments of
African-American women’s sorority leadership fails to recognize that sorority women’s
outreach to girls served, in part, as a means of challenging sexism and their advocacy of
educational opportunities mediated some of the classist elements of their ideologies.
A.K.A.s were not gender or class radicals, but to read all of their work in terms of simply
‘class myopia’ is to obscure the depth and sophistication of their outreach attempts.
431
Cherryl L. Nuñez and Michael H. Washington, “Education, Racial Uplift, and the Rise of the GreekLetter Traditions: The African-American Quest for Status in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Brown, et.al.,
139.
432
Ibid, 167.
191
The early histories of African-American sororities and their national programs
provide a glimpse into how privileged women worked on behalf of girls. A.K.A.s
advocacy for African-American girls and young women was distinct from previous uplift
movements in their characterization of African-American girls. A.K.A.s vocational
guidance program girls and teenage scholarship recipients were not merely burdens to be
disciplined in industrial schools, future mothers of the race’s men or cheap sources of
labor for nationalist movements; girls were capable, important and worth the deepest
investments. In an article for the Ivy Leaf entitled, “Possibilities of the Negro Girl,” soror
Millie E. Hale advised, “Girls have faith in your own ability to win…a diamond encased
in a brown velvet box has the same brilliancy as one encased in a white velvet box.” 433
The A.K.A.s rise in power placed them in front of White and Black power brokers, and
the choice to bring girls with them on the national stage was no small feat. The sorority
challenged the membership to “fight to the finish in defense of the soul of our girls” and
the fight required women to take seriously how they could shape girls’ futures.434
Beyond the effusive language surrounding girls, the activism in the case of the vocational
guidance movement demonstrated the sorority’s commitment to eradicating sexism
through the leadership of future generations of women. Despite the limits imposed on
African-American women in the present, A.K.A.s projected that by developing girls as
leaders could secure the success of future generations. While some industrial schools
focused on developing girls into trained domestics because that was the most realistic
option for African-American girls at the time, the boldness of A.K.A.’s desires for girls is
433
Millie E. Hale, “Possibilities of the Colored Girl,” Alpha Kappa Alpha Ivy Leaf (1927): 43.
434
Allen, 35-36.
192
notable. In the face of the moral and social attacks on African-American female youth,
A.K.A. suggested that girls could one day become “a Madame Curie.”435 A.K.A.s
guidance focused on imparting information on the conventions of professions and
cultivating girls to think and prepare strategically about their futures. A.K.A.s did use the
language of racial uplift, but it was not limited by it. To take on the professional world
went beyond the typical mandates of racial uplift asking girls to have good manners and
train to become good mothers.
Sorority women may have occupied the highest rung of Black society, yet they
desired to bridge some educational disparities and gaps among African-Americans by
supporting girls through scholarship and loan programs. Money often barred talented
African-American girls from attending college. In W.E.B. Du Bois’ landmark study, The
College Bred Negro, women college graduates from the turn-of-the-century discussed the
challenges to financing their educations. One woman recounted, “At a very early age I
assumed the responsibility of housekeeper, as my mother died and I was the oldest of a
family of five; hence I laboured under many disadvantages in attending school.”436
Another woman worked as a servant to pay for school: “My mother and I ‘took in’
washing for our support and to enable me to get an education.” Scholarships were a key
part of helping the less affluent to attend school. As one of the few educated members of
their communities, some schoolgirls were afforded status in their communities and taught
African-Americans who could not attend school. One woman reported, “While a school
girl, I taught persons living out in service, going into the premises of some of the most
435
436
Sims-Puryear, 6.
W.E.B. DuBois, The College Bred Negro: Report of a Social Study (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press),
1900, 53.
193
prominent white people in New Orleans…I paid my tuition out of these earnings.”437
DuBois anticipated a trend of more women gaining an education in African-American
communities because of “economic stress,” which often forced young men to leave
school in search of work. Conditions for girls did not change much from when DuBois
conducted his work to the time vocational guidance programs were implemented. From
the available records of scholarship winners, it is unclear if the students were of workingclass families; most likely they came from middle-class homes that did not have the
means to pay for school entirely. Also, in order for African-American girls to quality for
schools like the University of Chicago or the University of Illinois, they had to have
access to the better schools in the area. Yet, as the Cayton and Drake research revealed
access to education did not guarantee an opportunity to attend school. Even though
scholarships did not benefit the most destitute, the assistance widened the population of
African-American women college students and added more future women leaders for the
race.
A.K.A. women’s work in vocational guidance did not challenge all aspects of
racial uplift ideologies. Vocational guidance, although a ‘modern’ educational concept,
was tethered to old notions of racial uplift. A.K.A.s understood their mission as
important because as a means of not only developing African-American girls’ talents, but
also putting disadvantaged girls under the ‘right’ influences. Racial uplifters, both Black
and White, often believed that contact with the right people could change the course of
girls’ lives. Elite African-American women’s organization often used this rhetoric to
affirm the importance of their intervention in the lives of members of the African-
437
Ibid, 54.
194
American poor and working class. This call required leaders to constantly assert their
right to intercede on the grounds of moral, educational and social superiority. For
example, in the national address about the sorority’s adoption of vocational guidance,
Supreme Basileus Sims-Puryear urged the membership to support “programs which seek
to encourage the individual to its fullest possibilities and perchance to discover even from
the submerged Tenth, a Prometheus, and Atlas, or what not.”438 The diamond-in-the
rough analogies revealed optimism about the potential that existed among the lower
classes of African-Americans, yet emphasized the belief in the benefits of proximity to
the sorority members. The A.K.A. women’s advocacy for guidance and scholarships
relied partially on reifying their status as ‘representative women.’
The A.K.A.’s ties to racial uplift ideologies did not limit their vision or prevent
them from adapting with the times in order to overcome the Great Depressions hurdles.
Within a few years of the vocational guidance movement’s introduction as A.K.A.’s
national program, the leadership had to reconstruct the meaning and significance of the
program. In the period before the Great Depression, vocational guidance was a means of
evaluating and later ‘tracking’ students into appropriate coursework, where they could lay
the foundation for future employment. After the Depression, vocational guidance was a
means of reorienting young people, especially girls, toward their role in Depression
recovery efforts.
Vocational guidance programs were mutually beneficial to the girls and the
A.K.A. members, because A.K.A. activities provided both parties with experience with
career training. Girls were exposed to greater opportunities and members were able to
438
Sims-Puryear, 7.
195
apply their training to a worthy endeavor. The sorority’s requirement that chapters take
note of the development and process of vocational guidance gave the sorority a voice in
one of the major educational debates of the pre-WWII era—how does one prepare youth
to become contributing career men and women? Even University of Chicago-trained
sorors encountered difficulties in pursuing their academic and career interests, and the
sorority’s project allowed them to develop professional skills in community work,
research and program management. For African-American women, who could easily be
shut out of professions due to their skin color, the emerging field of the vocational
guidance movement was one opportunity to find promising work and some levels of
advancement. An A.K.A. historian described this use of the sorority for career
development in this way: “Though similar to their fraternal predecessors in its Greek
trappings, the founders of Alpha Kappa Alpha would, from the start, place a great
emphasis on community service as preparation for their lives as professional women.”439
A.K.A.’s connections to other African-American leadership organizations, like
the NCNW, and with influential White leaders, like First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt,
guaranteed their survival as other peer groups lost their power. A.K.A.s were able to
secure New Deal-era grants to help fill jobs, preserve their own community projects, and,
for some, remain employed. A.K.A. was willing to relinquish some of their control on
the issue of vocational guidance for girls and young women to support the NYA’s efforts
and to shift their focus to other projects. The sorority understood that flexibility was
important to its survival. Often historians of women’s organizations locate the demise of
women’s clubs and demise during the Great Depression because of financial problems
439
Nuñez and Washington, 169.
196
and the focus on male employment. Although the Depression hurt some Black women’s
clubs, like the NACW, this period also marked a shift away from clubs to sororities as the
seats of power among Black women’s activism. Sorority membership was smaller, more
exclusive and highly selective, and these organizations concentrated significant amounts
of power in urban centers, like Chicago where African-Americans migrated at rapid rates
and established new lives. The sorority’s brand of racial uplift advocacy, although
radical in its imaginings of Black female career success, still remained palatable for not
only other African-American elites but also powerful Whites, who could assist them in
their goals.
Although African-American sorority women, from the early to the late twentieth
century, often represented the most privileged of African-American people, they were not
immune from their share of struggles. Privilege did not protect them from the challenges
of community building and advancing girls and women. Sorority women had more
resources available to them than the women who supported the Amanda Smith School
and the Moorish Temple, but they too encountered economic, racial and gender barriers
illustrating that education and talent could not reconcile these issues.
Through an analysis of the A.K.A. vocational guidance movement, which
reflected some of the organizations’ core values, we find that although at times classist
presented a protofeminist consciousness about the role female leadership could play in
African-American communities. In addition to presenting a challenge to AfricanAmericans to value girls, A.K.A.’s revisions of racial uplift tropes, in fact, indicated a
desire to expand the vision of African-American people about themselves. The economic
changes of the Migration-era necessitated a larger and more complicated blueprint for
197
African-American improvement. The A.K.A.s hoped that vocational guidance would be
the first step in changing the tide of African-American life. But, as they articulated the
need for guidance and their own goals, they were never able to truly change the severity
of African-American disenfranchisement and poverty. The social and political climate of
the U.S. did not make breaking barriers so easy, and the times could not facilitate a
realization of all of the A.K.A.’s dreams. Yet, the organization demonstrated an ability
to change with the times, and strategically abdicated their control and shared power when
the federal interventions proved to be better equipped to handle the load.
The story of the vocational guidance movement’s changes is also a tale about the
changing nature of African-American women’s organizing and political power.
Fortunately, in all of the economic upheavals, the sorority’s agenda regarding girls was
never fully compromised; it merely shifted. Vocational guidance remained on the
sorority’s platform for decades after the 1940s, although it was no longer the primary
focus. Chicago chapter members continued to capitalize on their educational preparation
and their connections in the city to advance the aims of vocational guidance, capturing
wider audiences as the population of African-American youth in the city increased. This
was not a retrenchment on the part of the sisterhood, rather a demonstration of lessons
learned by other Black women’s groups. Survival required changing with the times. The
vocational guidance program’s pervasiveness in Chicago signaled a change in Black
women’s leadership in the city and ushered in a new message about the relationship
between work and respectability by emphasizing the possibilities of African-American
girls to enter professions. As New Negro women disrupted the work of traditional racial
198
uplift activists, sorority women disrupted the older guard of clubwomen through their
promotion of guidance.
In analyzing different types of African-American women’s leadership on behalf
of girls, we have an opportunity to recognize the subtle differences among AfricanAmerican social classes, political interests, and organizing. Often African-American
women’s historians regard women’s organizations as being bound politically by the
needs to advocate for their racial position and their gender status. The double bind
arguments need to be continually pushed to interrogate how girls experienced this bind as
recipients of women’s outreach. Although girls do not have the access to formal
structures of exercising political social power, such as voting and wage earning, does not
mean that they do not also feel the ties of these considerations. The A.K.A.’s advocacy
for girls demonstrated the evolution of women’s leadership during Chicago’s growth as a
Black, urban center. The sorority established its own political and social identity, yet
work was never too far away from the concerns for girls Adah Waters professed or the
New Negro spirit of the Moorish Science movement. Alpha Kappa Alpha was immersed
in the problems of Chicago’s Black Belts as they were in the intellectual discourses on
women’s roles and education. Regardless of whether or not they embraced all the
challenges of their time, the sorors of A.K.A. demonstrate both the continuity and change
of the Great Migration era. One of the legacies of A.K.A.’s partnership with the NYA
was the training of young women to take up the leadership of recreational activities, the
topic of the next chapter. In the following chapter, I examine African-American
participation in Chicago’s Camp Fire Girls and the role of African-American girls in the
organization.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE CAMP FIRE GIRLS OF AMERICA
The Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority’s decision to shift its primary focus away from
vocational guidance to other projects did not mean that African-American girls in
Chicago were left without allies. Despite the challenges of the Great Depression and the
color barriers that limited African-American access to New Deal resources, Chicago
remained a major center of African-American women’s activism and the home to
numerous clubs and outreach programs for girls.440
In the previous chapters, I focused on African-American organizations, each with
distinct motivations, leaders, strategies, and objectives. In addition to shared engagement
with racial uplift discourses and ideologies, all of these groups prioritized work and
education as terrains for lifting girls to moral and social fitness. Industrials schools,
colleges, job training programs, and career counseling initiatives were avenues for
instilling values associated with racial uplift—specifically respectability and community
responsibility. The previously examined institutions desired to train girls to become
professional, respectable, industrious, and innovators in fields previously off-limits to
African-Americans and women. In essence, these programs helped to mold future
uplifters of the race. Although there is a wealth of historical scholarship on Black
women’s educational and career activism, those activities do not reflect the entirety of
Black women’s advocacy for girls. While some organizations and leaders were solely
concerned with girls in school and at work, other activists took on the mission of ensuring
African-American girls had opportunities to play as well.
440
For more on African-Americans and the New Deal, see Nikki Brown, Private Politics and Public
Voices: Black Women’s Activism from World War I to the New Deal (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997), Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil
Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
199
200
In this chapter, I present one of Chicago’s predominately African-American
chapters of the Camp Fire Girls of America. Progressives Dr. Luther and Charlotte
Gulick established Camp Fire Girls in May of 1910 to encourage “the out-of-doors habit
and the out-of-door-spirit” in girls.441 Camp Fire promised its membership “fun, glorious
fun out of doors in all kinds of weather…and…the strength for climbing.”442 The
organization claimed that, “there is an abundance of beauty in the world and it is [the
Camp Fire Girl] who must and will find it.”443 The Camp Fire Girls reflected both the
Progressive movement’s concern with proper (and gendered) child development and a
related interest in the role of nature activities in combating the negative effects of
urbanization and helping children to build character.444 Camp Fire’s founders were also
proponents of the recreation movement, a part of the Progressive movement that helped
establish parks, playgrounds, and organized athletics for city children.445
By the early 1930s, Camp Fire Girls was a major national organization with
hundreds of local chapters, called councils, throughout the country. Although the
441
Camp Fire Girls of America, The Book of the Camp Fire Girls (New York: Camp Fire Girls of America,
1913), 5. Camp Fire Girls is now CampFire USA, a co-educational group. The process of including boys
in Camp Fire began in 1969, when the Boy Scouts of America opened up their Explorers program to Camp
Fire Girls. Then, in 1975, the Camp Fire Girls expanded to include boys and renamed the organization
Camp Fire Boys and Girls. In 2001, the organization became Camp Fire USA.
442
Ibid, The Book of the Camp Fire Girls, 9.
443
Ibid, The Book of the Camp Fire Girls, 9.
444
For more on the history of children camping, see Leslie Paris, Children’s Nature: The Rise of the
American Summer Camp (New York: New York University, 2008).
445
For more on the recreation movement and Progressives, see Elisabeth I. Perry, Muscles and Morals:
Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1981). For an interesting discussion of gender and this movement, see Clifford Putney, Muscular
Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2003). For more on Chicago’s parks, Julia Sniderman and William W. Tippens, “The Planning and
Design of Chicago’s Neighborhood Parks,” A Breath of Fresh Air: Chicago’s Parks of the Progressive Era,
1900-1925 (Chicago: Chicago Park District, 1989). For more on Chicago and leisure sports, see Gerald
Gems, The Windy City: Labor, Leisure and Sport in the Making of Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York:
Scarecrow Press, 1997).
201
majority of Camp Fire councils were White, African-American women and girls also
participated in Camp Fame. I examine one specific African-American Camp Fire council
in the city’s Second Ward, which included the epicenter of the Black Belt. The council
adopted the faux Indian name of Oececa, as was the practice of individual Camp Fire
councils. 446 The Oececa flourished with little recognition or support from the Camp
Fire’s Chicago Area Council, which represented the interests of the mostly White city
and suburban councils of the Chicago area. Through media reports, and some of the
internal documents of the Camp Fire Organization, I uncover how Oececa’s community
activities and the women who led and guided them. The Oececa’s success rested on the
strong leadership of their Camp Fire advisors, who were among Chicago’s most
prominent Black women citizens.
After providing a brief introduction of Camp Fire’s history, influences and
structure, I tell the story of the Oececa council in the late 1930s into the 1950s. The postDepression era forced the Oececa Girls and women to confront and engage with a variety
of later Migration-era issues. I isolate my study to this period because it was a time in
which Chicago’s African-American Camp Fire Girls councils were capitalizing on the
New Deal’s reinvigoration of the parks and recreation movement, responding to fears
about the negative ramifications of slum life on children, especially girls, in Chicago’s
Black Belt, and strengthening African-American women’s activism to secure camping
446
Camp Fire councils often adopted faux Native American names to provide the Council with a distinctive
name. Camp directors often adopted similar names for their camps. The ‘Indian’ names were usually an
amalgamation of a variety of words that reflected the values of camping. For instance Camp Fire often
refers to its Wo-He-Lo spirit, which is a combination of the words work, health and love. Camp Fire, Girl
and Boy Scouts, Girls Guides, and other children’s nature organizations claimed solidarity with Native
American culture by appropriating what was believed to be ‘Indianess.’ For more on this, see Shari
Huhndorf, Going Native: American Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2001) and Phil Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
202
and other ‘out-of-doors’ experiences for their girls. This period also marked new
articulations of racial uplift that reflected the concerns of the post-Depression era.
Middle-class women advocates of Camp Fire and similar groups framed camping
programs and nature appreciation in terms of combating juvenile delinquency and
providing girls with another form of training for leadership in the home and community.
Unlike the subjects of the past chapters, this organization is different in that it was
not created by and for African-Americans. In fact, during Camp Fire’s formative years,
the national body did not want to engage in matters of race. Camp Fire may have
remained silent on race and membership, but race, as well as gender and class, played
major roles in the organization’s origins and practices. Without much local or national
institutional backing, the Oececa appealed almost exclusively to African-American
churches, businesses, and schools to promote Camp Fire’s goals. African-American
organizations often helped Camp Fire because they believed that the girls’ group’s
promotion of camping and nature appreciation could not only serve as an intervention in
the community goal to reduce youth crime, but also because Camp Fire Girls served as
testaments to the community’s best African-American girls.
The majority of research on African-Americans and recreational activities
designed to combat youth problems looks at the role of ‘colored’ Young Women’s
Christian Associations (YWCA) and Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCA) in
providing swimming pools, gymnasia, and campgrounds for Black children when
segregation was the rule in children’s play activities.447 Scholarly works on the YWs
447
For more on the role of the YWCA in African-American communities, see Judith Weisenfeld, AfricanAmerican Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1997). For an analysis on the dynamics of race in the national YWCA, see Nancy Marie
203
often obscures the importance of other national organizations in providing recreational
opportunities to African-American children, including Girl Scouts of America troops, and
the recreation departments of local National Urban League branches. Unlike the multifaceted YWs, which provided a plethora of community services and organized in various
departments and committees, Camp Fire was devoted solely to the promotion of camping
activities. Therefore, all of Camp Fire’s political energies were expended in highlighting
the importance of girls engaging with the outdoors. Camp Fire’s singular goal was not a
simple one for Oececa and other councils of girls of color to fulfill in light of the racial
and economic impediments of the time. Yet, these councils found ways to participate
fully in the activity “with the threefold aim of developing…bodies, mind and
character.”448 Through an examination of the Oececa Camp Fire Girls, we can observe
how recreation and play fit within the rubric of racial uplift, therefore creating a new area
of analysis on the relationship between respectability politics and girls’ organizations.
The Call to the Camp Fire
Before exploring the impact Camp Fire Girls had on Chicago’s African-American
community, it is important to understand its historical and ideological roots, as well as its
understanding of race and racial difference within the organization. The Camp Fire
program was wildly popular in urban areas across the country, but its roots were planted
in a place much different from the Northern Migration cities of Chicago, Harlem, and
Detroit. Camp Fire was born on the edge of Lake Sebago in Maine when the Gulicks
Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2007).
448
Camp Fire Girls of America, Wo-He-Lo: The Camp Fire History (New York: Camp Fire, Inc., 1980), 6.
204
were on a camping trip with their six children. During the family’s annual adventure at
the Lake in 1910, the Gulicks decided to add new elements to their camping routine. The
Gulicks devised a system of honors to reward their children for completing their camping
chores, which provided a rough sketch of the bead and badge system in Camp Fire.449
Upon noticing how well the children responded to the awards, the Gulicks felt inspired to
create an organization for girls, which paralleled the popular Boy Scouts. Although the
Gulicks were familiar with Robert Baden Powell’s international scouting movement for
boys, the pair did not want Camp Fire Girls to merely exist as the ‘sisters’ of Boy Scouts.
The Gulicks instead created an “essentially…feminine program” that “stimulates the
imagination, guides it into channels of beauty, inspires ideals through its simple ritual,
encourages healthful activities and an appreciation of the feminine role.”450 The Gulicks
wanted to reorient modern girls toward the work of the home. From that summer
vacation, the Gulicks most influential and long-lasting project was born. The Gulicks
believed that camping was essential to a girl’s life. The Gulicks had four daughters of
their own, and they took great care in introducing them to camping. They even
established a girls’ camp for their daughters and their friends. Charlotte went on to serve
as a leader in the National Association of Directors of Girls Camps in 1916.451
The Gulicks originally named their group the Girl Pioneers; the Pioneers were
actually an umbrella organization comprising small, local girls’ groups across the country
449
The Gulick children and grandchildren kept the camp within the family for nearly a century. Louise
Gulick and her husband Davis Van Winkle ran the camp, called WoHeLo for more than 30 years. The
camp is still in existence in Maine.
450
451
“Program,” The Camp Fire Guide, (New York: Camp Fire Girls of America, 1940), 19.
For more on this organization and women’s leadership in the creation of summer camps, see Wilma
Miranda and Rita Yerkes, “The History of Camping Women in the Professionalization of Experiential
Education,” in Karen Warren, ed. Women’s Voices in Experiential Education (New York: Kendall-Hunt
Publishing, 1996), 63-77
205
that had already existed. After encountering problems in unifying already established
groups, threats of legal action from organizations also named Pioneers and disputes about
the similarities between the Pioneers Boy Scouts, the Gulicks decided to change course.
The Gulicks finally adopted the name Camp Fire Girls to end any further confusion about
the group, and continued to map out their new organization. The Gulicks took the task of
creating Camp Fire Girls quite seriously. Within a few years of establishing Camp Fire,
the Gulicks outlined their philosophy, enumerated the responsibilities of membership,
and created various levels of Camp Fire membership and defined related vocabulary.
The Gulicks believed Camp Fire’s power rested in its ability to help girls acquire
citizenship skills, promote the “spiritual ideal of the home,” and teach them “standards
for women’s work.”452 The Law of the Camp Fire charged girls to: “Seek beauty, pursue
knowledge, be trustworthy, hold on to health, glorify work, [and] be happy.”453 The
Gulicks chose the campfire as the group’s symbol because it represented a mythologized
past, of pioneer women dutifully attending to the task of shaping a new nation through
their ingenuity in the outdoors. One scholar of the organization has suggested that the
Gulicks wanted the Girls to have “a profound respect for the campfire itself, a symbol of
a more primitive time when fire’s power had been domesticated in the service of the
home.”454
The Gulicks created various Camp Fire designations and mandates for the
blossoming organizations. Within the Camp Fire family there were four formal levels of
452
Ibid, The Book of the Camp Fire Girls, 5.
453
“The Law of the Camp Fire,” Camp Fire Girls of America (CFGA) publication, dated 1940, Chicago
Area Camp Fire Council Office (CAFC), Chicago, IL.
454
Sue Miller, Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organization in America (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2007), 5.
206
participation. Girls aged six to twelve years old could join the Blue Birds, which was
established in 1913. Camp Fire Girls proper were twelve years old and older. The final
level of participation, Horizon Girls, was established decades after the founding. In
1941, Camp Fire sanctioned the high school and college age group. Horizon Girls often
assisted younger council members and served as mentors for Camp Fire Girls. Each
Camp Fire council had an adult leader. Leaders were usually mothers of Camp Fire Girls
or Blue Birds, teachers and other women interested in girls’ organizations. Council
leaders, or Guardians, had to be at least 18-years-old and reported to a sponsoring
committee who could attest to the woman’s character and leadership ability. Councils
sometimes enlisted the help of a Sponsors group to aid with fundraising and community
partnerships.
Similar to the Boy and Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Girls could earn badges and beads
signifying their completion of various activities. Gulick was specific as to the activities
girls could participate in to earn badges and demonstrate their Camp Fire values. Camp
Fire honor areas included Home, Health, Hand, Nature Lore, Camp, Business, and
Citizenship.455 After amassing a certain amount of beads and badges, Camp Fire girls
ascended the Camp Fire ranks, which began with Trail Seeker, then Wood Gatherer, then
Fire Maker and finally Torch Bearer. Camp Fire members received their honors at
annual Camp Fire celebrations, called ceremonials, where members donned ‘native’
garb—fake animal skin dresses, homemade tunics, feathers, and beaded jewelry.
455
“Leaders Association Training,” October 1959, pamphlet, Chicago Area Council of Camp Fire files
(CACCF), Chicago, IL. By the 1950s, the honors were Homecraft, Outdoors, Creative Arts, Frontiers,
Business, Sports and Games and Citizenship.
207
The Gulicks went to great lengths to draft Camp Fire policies, create the
organization’s ceremonies and honor system, and design special uniforms, commission
accessories for the Girls to wear, and appointed notable educators and activists to the
governing board. Yet, the Gulicks made no mention of race or ethnicity when they
developed the membership protocols and requirements for the group. Camp Fire’s
silence on race was both a blessing and a curse. In the South, Camp Fire groups
encountered resistance from White groups who believed that the presence of Black Camp
Fire Girls lessened the character of the organization. Yet, in larger Migration cities, such
as Cleveland or Chicago, Camp Fire’s passive inclusion allowed for the relatively
uncontroversial creation of African-American councils. Due to the leadership of AfricanAmerican women in Chicago’s women’s clubs and recreation movement, AfricanAmerican girls were able to participate in Camp Fire programs within a few years of its
founding. The available records on Camp Fire in the city and surrounding areas indicate
that Chicago’s Black Camp Fire Girls were organized as early as 1915 in traditional
councils. African-American girls also participated in Camp Fire’s World War I era
auxiliary group, named the Minute Girls.456
456
During World War I, the Gulicks partnered with the War Camp Community Service to create the Minute
Girls Program, a patriotic organization that supported World War I civilian initiatives. Gulick described
the group in this way: “Founded on the belief that in war as in peace the largest power of woman lies in the
protection and development of the home and its ideals, the care of children, of the sick and injured—all in
the relation to this largest needs of the community.” Minute Girls were required to perform: “five minutes
callisthenic exercises daily…walking forty miles over the course of four days…marching in unison…fire
building and outdoor cooking, nutrition and grocery shopping, and meal preparation without modern
convenience,” the “practice self-denial,” caring for a baby, remembering to “donate one dollar to a relief
organization” and demonstrating patriotism. From Abbie Condit (AC), memo from Camp Fire Girls (CFG)
headquarters regarding Minute Girls Program, June 3, 1918 in Irene McCoy Gaines Papers (IMGP), Box 2,
Folder 2 (2/2), Chicago History Museum (CHM). See Jennifer Hillman Helgren, “Inventing American
Girlhood: Gender and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century Camp Fire Girls,” unpub. diss., (Claremont:
Claremont Graduate University, 2005), 344-347. For more on the role of girls in wartime morality crusades
see Nancy Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering During the Great War (New York: New York
University Press, 1997) and Susan Cahn, Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Both Bristow and Cahn discuss how wartime campaigns to
208
Camp Fire Comes to the Prairie State
With the blueprint of the organization completed, the Gulicks turned to their
notable Board members to help promote Camp Fire nationally.457 The Gulicks opened
the Camp Fire office in New York, and they needed strong leaders in other regions of the
country to help spread their movement. The Gulicks tapped Hull House founder Jane
Addams to serve as the first national vice-president, which helped introduce Chicago’s
social service community to Camp Fire and ensured its future successes in the city.
Chicago’s local Camp Fire chapters progressed alongside the national organization’s
development. The Camp Fire Chicago District, as the city’s governing body was known,
was established in 1911. The state of Illinois granted the group corporation status in
1912, the same year the national group became incorporated. Camp Fire was an
immediate success. The official history of the Camp Fire Chicago District (now known
as the Chicago Area Council) recorded that “a progressive group of women in the
Chicago area found that the program advocated by Dr. and Mrs. Luther Gulick met the
needs of girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen.”458 The Chicago District councils,
like many of its urban counterparts, created Camp Fire groups at YWCAs, settlement
houses and neighborhood recreation associations. In its early years, Chicago Camp Fire
councils drew largely from poor, working-class, and immigrant communities. Camp Fire
reduce sexually transmitted diseases appealed to young women to uphold their sexual virtues, and they also
provided education on venereal disease and promoted the use of prophylactics.
457
For more on the details of the formation of Girl Pioneers and the Camp Fire Girls, see Stephanie
Wallach, Luther Haley Gulick and the Salvation of the American Adolescent (Ph.D. dissertation, New
York: Columbia University, 1989). The original Camp Fire Board included the chair of Princeton’s
Hygiene Department, the head of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, a professor in Columbia
University’s Teacher’s College and a teacher at New York’s Horace Mann School.
458
“Camp Fire Girls, The Early Years, 1913-1921,” The Book of the Camp Fire Girls (New York: Camp
Fire Girls of America, 1939), 30.
209
targeted this population because the Gulicks coupled its mission of creating girls into
nature-loving homemakers with a plan to Americanize immigrants and engender a sense
of self-sufficiency among the poor. The Northwestern University Settlement House on
Chicago’s West Side created a Camp Fire Girls program for its residents shortly after
Addams began advocating for Camp Fire. 459
Gradually Camp Fire programs among African-American communities grew
alongside immigrant resource centers. Camp Fire’s popularity was partly a result of the
glowing endorsements it received from a wide array of African-American organizations.
In one Chicago Defender report, the newspaper praised Camp Fire for being: “an
organization of girls and women to develop the home spirit and make it dominate the
entire community.” 460 The article applauded Camp Fire’s desire to ‘uplift’ women’s
work by “organizing a girl’s daily home life; and to show that the daily drudgery may be
made to contribute to the beauty of living.”461 Gulick believed that the organization’s
duty was to convert menial and potentially laborious tasks into artful and enjoyable
experiences for girls, all of which was rewarded by various badges and Camp Fire
honors. Included in Gulick’s listing of potentially transformative activities was: learning
to make “ten standard soups,” sleeping with “windows open,” and “planning the family
expenditures for food at $2 a week.”462 Gulick himself recognized these activities as
“everyday drudgery,” yet within the context of a merit-based system and ideological
459
The Northwestern University Settlement House was affiliated with the Evanston University, but it was
situated in the predominately German, Polish and Scandinavian Humboldt Park section of the city. The
House was also host to one of the first Boy Scout troops in the U.S.
460
461
Chicago Defender, “Seen and Heard Along the North Shore,” September 30, 1916.
Ibid, “Seen and Heard Along the North Shore.”
Luther H. Gulick, “Recreation and Youth,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in the City
of New York 2, no. 4, (July 1912): 592.
462
210
framework of preparation for perfect womanhood and motherhood. Camp Fire Girls
created its own world of exciting chores and scientific standards for housework. The
Camp Fire strategy for elevating the status of housework was to fragment it into parts, so
that girls would learn one part of home making, and this part would be celebrated with
special badges and experiences that made them eligible for a higher status within Camp
Fire. According to the article, Camp Fire also helped reduce bad behavior among girls by
promoting a “happy social life,” because “the girls must know how to work as well as
play.”463
Camp Fire’s promotion of women’s “daily drudgery” and the exaltation of the
hidden “beauty of living” in these activities did not speak to its White and Black
members in the same way. The uplifting of women’s work had different racial
implications for both Black and White Camp Fire Girls. Gulick’s celebration of the
domestic was not only a part of his concern for girls, but his response to the changing
roles of women in White, middle-class homes. Gulick was concerned with the increasing
mechanization of household tasks and the ‘sending out’ of women’s work into a diverse
array of places: from public schools to groceries and bakeries to commercial laundries.
The Gulicks also wanted to preserve the viability of the White home because they
subscribed to the period’s belief that the White race was in jeopardy, and women could
help restore it. Developing girls into strong, yet feminine (White) women meant that
Camp Fire was helping to improve the racial stock of a beleaguered and threatened
nation. Gulick suggested that the Camp Fire educated girls on how to retain their
feminine connection to tasks such as educating children and feeding families.
463
Ibid, “Recreation and Youth.”
211
Conversely, for African-American girls who may have looked toward the bleak world of
working as a domestic as their only occupational possibility, Camp Fire dignified their
participation in the very public act of working outside of the context of the home. Camp
Fire’s appeal in African-American circles resembled the rhetoric of domestic training and
industrial programs that elevated Black women’s work to the levels of science and
precision to generate more respect for their labor.
Gulick's message on work and the outdoors may have been formulated with
White girls and women in mind, yet it still resonated with African-American women
across the city and state. From the remaining records of Chicago’s Camp Fire councils, it
is clear that African-American girls in the city and other parts of the state participated in
Camp Fire before the peak years of the Great Migration, as early as 1915. Similar to
their White counterparts, Black Camp Fire Girls met at settlement houses. A Black
Camp Fire council met regularly at the Clotee Scott Settlement in 1915.464 The
Settlement, which was located near the University of Chicago in the Hyde Park
neighborhood, does not appear in the early official histories of the Chicago Area Camp
Fire District, but the Defender posted notices of its meetings and events weekly. The
Scott Settlement Camp Fire Girls later moved their meetings to the Wendell Phillips
Settlement after Clotee Scott became too ill to run the House herself.465
Councils also emerged across the state in small and mid-size towns with small,
but well-organized, African-American communities. In downstate Champaign, a Camp
Fire council was established by 1916. In honor of the World War I effort, Champaign’s
464
Chicago Defender, “The Clotee Scott Settlement,” January 23, 1915 and Chicago Defender, “The
Clotee Scott Settlement,” August 7, 1915.
465
Chicago Defender, “Clubs and Societies,” July 22, 1916.
212
Minehana Camp Fire Girls joined the local Boy Scout troop to perform “a patriotic
service,” which included a tribute to freedom and Abraham Lincoln.466 That same year,
Camp Fire girls enjoyed a “pink party,” in Decatur, a town 200 miles southwest of
Chicago.467 Mrs. Minnie Carr, the council’s Guardian, was also a member of the town’s
Christian Culture and Social Uplift club, indicating the ties between Black women’s
participation in Camp Fire and the uplift perspectives of Black women’s clubs.468 The
Omnihecca Camp Fire Girls existed in the southern Illinois town of Galesburg as early as
1918.469 Another small southern Illinois town, Marion, had a council, which hosted
concerts in 1924.470 In 1927, the Minnie-Ha-Ha Camp Fire Girls of Colp reported
enjoying a “four-mile bike” on a Thursday afternoon with the Council’s chaperone.471
The proliferation of so many Black Camp Fire Councils throughout the 1910s and
1920s in Illinois was no small feat. Although the national organization never took a
formal stance on how open its councils would be toward non-White girls, some of its
practices and responses to Black participation indicated a far more complicated approach
than ‘general openness.’ Camp Fire’s contemporary champions often emphasize that
Camp Fire made no mention of race in it the founding policies on membership or
councils. In the historical register of girls’ organizations, it is often described as an
466
Chicago Defender, “Champaign, February 20, 1915 and Chicago Defender, “The Prairie State,” August
18, 1917.
467
Chicago Defender, untitled article, June 17, 1916.
468
Chicago Defender, “Prairie State Events.” March 10, 1917.
469
Chicago Defender, “Prairie State Events,” July 20, 1918 and Chicago Defender, “Prairie State News,”
June 29, 1918.
470
Chicago Defender, “Illinois State News,” November 29, 1924.
471
Chicago Defender, “Illinois State news,” June 4, 1927.
213
interracial one. Yet, this did not mean that Camp Fire’s leadership did not struggle with
the issue of race or sometimes engage in segregationist behavior.
In 1914, when an African-American group in Nashville, led by a settlement house
worker named Lizzie Smith, challenged the racial policies of Camp Fire, the national
office experienced one of its first confrontations with the issue of race. After White
councils complained about Smith’s group, Gulick and his associates suggested that the
group reorganize under the name of the Girls of the Forward Quest.472 AfricanAmerican girls in Nashville, and other parts of the country as well, had used this strategy
to organize a Black version of the YWCA’s Girls Reserves by calling themselves the
Blue Triangle League.473 Some African-American councils heeded the national office’s
advice and changed their names to mask their ties to Camp Fire. The national office was
concerned that other White councils would withdraw their support for Camp Fire if
African-American Girls enjoyed the same membership privileges as White Girls. Camp
Fire was already in strong competition for new members with the Girl Scouts, and the
organization never formally set a policy about girls of color or spoke out against racial
discrimination out of fear that Camp Fire would lose momentum in the South. Gulick
eventually formed an interracial committee, including Booker T. Washington’s
clubwoman wife, Margaret Murray Washington, to deliberate on applications from
African-Americans. Camp Fire eventually decided that they would only accept AfricanAmerican groups so long they were in areas where Whites had already established Camp
473
For more on the significance of Blue Triangle Leagues to African-American girls, see Tennessee State
University’s digital library: http://www.tnstate.edu/library/digital/Blue.htm.
214
Fire groups for themselves.474 This practice may have helped African-American groups
in Illinois grow so rapidly.
The Camp Fire Board did not want to be activists on the issue of race and
routinely held the position that they would not personally intervene in controversies
regarding African-American groups. The Nashville incident, coupled with competition
from the Girl Scouts, may have accounted for the scarcity of Camp Fire councils
throughout the South. Camp Fire did manage to capture interest in some Southern states,
mainly in Texas and Missouri, and in the city of Atlanta. Camp Fire focused on the more
uncontroversial and receptive regions of the country—the Northeast and the Midwest—in
its quest to convert more girls to the organization.
The racial controversies in the South, the highly segregated councils across the
country and even the Gulicks’ own belief in eugenics, did not detract from Camp Fire’s
image of itself as an egalitarian and inclusive organization.475 The same year of the
Nashville incident, Grace Parker, Camp Fire’s national secretary, wrote a memo on how
the organization demonstrated “true democracy” in that “every strata of society” was
represented at the 1914 Grand Council’s national Camp Fire Girls meeting.476 Parker
noted that even Southern girls, both Black and White, overcame their personal
apprehensions and familiarity with segregation in order to interact at the event. She
474
See Helgren, 274-283.
475
The issue of race did not only impact Camp Fire’s actions, but race also shaped their ideology. In
addition to Camp Fire’s desire to create a domain of the outdoors for girls, the movement situated itself in
the context of the changing political tides of the era. One scholar of Camp Fire has linked the Gulicks and
their association with G. Stanley Hall, to the eugenics or ‘racial hygiene’ movement of the early twentieth
century. See Miller, 195-198 and Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Race
and Gender, 1890-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 77-120.
476
As quoted in Helgren, 247.
215
declared that “all prejudices seem to disappear” at the Camp Fire gathering.477 Although
the National Council wished prejudice away, it was alive and well in the national and
local chapters of Camp Fire. Interested African-American Camp Fire organizers in
Chicago may have been unaware or undeterred by the Nashville issue. The conflicts with
and within the national office did not weaken the program in Chicago’s AfricanAmerican communities.
After World War I and the ensuing rise of Chicago’s African-American
population, new councils continued to emerge. One of the strongest African-American
councils in Chicago, named the Loma, began in 1918, and they met regularly at the
Frederick Douglass Center. The group was led by Chicago suffragist Irene Goins. In
March of 1918, the Defender announced that the “club recently organized [and] is
making rapid progress…doing charity work and mainly a heart has been filled with joy
by a deed done by this club.”478 The Loma Girls participated in patriotic activities, and
the newspaper described them as “a new organization in this locality…pledged to aid in
war relief work.”479 In May of the same year they organized, the Loma girls hosted a
“grand patriotic pageant and council fire,” at the Unity Club House, which would later
become the Moorish Science Temple’s entertainment venue. The event promised a
performance and dancing for only a quarter.480 The group seemed to have placed less
emphasis on camping and more on performances to boost morale among civilians and
entertain the community. After World War I ended, Loma continued to provide
477
Quoted in Helgren, 247.
478
Chicago Defender, “Clubs and Fraternal,” March 2, 1918.
479
Chicago Defender, “Loma Camp Fire Girls Give Beautiful Pageant,” June 10, 1918.
480
Chicago Defender, untitled advertisement,” May 18, 1918.
216
Chicagoans with spirited social events. In the summer of 1919, the Loma girls starred in
“Who’s to Win Him?” an “old-time playlet.”481 The group also undertook community
service activities; in the winter of 1920, the group helped to support, “two needy families
a month.”482 Although the Loma Council participated in a wide array of community
activities, after 1920, the Loma Girls disappear from any newspaper accounts of girls’
clubs, and it appears that Oececa replaced the council sometime in the 1930s. 483
The Oececa Girls and Women in Chicago
From the reports of Camp Fire activities and leaders in the Defender, it appears
that the Oececa Camp Fire Girls were organized by 1931, when the Girls presented an
“all nations revue and vase ceremonial,” to raise money at the Pilgrim Baptist Church,
but they may have adopted the name Oececa later, around 1937.484 The success of the
Oececa council originated with the council’s leaders and institutional advocates, the
council’s interventions in the promotion of camping as a ‘solution’ to the various
problems experienced by African-American girls, and the diversity of programming the
council provided for not only the girls, but also the Second Ward community.
The Oececa’s leadership during the 1930s and 1940s comprised women who most
likely did not participate in Camp Fire themselves, but they saw an opportunity to serve a
need by serving as Guardians, and they were often well connected in Black Chicago. The
481
Chicago Defender, “Loma Girls Star in Old-Time Playlet,” June 28, 1919.
482
Chicago Defender, “Clubs,” January 31, 1920.
483
Another council named the Pines began to meet in 1930, but there are few reports of their activities.
They may have been a precursor to the Oececa. See Chicago Defender, “Campfire Girls,” August 2, 1930.
484
Chicago Defender, “In Concert,” March 14, 1931. Pilgrim Baptist is often referred to the birthplace of
gospel music, under the leadership of their music minister, Thomas A. Dorsey.
217
longest serving and most notable Oececa Camp Fire Guardian was Mrs. Blanche E. King,
who was credited with “bringing the Camp Fire Girls to the South side for the inhabitants
of the Second Ward,” in order “to help the girls in the district who need it the most.”485
King was married to lawyer and politician Representative William E. King, who served
in the Illinois state senate. King regularly opened up her home to Camp Fire Girl
activities, including an “annual installation,” to award Girls’ their badges and beads, and
to name new Sponsors and Guardians.486 The Kings were deeply committed to youth and
together they supported a number of philanthropic causes. Although the national Camp
Fire organization did not mandate it, in 1931, the Kings helped organize a Camp Fire
scholarship program for local girls. Ruth Reese, a Phillips High School alumna, and
University of Illinois undergraduate received a Camp Fire Girls scholarship. Reese was
one of the less affluent members of Oececa, and King’s husband awarded her the prize
because he knew, “the struggle of the mother trying to care for a family of ten children
without any support.”487 Reese later became a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha
sorority and she worked as a girls’ teacher at the Madden Park field house, a Chicago
Park District facility designed for African-American residents of the Fourth Ward.488
Other Camp Fire alumna went on to colleges in the area. Former Camp Fire Girls
485
Chicago Defender, “Progressive,” January 7, 1933.
486
Chicago Defender, “Oececa Camp Fire Officers Plan Affair; Florence I. Williams to be Guest Speaker,”
July 6, 1940.
487
488
Chicago Defender, “Girl Given Scholarship by Rep. William E. King,” October 3, 1931.
Chicago Defender, “A.K.A. Sorors Give Original 3-Act Comedy,” May 14, 1932 and Chicago
Defender, “Softball Tournament Starts September 5,” September 4, 1932. At the urging of South Side
Chicago community groups, the Chicago Park District acquired land from the South Park Commission to
establish a park in 1934. In the 1940s, the federal government purchased more land in the area around the
park to create the Ida B. Wells Home, one of the first housing projects open to African-American families
exclusively.
218
president Patricia Wright went on the Northwestern University, where she was crowned
“Queen of the Navy Ball.”489
Other prominent Oececa leaders included Essie Duke Hobson, a member of the
Oececa Executive Council, who was a graduate of the mostly-White Hyde Park High
School, in 1921.490 She was a member of Pilgrim Baptist and served on prominent
church boards.491 Her connection to Pilgrim served as a resource for her, and she often
contacted and encouraged girls to join Camp Fire. Rose J. Brown, a Junior League
member and Poro College affiliate, also helped the girls’ effort as the organization’s
president.492 Mrs. Katye H. Steele, a member of the Elks’ Daughters Club, served as the
president of the Camp Fire Sponsors after King stepped down from her post. 493 Camp
Fire Guardians of the 1930s and 1940s represented a cross-section of race women, and
although there was no typical member of the Guardians, they were more likely to be
members of Chicago’s Black high society. Irene McCoy Gaines, the noted Republican
women’s activist, pioneered the Minute Girls program, and her contact with the juvenile
courts convinced her that recreation was the key to helping girls survive the rapid
489
Chicago Defender, “Chicago Girl Rates High in N.U. Queen Contest,” December 24, 1949.
490
Chicago Defender, “Citizens Executive Committee,” January 2, 1937 and Chicago Defender, “Hyde
Park Graduates,” June 25, 1921.
491
Chicago Defender, “Rev. Austin Welcomed Back Home,” April 19, 1941.
492
Chicago Defender, “Junior League in Installation,” October 11, 1941, Chicago Defender, “Poro College
has Lovely, Unique Commencement,” July 26, 1941,’ and Chicago Defender, “Annual Affair Honors
Group’s Past Officials,” November 25, 1939.
493
Chicago Defender, “Elks to Choose Champion State Orator on June 22,” June 13, 1931 and Chicago
Defender, “Annual Affair Honors Group’s Past Officials.”
219
changes in the city. She was a long life supporter of Camp Fire Girls.494 Fellow
Republican, Mrs. Otta Mae Wallace, who served as Oececa’s executive director, was a
community activist and beauty queen. She was crowned a Hawaiian Goddess at a
festival at Poro College.495
The Defender’s many stories about local and national Camp Fire councils reflect
how much the group meant to African-Americans; Camp Fire was as an integral part of
African-American communities nationally. The newspaper reported on councils as far
West as Oakland, California, and as far East as Brooklyn and upstate New York. Camp
Fire milestones such as integrating a campsite or the inclusion of African-American girls
in national programs often led to articles and photographs in the newspaper. When an
Atlanta Camp Fire council of African-American girls participated in the organization’s
annual donut sale for the first time, the event was included in the pages of the Defender.
The fundraiser, which generated money for camping facilities, also served to give the
organization a new face in various communities. Considering the previous battles
decades earlier surrounding African-American girls in the South, there have been
apprehension toward including African-American representation in this public activity.496
By 1942, there were enough Black Camp Fire alumnae in the city to create a
Horizons group in Chicago. The Spartans council of Horizons, a branch of the “national
494
For more on Irene McCoy Gaines’ service, see Sandra M. O’Donnell, “The Right to Work is the Right
to Live:” The Social Work and Political and Civic Activism of Irene McCoy Gaines,” Social Science
Review, vol. 75 (2001): 456-478.
495
496
Chicago Defender, “Hawaiian Goddess,” July 25, 1942.
“Camp Fire Girls Sell Donuts,” Chicago Daily Defender, April 17, 1948. In the 1950s, Atlanta served
more than 500 African-American girls through various Camp Fire Councils. Atlanta maintained a policy of
segregation in the 1960s. When the Atlanta Council opened new camp facilities, three of the four were
made available to Whites, and one was made available to Blacks. See Helgren, 289.
220
organization composed of a graduate group of the Camp Fire Girls,” began to spend time
with the Oececa soon after.497 Prominent Chicagoans, such as the pastor of Olivet Baptist
Church and attorney B.G. Clanton helped install Horizon members in 1942. The Horizon
Girls participated in community service activities, dressed in their “new uniforms [of]
blue sweaters and white skirts,” at places such as the Service Men’s Center.498 Prior to
the creation of the Horizon Girls, Pilgrim Baptist sponsored Junior Camp Fire Girls, an
organization for girls aged 18 to 23 years old. It was one of three Camp Fire groups
sponsored by the Church’s council, and by1930, Pilgrim hosted three groups of Camp
Fire Girls.499 Pilgrim was in a unique position to host so many activities because of its
long history in the city and more affluent congregants. In fact, churches often struggled
to support groups like Camp Fire due to a lack of resources. While Whites could rely on
schools and churches to aid in providing recreational opportunities to children, AfricanAmerican places of worship were often overtaxed and could not provide adequate
opportunities. In a report entitled The Negro’s Church, researchers found that “formal
recreational work is not well developed in the Negroes churches. In many instances
where churches have advertised recreational work as part of the program, the actual
promotion of this work has been short-lived.”500 Even when churches were unable to
497
Chicago Defender, “Society,” June 6, 1942.
498
Chicago Defender, “Hostesses at Center,” December 19, 1942.
499
Chicago Defender, “Junior Camp Fire Girls Election of Officers,” August 9, 1930.
500
Benjamin E. Mays and Joseph Nicholson, The Negro’s Church (New York: Arno and New York Times
Press, 1933), 155.
221
support their own recreational programs, they still contributed to popular causes such as
the Y’s, Urban Leagues and Community Chest projects.501
In spite of the tremendous work it took to keep Oececa running, the leaders
managed to enjoy Camp Fire too. The leadership of Oececa found the activity mutually
beneficial because Sponsors used their Camp Fire ties to foster a community among
themselves. African-American Camp Fire leaders formed their own Guardians social
club, where they could share ideas for projects and participate in cultural activities
designed for adults. They patterned their meetings after women’s clubs, and they
supported the intellectual development of its members. At the 1940 Sponsors anniversary
dinner at the South Side’s Morris’ Eat Schoppe restaurant, the women discussed business
and also heard noted Black librarian Vivian G. Harsh lecture on W.E.B. DuBois’ Dusk of
Dawn.502 The event’s featured speaker, Florence C. Williams led a discussion entitled,
“Achievement of the Negro Youth and their Cooperative Movements.”503 King gathered
Guardians and Sponsors to address fundraising, and to provide a social outlet for the
women. Both King and the Sponsors Club at large was so powerful that they were able
to attract “over 100 guests” to the Appomattox Club for a banquet in King’s honor to
raise money for the Oececa Girls.504
For African-Americans, Camp Fire leadership and activities created a flurry of a
social activity. Camp Fire dances, pageants and the like made it a part of both children’s
and adult’s social lives, which may have been the result of the compression among
501
Ibid, The Negro’s Church, 155.
502
Chicago Defender, “Observe Close of Fourth Year,” December 21, 1940.
503
Chicago Defender, “Observe Close of Fourth Year.”
504
Chicago Defender, “Annual Affair Honors Group’s Past Officials.”
222
African-American communities to use the same resources on a variety of issues. The
Second Ward girls also reflected some elements of Chicago’s middle-class society in
their activities. White councils in the Chicago council often focused on the mandates of
the national organization in instructing on earning beads and completing the elements of
the Camp Fire program. African-American groups devised complementary and
peripheral activities that were in line with the social culture of African-American
urbanites. For example, in 1937, the council chose Mrs. Bethel Carey Askey as the
“queen of the Pilgrim Baptist church campfire matrons.”505 The national organization did
not require or mandate a ‘queen’ be chosen among the group’s advisors, but with the
popularity of black beauty contests and sorority popularity contests, the council probably
elected to take on these activities to generate more interest and publicity for the group.506
As more and more girls heeded the Camp Fire call, the Oececa’s organizational
structure became more sophisticated, with Guardians reporting to Sponsors, who worked
with an executive council. King enlisted prominent Chicagoans to serve on the Oececa’s
executive council. The executive panel hosted parties for the Girls and Guardians, such
as one “lovely party” they organized before the rehearsals for their “annual junior
revue.”507 The Guardians and Sponsors shared a love of the outdoors with the Girls also.
In the summer of 1940, the Camp Fire Sponsors and Guardians “took a trip to Sunset
505
Chicago Defender, “Queen of Campfire Girls,” May 29, 1937.
506
Beauty pageants were wildly popular during the Migration era, and they were sponsored by a wide array
of Black community organizations, from the National Urban League to the various national and local
newspapers. For more on this, see Maxine Leeds Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty,
and the Politics of Race (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2002).
507
Chicago Defender, “Oececa Camp Fire Girls Plan for Annual Revue,” February 5, 1938.
223
Hills to collaborate on the state of the program.” 508 The group presented the girls in a
skit about “the thought of Camp Fire at the Negro Exposition in the areas.”509 Sunset
Hills was an important place for the Oececa community. Sunset Hills was a forested area
on the Illinois-Missouri border where African-American vacationed and created a country
club to hold golf outings and tournaments. Black Camp Fire councils had access to land
at Sunset Hills; yet without adequate cabins the Girls could visit Sunset Hills but could
not camp there.
Sunset Hills was one of the various Black institutions that helped the Oececa by
providing meeting spaces, fundraiser venues and financial contributions. The Oececa did
not own its own meeting space, so the council met at the Wabash Y.M.C.A., the
Y.W.C.A. and celebrated Camp Fire ceremonials at Wendell Phillips High School. Local
and national celebrities occasionally donated their time to the Girls also. One 1940 event
included Alfreda Duster, the daughter of activist Ida B. Wells presiding over the
installation, as well as a guest speaker and a guest artist.510 Prominent AfricanAmericans outside of the Camp Fire community also acknowledged the work of Camp
Fire girls at public awards presentations. In 1941, singer and actress Ethel Waters was
the guest of honor at a summer time Camp Fire revue at the Parkway ballroom.511 In
honor of the Broadway music star, the Oececa Girls performed “special arrangements of
two tunes made popular by Miss Waters.”512 A longtime supporter of Camp Fire Girls,
508
Chicago Defender, “Camp Fire Sponsors in Outing and Program,” August 31, 1940.
509
Ibid, “Camp Fire Sponsors in Outing and Program.”
510
Chicago Defender, “Oececa Camp Officers Plan Affair.”
511
Chicago Defender, “Typovision,” May 3, 1941.
512
Ibid, ‘Typovision.”
224
boxer Joe Louis and his family often celebrated with Chicago’s Camp Fire family. Louis
established a boxing training center at Sunset Hills, and Camp Fire’s connections with
Louis probably made the area safer for African-American girls to visit and camp. In
1941, at the Camp Fire’s annual revue and Honor Award Contest, Louis’ wife presented
the Honor Award, given to an outstanding Camp Fire sponsor.513 Years later the Oececa
council honored Louis’ daughter, Jacqueline, with a special award.514 Many events,
including the Ethel Waters performance, were part of a strategic fundraising campaign to
develop camp sites open to the Girls.
Delinquency and Recreation
King and the other Guardians cherished their times with the Girls and with each
other, but the majority of their time and energy was devoted to the difficult task of
fundraising during a time of economic insecurity. Yet, the Oececa council effectively
promoted their cause because its growth coincided with new national policies and local
concerns that helped politicize Camp Fire’s work with girls and imbued it with great
importance. Although the Great Depression eroded some areas of African-American
women’s activism, namely the work of the National Association of Colored Women and
similar membership organizations, the Depression also inadvertently opened up new, if
limited, areas for African-American youth. The New Deal helped to support two fields
that buttressed Camp Fire’s growth in the 1930s and 1940s. First, New Deal agencies
employed a number of researchers, including African-American social scientists, to
investigate the aftermath of the crash and its role in youth problems. Second, the New
513
“Set June 18th For Revue Date,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 3, 1941.
514
“Camp Fire Girls to Honor Champ Joe Louis’ Daughter,” Chicago Daily Defender, November 15, 1947.
225
Deal also reenergized the conservation and recreation movements by earmarking more
federal dollars for campsites, urban parks and youth leadership programs. For the
members of Oececa who enjoyed musical revues and proudly displayed their Homecraft
beads, they may not have been aware of how much economic and political forces helped
to drive their beloved Camp Fire council. Yet, the experiences of every Camp Fire Girl
between the Great Depression and World War II, particularly African-American
members, were precisely a result of both academic inquiries and the setting of new
national priorities.
In order to appreciate the enthusiasm that helped Camp Fire flourish in the
Second Ward and other African-American sections of the city, it is vital to understand the
city’s collective anxiety over juvenile delinquency in the late 1930s and into the 1940s.
Juvenile delinquency and its accompanying panic did not emerge spontaneously during
this period, yet the lack of relief in New Deal programs and economic uncertainty
intensified the concerns. King and other accomplished African-American Chicagoans
were drawn to Camp Fire because they believed that outdoor recreation could conquer
more than boredom or a desire to be ‘out-of-doors.’ As African-American women
uplifters assessed the social damages of the post-Depression era, many of them became
committed to the recreation movement. As juvenile justice advocates presented outdoor
activities as a way to reduce the youth disillusionment and juvenile crime that followed
the economic change, Camp Fire’s social significance increased. Like their Progressive
ancestors, Chicago’s middle-class reformers during the New Deal era, made connections
between urbanization and the vulnerability of youth to negative influences. In an earlier
period, fresh air funds and rooftop ventilation spaces were a matter of physical health. In
226
this new period, the outdoors helped to secure social and moral fitness. From churches to
universities, African-Americans from various institutions were concerned about this
problem.
In 1936, the Reverend Richard Keller, the Defender’s religious editor reported a
“startling increase” of African-American children in the juvenile courts, and highlighted
that younger and younger children were being brought into Chicago’s juvenile detention
centers and training schools. He connected this rise in youth crime to “the pressing
problem of providing a livelihood” during the post-Depression years. 515 Keller
concluded that if Chicagoans were to reduce “gangsterism” and “the disintegration of
family life,” African-Americans had to give “boys and girls the opportunity for
constructive activity to fill their leisure time.”516 Keller characterized Black families as,
“hard hit during the past five years by the depression,” and “not…able to provide their
progeny with adequate facilities for recreation and development.”517 Keller’s article was
also a promotion of the Defender’s Billikens Club, a children’s group that sponsored an
annual parade and field days for Black children.518 Chicago Camp Fire Girls
occasionally wrote to the character Bud to request pen pals and share their experiences in
their council.
The University of Chicago’s intellectual community also came to similar
conclusions about delinquency and the needs of youth recreation. The University’s
515
Chicago Defender, “Bud’s Easter Celebration Boon to Youth of Race,” April 11, 1936.
516
Ibid, “Bud’s Easter Celebration.”
517
Ibid, “Bud’s Easter Celebration.”
518
Robert S. Abbott established the Bud Billiken Parade in 1929. Each year, the parade is held the second
Sunday in August to celebrate the start of a new school year. The character of Bud Billiken ‘wrote’ a
column in the newspaper for the children’s section, called Defender Junior, and more than 10,000 children
sought membership in the Billiken Club.
227
sociologists and research institutes played an important role in assessing juvenile
delinquency issues during this period. Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake’s 1945 Black
Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City was an extensive study of
Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s and 1940s, and the University’s noted sociologist
Lloyd Warner also supported it. The study, which was in large part a Works Progress
Administration (WPA) project in conjunction with the Julius Rosenwald Fund and the
Church of the Good Shepard, looked at juvenile delinquency during the Depression.
Though the report did not explore gender and juvenile delinquency explicitly, it provided
some insights into the prevalence of girls’ delinquency in addition to the recreational
needs of African-American youth. Cayton and Drake discovered that the Depression had
caused an increase in the number of youth offenders in Chicago’s juvenile courts. The
report claimed that in 1930, 20 out of every 100 hundred boys called before the juvenile
court were African-American boys; the rates for girls were almost as high.519 The study
also cited that in 1944, “the superintendent of the state training school for girls at Geneva,
Illinois reported that Negro girls made up 36 percent of all girls at the institution.”520
Cayton, and Drake, like the Reverend Keller, emphasized the importance of opening
recreation to Black children to curb further delinquency.
On the whole, youth advocates and researchers framed the issue of juvenile
delinquency in terms of familial poverty and the lack of opportunities for alternatives to
crime. Yet, some observers were concerned that poorer children were disproportionately
and sometimes unjustifiably implicated in juvenile delinquency. In a 1940 letter to the
519
Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis; A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, 3rd Ed.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 589.
520
Ibid, 204.
228
editors of the Defender, A.L. Foster, executive secretary of the Chicago Urban League
expressed concern that poor youth were being unfairly accused of the rise in juvenile
delinquency. “The present wave of lawlessness among youth may partly be explained by
the present economic situation, bad housing, over-crowded conditions, etc. but it is
significant that there is no greater increase in juvenile delinquency among boys and girls
who are on relief than among those young people who have…economic advantage.”521
Due to the widespread devastation of the Depression, African-Americans who once
enjoyed some of the trappings of a middle-class life may have found themselves in closer
proximity to the African-American underclass.
Regardless of the debates about the sources of juvenile delinquency, most
community leaders agreed that outdoor activities, to some extent, could serve to help
expand horizons if not alleviate the problems. Camping advocacy has its roots in
Progressive era activism, and the New Deal mandate for parks and recreation helped to
revive the spirit of the earlier initiatives. In addition to funding research studies, the
WPA, partnered with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the National Park
Service (NPS) to create Recreation Demonstration Areas (RDA)—federally owned land
that later became national parks. Of the RDA’s 46 parks, 34 of these sites were leased to
camp groups to provide campsites. The NPS benefited from this arrangement because it
allowed them to acquire more land and they secured labor for clearing and preservation
projects from CCC employed relief workers. The RDA focused primarily on urban areas,
like Chicago, and southern Illinois gained the Pere Marquette Park as a result of the
521
Chicago Defender, “What the People Say,” March 16, 1940.
229
mandate.522
In addition to organizing the physical work of creating the parks, the NPS
undertook research on the need for parks too. A 1941 study conducted by the NPS,
which was under the U.S. Department of the Interior, entitled “A Study of the Park and
Recreation Problem of the United States” discussed the importance of recreational
facilities for Americans in urban areas. The study concluded described city life as “lived
among man-reared walls, man-built streets, objectionable noises and smells, and for a
large percentage of them, in poor housing.”523 Among the report’s list of needs were
“neighborhood playgrounds within easy walking distance,” and “playfields and
neighborhood centers.”524 Parks were also a major part of this vision because, “no matter
how poor, [citizens] may enjoy them at least occasionally.”525 The goal of creating parks
was to allow “city folk and by those who live in thickly populated or intensively
cultivated rural sections” an opportunity to engage in “picnicking, water sports, day and
overnight camping, hiking, and other related activities” that could “provide those who use
them a sense of freedom and of separation from crowds.”526 According to the report, by
1930 57.2% of all Americans lived in cities, and the “highly artificial conditions under
522
Harpers Ferry Center National Park Service, “The National Parks: Shaping the System,” U.S.
Department of Interior, Washington, D.C., 2005. (online book)
http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/shaping/index.htm
523
United States Department of the Interior National Park Service, “A Study of the Park and Recreation
Problem of the United States,” 1941 (online book)
http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/park_rec/index.htm.
524
Ibid, “A Study of the Park and Recreation Problem of the United States.”
525
Ibid, “A Study of the Park and Recreation Problem of the United States.”
526
Ibid, “A Study of the Park and Recreation Problem of the United States.”
230
which city dwellers are forced to live,” proved that this crusade was not in vain.527 The
NPS presented a somewhat egalitarian vision of all Americans accessing the state park
system by emphasizing the potential of parks to relieve the everyday city dweller from
his or her many stresses. “Yet a vacation in the out-of-doors in attractive natural or
naturalistic surroundings, where a reasonable variety of recreational occupation may be
obtained, is desirable for all and particularly for those whose limited means normally
provide only limited recreational opportunities.”528 The NPS, in similar ways as the
Camp Fire organization, did not engage the troubling issue of race. The NPS maintained
a policy of non-discrimination, but often hid behind ‘local custom’ to determine
openness. State segregation policies limited African-American access to the park
systems created ‘separate but equal’ racial barriers to enjoying ‘naturalistic
surroundings.’529
The New Deal’s park programs benefited the city of Chicago greatly, yet like
state parks, city parks also presented hurdles to African-Americans. Between 1934 and
1941, the federal government provided more than $100 million for improvements,
including the commissioning of WPA artists to create murals and public art for parks and
the creation of Lake Shore Drive.530 Yet, as a practice, African-American neighborhoods
527
Ibid, “A Study of the Park and Recreation Problem of the United States.”
528
Ibid, “A Study of the Park and Recreation Problem of the United States.”
529
For illustrative examples of this, see Reed Engle, “Laboratory for Change,” Resource Management
Newsletter (January 1996) online report, National Park Service,
http://www.nps.gov/shen/historyculture/segregation.htm and Susan Cary Strickland, “Prince William
Forest Park: An Administrative History,” History Division National Park Service, Washington, D.C., 1986,
http://www.nps.gov/prwi/historyculture/segregation.htm.
530
Julia Sniderman Bachrach, “Park Districts,” Encyclopedia of Chicago,
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/955.html.
231
were often among the Chicago Park District’s lowest priorities. In 1930, Chicago’s
Second Ward comprised 86.6% of African-Americans, yet contained less than 8 acres of
parks and playgrounds. The city’s ratio of person per acre was 507 to 1, but when race
was factored in, there were more than 8000 African-American Chicagoans per city
acre.531 City parks and recreational facilities at the edges and outside of AfricanAmerican sections of the city were often stages for segregation, and sometimes, conflict.
Cayton and Drake’s research found anecdotes of racial violence in Chicago’s recreational
facilities, including an incident in which a woman and four girls could not secure a locker
at a public beach, so a group of White children destroyed their clothes. In another case a
policeman refused to intervene when a group of Whites harassed Black and Mexican
children participating in a WPA program at a public beach. The officer explained that he
could not help the children “on account that he was told to ‘put all colored off the
beach.”’532 Black Metropolis also found that the color line “in amusement places such as
roller skating rinks, bowling alleys, and public dance halls,” was a “rigid line,” because
those activities brought the sexes together and exacerbated fears of ‘social equality’ and
‘race mixing’ between White and Black youth.533 Cayton and Drake commented that,
“Most Negroes do not wish to risk drowning at the hands of an unfriendly gang.
Therefore, they swim at all-Negro beaches or one in the Black Belt parks.”534 That
statement referred to the 1919 drowning of Eugene Williams, which touched off the
531
Gareth Canaan, “Part of the Loaf: Economic Conditions of Chicago’s African-American Working Class
During the 1920’s,” Journal of Social History (Fall 2001): 71.
532
Cayton and Drake, 105.
533
Ibid, 105.
534
Ibid, 106.
232
Chicago Race Riots.535 The Chicago Park District’s policies, as well as neighborhood
resistance, often determined the color line in Chicago’s swimming pools, sports courts
and field houses. Therefore, whether administered by the NPS or under the auspices of
the Chicago Park Districts, often youth camps were also segregated. Due to the politics
of play, organizations such as Camp Fire and Scouting tried to work on providing
camping facilities for them.
The Fight to Camp
African-American women leaders, some still haunted by the memories of the
Riots, worked on securing private camping facilities for girls. Camping became a part of
many area women’s club agendas and they developed an interest in helping to eradicate
juvenile delinquency. The growing network of pro-camp women helped Camp Fire Girls
in their fundraising, and helped legitimate the effort. The Chicago’s Women’s City Wide
Betterment league, which met at the Metropolitan Delinquency Prevention Division, had
a standing committee devoted to camping.536 Dr. T. H. Nelson, Chicago’s Central
YMCA president called summer camp one of “the most effective types of educational
enterprises,” because “the whole boy or girl [is] dealt with.”537 In camping, Nelson
asserted, “girls at camp become acquainted with new beauties through lessons on insects
535
Eugene Williams, an African-American boy, was attacked at the 29th Street Beach on July 27, 1919.
After being struck with stones by a White beachgoer, Williams was hit on the head; his friend’s attempt to
save him failed and he died. Police refused to arrest the man who struck Williams, and instead AfricanAmericans were arrested for being on the ‘White side’ of the beach. The riots lasted five days, ending
when the weather turned threatening. For more on the Great Migration, as well as the riots that took place
that summer, see Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race
Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922).
536
Chicago Defender, “Study Delinquency,” May 9, 1942.
537
Chicago Defender, “Advantages of Camping are Cited,” July 6, 1935.
233
flowers, bird, wood, lore, fields, and streams. City children become acquainted with
these beauties, first inquire, then appreciate, and finally respond to them. Nature is
always an excellent teacher.”538 Nelson’s perspectives on camping reflect some of the
same undertones as racial uplift discourses because he believed that contact was the key
to influencing children. Just as mixing with the better classes helped influence the
underclass, nature served a similar civilizing function as the middle-class. The Southside
Community Committee also played a role in the camping advocacy. Committee Director
Golden B. Darby declared that “the value of a week in camp is immeasurable as the
contacts and experiences the children receive do more for them than like experiences in
the city for a month or more.”539 Darby’s assessment that nature was inherently more
valuable to children than city life represented the prevailing notion about juvenile
delinquency experts that the outdoors had a curative quality. Darby’s message fell on
eager ears. His group initiative on camping led to “interest in camp [becoming] so great
that each year an increasing number of children seek to be among the fortunate.”540
Camping was no longer leisure or play; rather it was an integral necessity to youth
development and community preservation. Darby warned African-American families,
“Let us not forget that we on the home front must face our responsibility squarely, for
indeed our First Line of Defense—Our Children, must not be neglected.”541 Darby later
supervised “Camp Illini” for 25 boys to visit, “where much of the state’s Indian lore
538
539
Ibid, “Advantages of Camping are Cited.”
Chicago Defender, “Summer Camp Program Set,” July 1, 1944.
540
Ibid, “Summer Camp Program Set.”
541
Ibid, “Summer Camp Program Set.”
234
originated.” 542 The Defender co-sponsored a competition where boys competed to attend
the weeklong camp.543
In the 1930s and 1940s, co-ed camping had not yet become acceptable, so strides
in camping was delineated by a gender. Camps slowly began to open up to AfricanAmerican girls as well as boys, which became major news in African-American
communities. In 1939, when Camp Rotary in Rockford opened their camp to Black girls,
the Defender reported, “Facilities provided for first time for young race lassies.”544 The
newspaper mentioned that in Rockford, a city forty miles outside of Chicago, recreation
areas had been earmarked for “all other underprivileged children of the city,” but “no
preparation has ever been made for Race girls between the ages of 10 and 18 years until
the attention of the camp group of the local Council of Social Agencies was called to the
fact.”545
As a group devoted solely to developing leadership through camping, the Black
Camp Fire councils throughout the city worked to secure campgrounds for their girls.
The national Camp Fire program extolled the virtues of seeking “purple hills for
climbing,” and for more affluent White Camp Fire councils, the hills were far easier to
access.546 Very early into Chicago’s Camp Fire introduction to the city, a group of White
Guardians was able to secure Camp Nawaka in South Haven, Michigan, which was only
open to White Camp Fire Girls. The group devised a ‘Donated Cottage’ scheme, and
542
Chicago Defender, “To Send 25 Youths to Camp,” August 2, 1947.
543
Chicago Defender, “To Send 25 Youths to Camp.”
544
Chicago Defender, “Four Day Outing at City Camp: Facilities Provided for Fist Time for Young Race
Lassies,” September 2, 1939.
545
Ibid, “Four Day Outing at City Camp.”
546
The Book of the Camp Fire Girls, 5.
235
donors helped pay for the building of cottages, general camp repairs and renovations.547
From their inception, White councils were able to fulfill the program’s camping mission.
For African-American groups with limited resources, while trying to arrange some type
of camping alternative, they supplemented their programs with local activities and sports.
Oececa organized a softball team to compete against other girls’ groups and community
teams at Madden Park.548 The games may have substituted for camping adventures.
Without a Camp Fire camp of their own, some Oececa and other council Girls
enjoyed the camping resources provided by other Black women’s organizations. The
1935 platform of Illinois’ state branch of the National Association of Colored Women’s
Clubs (NACW) included girls camping, and the Illinois Federation ran a camp in central
Illinois. An East St. Louis clubwoman, Annette Officer, secured the lot, and her
colleague, state president Carrie Horton “developed it and provided tents, cots and
arrangements for cooking and a caretaker.”549 The National Association of Colored
Girls, an offshoot of the NACW organized by the group, created a camp at Lake Storey,
Illinois, where girls’ clubs could attend and invite guests.550 The Galesburg chapter of a
NACW club shared plans for a girls’ camp in the district in 1930.551 Dorothy Mae
Parker, of Chicago, “was one of the two girls sent to camp by the Dorcas Art and Charity
Club.”552 Some women of means were able to establish their own camps. Sarah L.
547
The Early Years, 1913-1921,” The Book of the Camp Fire Girls, 30.
548
Chicago Defender, “Softball Meet in Final Rounds; 20 Teams Compete,” October 1, 1932.
549
Chicago Defender, “Race Women in Club Work,” May 4, 1935.
550
Chicago Defender, “Illinois,” August 22, 1936.
551
Chicago Defender, “Illinois State News,” December 20, 1930.
552
Chicago Defender, “Dorothy Parker Back from Camp,” September 26, 1936.
236
Coleman opened a camp for African-American children in conjunction with the Chicago
Park District, which may have indicated that the Parks were not in a hurry to integrate
existing camps. An affiliate of the Central Northern District Association of Colored
Women’s clubs, Coleman established the Camp in 1935 in the Illinois Forest Preserves.
She opened the camp because “girls of the Race were limited for such recreational
activities.”553 Coleman wanted “to give the same program that other camps offer.”554
Coleman raised funds for the project through pretty baby contests, popularity
competitions, and other social activities. The desire to “give the same” to AfricanAmerican girls indicates that camping was more than just something to do over a long hot
summer or a way of keeping girls away from danger or trouble. African-American
women who worked with Camp Fire, and similar programs perceived sending girls to
Camp as a way of achieving equality of access to recreation to African-American girls.
Black and White Camp Fire Girls did not interact outside of camping sites either.
During this time, Black and White councils often celebrated Camp Fire activities
separately. For example, in March of 1935, the Wabash Colored YMCA hosted the girls
as they celebrated Camp Fire’s 23rd birthday, with “a huge cake” provided by Mrs. O.
Wiltz, a local society woman. The ceremony included “a rededication of the girls and
Sponsors to the ideals of Camp Fire.”555 Ironically, the racially segregated event was
described as an opportunity for “observers to gain a new insight into the meaning of
553
Chicago Defender, “To Hold Benefit Party April 18th; Camp Shows Progress Since 1935 Opening,”
April 15, 1939.
554
Chicago Defender, “To Hold Benefit Party.”
555
Chicago Defender, “Campfire Girls,” March 30, 1935.
237
Camp Fire and a new vision of the working together of all groups as a united whole.”556
The newspaper talks about the group “developing of them into splendid womanhood…”
and “also takes care of the leisure times of the adolescent girls.”557 The article also
hinted that the group was working on a minstrel and dance revue to raise funds. The
article noted that the ceremonies encouraged ‘working together,’ but that was not a hint at
interracialism. Meanwhile, the national organization prided itself for being an interracial
group. White Camp Fire Girls celebrated separately with a birthday party of their own
that month at the Chicago Real Estate Board Building. Camp Fire Girls from the allWhite Bryn Mawr Community Church and Girls from suburban Park Ridge and Niles
hosted the event.558
The majority of Sponsors’ fundraising efforts, like the birthday celebrations, were
devoted to building camp facilities on existing parks and land that would be open to
African-American children. Sponsors discussed dormitories for Sunset Hills as early as
the November 1940 meeting. In 1944, the Camp Fire revue, “Sentimental Moods of
1944,” was devoted to the Building Fund for more dorms at Sunset Hills. The event
included Antoinette Duke, the president of the Horizon Girls.559 In October of 1947, the
Oececa Girls finally got the news that had waited decades to hear. National Association
of Negro Musicians member Annette B. White donated 25 lots of land in Idlewild,
556
Ibid, “Campfire Girls.”
557
Ibid, “Campfire Girls.”
558
Chicago Daily Tribune, “Camp Fire Girls to Hold Birthday Program Tonight,” March 22, 1935.
559
Chicago Defender, “Girls Present Musical Revue,” July 8, 1944.
238
Michigan to the girls to establish a camp. Idlewild was a popular vacation town for
affluent African-Americans in the Midwest. The property, appraised at a value of about
$20,000 was a major donation to the group considering the barriers to African-American
camping. The donation was made as a tribute to her sister, Mrs. Fannie Henry, “a
musician and one of the first sponsors of the Camp Fire Girl movement in the state.”560
White, a member of the Ida B. Wells Woman’s Club, and her sister Fannie were involved
in Chicago’s music community and she often performed at society luncheons and garden
parties.561 White’s musical activities helped raise funds for the “race Kiddies under the
care of the Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society.”562
The generous donation helped inspire greater efforts to raise funds to develop the
land allotment. Similar to Sunset Hill’s opening up to Camp Fire, the land was only as
valuable as its ability to house Girls at camp. The Oececa’s board, under the direction of
Mrs. Samuel J. Fountain, tried to raise $5,000 to supply the camp with buildings. The
Oececa ended the fundraising drive with a music program at Corpus Christi Hall. In the
fall, the Oececa honored White with an “autumn soiree” to raise funds to pay for
dormitories on the donated land.563 White’s gift for the Girls was an important moment
for those who worked for girls in the late 1940s. White was a representative race woman
and her ability to donate a significant amount of land to the organization, symbolized the
gains in the clout and financial status of African-American women in the North. No
560
Chicago Daily Tribune, “Our Town,” October 5, 1947.
561
Chicago Defender, “Woman’s Club Celebrates 46th Year,” January 28, 1939.
562
Chicago Defender, “Carefree Hours of Enjoyment are anticipated by Supporters of Second Annual
Women’s Amateur Minstrel, November 5, 1938.
563
Chicago Defender, “Camp Fire Girls Will Honor Bud Billiken at Autumn Soiree,” November 1, 1947.
239
other organization or individual, regardless of commitment, was able to make such a gift
to Oececa. The gift was also significant because it was the sum total of Black women’s
groups, Camp Fire Guardians and clubwomen, activism and efforts to secure a permanent
camp site for African-American Girls.
The Oececa Girls celebrated and enjoyed their new camp facilities in Idlewild,
and the Camp Fire community continued to grow. Throughout the 1950s, other Camp
Fire Councils grew to accommodate more African-American girls. By 1954, the new
council of Tep Pwe Tanda Camp Fire Girls was established and participated in a “spring
vacation tour” of the Defender.564 The following year, prompted possibly by a national
call to recruit more members to Camp Fire, the Chicago councils began a membership
drive. In 1956, a new council named the We-Ce-Ko-Co formed to organize girls in the
upper South side of the city.565 In 1958, a Bluebird group was operating in the
Wentworth Gardens Housing Project.566
Eventually, as the political climate of the Civil Rights Movement changed the
nation, some major youth educational and social organizations also shifted, but Camp
Fire was slow to change. Although African-American youth activists recognized the
value of Camp Fire Girls, some were hesitant to give the group a whole-hearted
endorsement because of the racial barriers within the organization’s local councils. In an
article in the Journal of Negro Education, a social work professor at Howard University
both praised Camp Fire Girls for being a “character building agency,” and he criticized it
564
Chicago Defender, standalone photo, May 8, 1954.
565
Chicago Defender, “National Hails Campfire Girls and Girl Scouts,” March 10, 1956.
566
“On Good Friday,” Chicago Daily Defender, May 10, 1958.
240
because it was “limited to the participation of a small number of Negro girls.”567 Camp
Fire did not collect data on its participants by race, but it is clear that African-American
girls participated marginally until the 1960s. Eventually, at the height of the Civil Rights
struggle for African-American rights and equality in the mid-1960s, Camp Fire radically
changed its institutional policies and practices. Responding to both national calls for
action and declining membership, the organization took steps toward integrating its
councils and acknowledging the African-American presence in its community.
The national organization’s desire to progress with the times influenced the
Chicago Council. Meanwhile, by the mid-1960s, most Chicago-area campsites were
desegregated, and African-American service organizations sponsored trips for their
youth. In 1968, the Camp Fire Girls’ South side office solicited alumna of Camp
Tiyalaka in Westfield, Wisconsin to submit memories of camping at the facility, which
indicates at some point beginning in 1947, the Camp gradually opened up to AfricanAmerican girls.568 In 1966, Chicago media personality Les Brownlee was appointed
vice-president of the Chicago Area Council, a first for an African-American man.569
While the Civil Rights Movement began to change the hearts and minds of the White
members regarding integration, Black Camp Fire Girls began to participate in ‘cultural
activities’ tied to emerging Black Nationalism. In 1972, Camp Fire Girls participated in
the “Black Esthetics” celebration at the Museum of Science and Industry.570
567
Ira L. Gibbons, “Character Building Agencies and the Needs of Negro Children and Youth,” Journal of
Negro Education 19, no. 3: (Summer 1950), 368.
568
Chicago Defender, “Campfire Girls Plan Gala 25th Birthday,” July 15, 1972.
569
Chicago Defender, standalone photo, March 9, 1968.
570
Chicago Defender, “Calendar of Events,” February 21, 1972.
241
Conclusion
An examination of Oececa’s history provides some insight into how AfricanAmerican women helped girls participate in predominately White, and sometimes
segregated, organizations. Often, the institutional histories of girls’ organizations fail to
engage how race shaped both girls’ experience and women’s leadership. Camp Fire Girls
provides an interesting arena for this type of inquiry because of the relative autonomy of
individual councils and the regional differences in council practices and openness.
Further studies of Black Camp Fire councils across the country can help historians of
Black women’s activism understand how African-Americans adapted, interpreted, and
understood programs that ultimately excluded them. Despite Camp Fire’s institutional
engagement with race in a number of areas including the organization’s belief that Camp
Fire had a racial duty to Whites, the desire to Americanize ethnic girls in settlement
houses and the cooptation of Native American symbols for Camp Fire activities, the
organization rarely connected with African-American people and councils. Oececa
leaders used Camp Fire’s benign neglect to their advantage, and they were able to mold a
racially alienating program into a beneficial and community-driven one. Oececa’s
specific story also indicates how the culture of racial uplift shifted and developed as the
needs of African-Americans changed through the Migration years.
African-American women leaders like King and her peers were motivated to lead
the Oececa Camp Fire councils for a variety of reasons, but the strongest attraction to
Camp Fire may have been its consistency with racial uplift ideology, the fear of juvenile
delinquency and the desire to demonstrate that African-American girls also ‘deserved’
the privilege of enjoying camping and leisure activities. Camp Fire’s maternalist politics
242
paralleled the similar discourses of African-American women’s clubs. Camp Fire linked
the experience of camping with developing strong motherly figures. Camp Fire Girls was
founded on the notion that experiences of nature and camping helped groom a girl into a
thoughtful, nurturing, yet tough woman. The organization boasted, “Camp Fire Girls are
different from other girls.”571 Similar to African-American women’s desire to uplift girls
to become ‘mothers of the race,’ White supporters of Camp Fire, and other similar
groups, believed that the Camp Fire experience could help them restore the White
household. Again, girls were the key to a patriarchal future. In a 1915 edition of the
Journal of Heredity, one expert declared “fitness for motherhood is a happy by-product
of Camp Fire activities, which makes for splendid physique and intelligent control of
one’s own body and mind.”572 Camping facilitated the strong body, which could be
exercised into a stronger race, with stronger mothers and “sturdy, healthy, and happy”
babies.573 Ultimately, a study of Camp Fire reminds that there were many varieties of
racial uplift. Although Camp Fire did not lead to an expansion of educational or
vocational opportunities for girls, Camp Fire’s success rested on the same desires of
African-American uplift action. Camp Fire Girls put a positive face on AfricanAmerican communities by grooming the best of its girls to withstand public scrutiny.
Camp Fire was a highly visible organization identifiable by its custom garb and public
events. The Camp Fire name appeared regularly in the press. In turn, by serving as
‘representative girls’ led by ‘representative women,’ African-American Camp Fire Girls
provided a great sense of pride among the community. The struggle to create more
571
The Book of the Camp Fire Girls, 5.
572
As quoted in Miller, 197.
573
Ibid, 197.
243
opportunities for African-American girls did not allow any moment to be wasted, even at
play girls and women were strategic about their work. Whether it is at school, at work or
in the campground, African-American girls had to be involved in every facet of
combating negative racial and gender stereotypes of Black females. Respectability was
an issue in the world of children’s play too, and it reflects the political significance of
children’s organizations and calls into question whether girls could remain innocent in an
age of deep political struggle.
Fears about innocence and protection permeated discourses about juvenile
delinquency, as well. African-American girls were not too young to participate in racial
uplift initiatives, but they were not quite able to protect themselves from the dangers of
city life and potential sexual vulnerability. Camp Fire’s growth among AfricanAmericans demonstrated a widespread concern over the association between AfricanAmerican youth and delinquency. When Gulick framed the Camp Fire Girls, he was far
more concerned with insolence and sexual vice, than actual crime. Similarly, AfricanAmerican clubwomen were also concerned about the sexual morality of AfricanAmerican girls in Great Migration cities. Camp Fire did not explicitly state their mission
to suppress girls’ sexuality through camping, but Gulick himself expressed these
intentions in other venues, and promoted as camping into a rugged, yet virtuous activity.
When Gulick presented his idea for Camp Fire to his fellow social scientists at the
Academy of Political Science, he alerted his audience to Camp Fire’s potential to quell
the social vices of unsupervised teenagers, especially in the areas of sexual
experimentation and promiscuity. Gulick believed that the key to bridling adolescent
passions was cultivating their senses of adventure and diverting them toward group and
244
communal activities, such as camping. Using a metaphor of a ‘great dam’ of social
services, Gulick remarked, “If we can provide ways in which adventure can count in
connection with everyday work, we may help direct the powerful streams of human
instinct…which lead boys and girls in their teens to want to know each other.”574
Gulick’s intention to suppress youth energies resonated with a post-Depression Camp
Fire Guardian, who read sensational reports of youth crime in the Defender or the
Chicago Daily News. This element of controlling youth sexuality, in the context of
African-American racial uplift, related to respectability politics and the anxieties about
stereotypes on female promiscuity. Racial uplifters did not want all African-American
children indicted for the behavior of a few, especially if they were of the lower classes.
And, they especially did not want their girls implicated in unsavory behavior. In
identifying camping as the solution to juvenile delinquency, African-American recreation
advocates and Council leaders framed the outdoors as having the power to uplift via
contact. Nature talk mirrored dialogue that suggested that the upper class modeled right
behavior to poorer Blacks. Proximity to nature was similar to proximity to the upper
class—the outdoors could inspire better behavior. For poorer girls, Camp Fire brought
them in contact with their peers of ‘the better classes,’ while also expanding their
horizons through introduction to leisure class activities.
Camp Fire Girls were not delinquents, and quite possibly they may not have been
potential delinquents, yet the fears and anxieties of further youth problems may have
574
Gulick, “Recreation and Youth,” 592. One of Gulick’s many publications dealt with young men's
passions explicitly. In The Dynamic of Manhood, Gulick advocated for men to control their sexual urges
as a means of conditioning their emotions and expressions. See Luther H. Gulick, The Dynamic of
Manhood (New York: New York Association Press, 1918). In these types of work, you can see the
relationship between Gulick and G. Stanley Hall.
245
shadowed the joys of the Girls’ participation in both public and private events. AfricanAmerican Camp Fire Guardians and Girls alike had to find a way to understand their
experience in relationship to White councils which enjoyed privileges that they could not
access. Oececa Guardians took steps to ensure their Girls would not be second-class
citizens in the land of Wo-He-Lo. Through their strategic planning and diligence, the
Oececa Guardians were able to creatively and boldly put their Girls first. As a result of
this insistence to create opportunities for their Girls, Oececa brought poorer girls in
contact with notable African-Americans, and created an interclass organization in a time
when elitism shut out girls from Black social opportunities and cultural programs.
Underprivileged girls rarely had an opportunity to go to places outside of the city, let
alone an exclusive place like Idlewild. Camp Fire provided a cross-class opportunity,
though the leadership was among the upper class, the group served a cross-section of the
city’s African-American girls. For instance, one Second Ward Camp Fire Girls, Miss
Constance Johnson was a “well-known member of the younger social set and daughter”
of a prominent Chicago undertaker.575 She graduated from the Wendell Phillips High
School after completing her studies a semester early. Another prominent member was
Vivian Jones Rodgers, the daughter of “senatorial committeewoman,” who shared her
time with Camp Fire and the “Sub-debs,” social debutante club.576 For some girls, Camp
Fire was a way of staving off the negative influences of the slums, and for others, it was
simply one of many activities to help her grow into a well-rounded woman. Similar to the
tensions felt by Chicago’s mainline Christian churches struggling to include Southern
575
Chicago Defender, “Congratulated,” June 24, 1933.
576
Chicago Defender, “Rites Held for Mrs. V.J. Rodgers Young Socialite,” February 20, 1937.
246
migrants, Oececa may have provided the same opportunity but the audience of their help
may have received it very differently. For the middle and upper class Camp Fire girl, the
activity was one of many that made them part of the young social set. Therefore, the
recreation response was not considered only a means of quelling the criminal tendencies
of poorer girls; rather recreation was framed as essential to all youth’s development.
Camp Fire’s success in providing a place for African-American girls was predicated upon
the tireless commitment of many women and girls who believed that they too could effect
change through a little bit of play time. As Chicago’s social and educational segregation
slowly dissipated, African-American girls could reach higher goals and gain greater
support for their pursuits, from camping to college.
The programs featured in this study do not represent the entire African-American
girl experience during Chicago’s Great Migration. Rather, this exploration provides
important context for understanding how the Migration’s culture of racial uplift informed
the way girls were discussed, led, and nurtured during a turbulent and exciting time for
African-American people. As she reflected upon her many years of service to Camp Fire,
activist Irene McCoy Gaines asserted this sentiment, which speaks to the dedication,
experience, and legacy of scores of African-American women and girls who sought to
make meaning out of their new lives up North: “Despite many handicaps and obstacles,
which I have had to face, I now know that my unkind environment and obstacles were
given to me for a purpose, and that I have been made stronger by and through them.577
577
Daryl Lyman, “Irene McCoy Gaines,” Great African-American Women (New York: Gramercy Press,
2001), 84.
CONCLUSION: THE MOST INTERESTING GIRLS
In the spring of 2008, one of my colleagues at the University of Oklahoma invited
me to what she believed was a discussion of comedian Bill Cosby’s most recent book
entitled Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors.578 The polemic was the
culmination of Cosby’s various speeches directed toward the African-American working
class and poor about ‘cleaning up their acts.’ Beginning with an acceptance speech at a
NAACP Awards ceremony in 2004, Cosby spent the following three years visiting talk
shows and delivering public lectures about the ailing state of Black America. Cosby’s
sometime vitriolic comments about the lack of strong African-American parents, his
contention that the African-American underclass did not value education, and his
accusations that African-Americans valued material gain over character development
placed the entertainer in the middle of several debates about whether he was simply
‘airing dirty laundry,’ or merely ‘blaming the victim.’ Cosby’s one-man crusade even
inspired public intellectual Michael Eric Dyson to write a book which asked in its title, Is
Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle-Class Lost Its Mind?579 Considering my own
academic and personal interests on debates about class tensions and contemporary racial
uplift, I enthusiastically accepted an invitation to discuss what I believed to be an
important moment, historically and politically.
As I drove to the gathering of African-American women, I imagined a meeting
reflective of my generation’s understanding of Black women’s organizing which has its
578
Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors (New York:
Thomas Nelson, 2007).
579
Michael Eric Dyson, Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle-Class Lost its Mind? (New York:
Basic Civitas Books, 2005).
247
248
roots in the Second and Third Wave feminist movements, with consciousness-raising
discussions on how to challenge systems of oppression and reconfigure notions of power.
Instead, I stepped into another time altogether. I was expecting the 1970s, and I was
welcomed into the 1930s.
When I arrived at the meeting in Oklahoma City, I was surprised to find, via a
program book, that the event was actually part of a luncheon and discussion sponsored by
the city’s East Side Culture Club, a member of the National Association of Colored
Women’s Club. As a young historian of African-American women’s activism, I was well
aware of the historic 1896 meeting that organized this powerful group in Washington
D.C., and their rich heritage. Yet, as was the case with many women’s organizations, the
NACW’s influence began to abate in the late 1920s and early 1930s when the economic
challenges of the Great Depression impeded the growth and expansion of a number of
women’s groups. The existence of the group was as surprising as the ways in which the
members of the East Side Culture Club evoked the spirit of racial uplift that characterized
their foremothers’ interventions in community and political life. From the impeccably
dressed women who sat on a panel to discuss issues such as “personal appearance,”
“juvenile delinquency” and “self-respect,” to the calls for those assembled to be “an
influence on those not present” at the luncheon, I felt as if I were experiencing the type of
activity previously available to me only through digitized databases of the Chicago
Defender and the numerous reports of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority or the Northern
District Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.
The most striking aspect of the meeting was not its engagement with what seemed
to me outdated issues or somewhat anachronistic language. The anxieties of African-
249
American middle-class women toward their poorer sisters and brothers were not quelled
by the gains of the Civil Rights movement or their own social and economic mobility in
the ensuing decades. Rather, in scope of the club’s entire program—which included
lengthy discussions of multicultural education, African-American access to the city’s
public school programs, and youth employment barriers—not a single person discussed
issues pertaining to girls. Instead, African-American girls were evoked anecdotally to
buttress points about young men and the importance of the family. When girls were
mentioned in reference to Cosby’s book, it was to assert that girls were easily
manipulated into having sex with teenage boys. One panelist talked about her own
daughter in reference to the importance of African-American marriage and the patriarchal
home. The clubwoman admitted that she was indeed divorced and that her daughters
suffered because of it; the woman punctuated her statement by saying, “and we are
middle-class!” Her exclamation communicated the devastation of marriage dissolution
because it could even hurt the best classes of women. In fact, every presenter and theme
revolved around how the particular problem affected African-American boys and young
men exclusively. The last reference to girls was made by a male speaker, who discussed
juvenile delinquency, and he emphasized the importance of fathers in the Black home,
citing his daughter’s decision to marry while in college not because she was pregnant, but
because she had found a man just like him.
The meeting’s agenda mirrored some of Cosby’s commitments to speaking to
young men directly about African-American community problems and struggles, which
essentially meant problems experienced disproportionately by African-American males.
The first chapter of Cosby’s book, “What’s Going on with Black Men?” was answered by
250
many of the women in the club and those that worked with them. After sitting through
hours of alarmist statistics about African-American boys and men and their precarious
futures, I remembered how I came to this dissertation and its related research topics.
Despite the rich history of African-American women committing themselves to
advancing the educational and occupational opportunities of girls and teenage women,
somehow this constituency no longer appeared to matter to African-American
organizations, women’s clubs and otherwise. Finally, after the final speaker alarmed the
audience about boys dropping out of school, being sent to prison and the possibility that
African-American marriage rates would continue to decline, I had to ask, “Where is the
concern about girls?”
The Most Interesting Girl of This Country is the Colored Girl is an attempt to
respond to the shift in African-American organizations away from recognizing girls’
ability to contribute to African-American progress to an almost obsession with the needs
of boys and young men to the exclusion of girls. This shift may have its roots in the calls
to patriarchal restoration in the 1965 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,
also known as the Moynihan Report, which indicted African-American families for being
too matriarchal and supported federal full employment programs and military enlistment
to fortify Black manhood.580 The federal government’s endorsement of a patriarchal
uplift program coupled with the masculinist discourses of the Black Power movement
fundamentally changed the ways in which African-American organizations thought about
who will lead the future of the race.
580
Source: “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Office of Planning and Research, United
States Department of Labor (March 1965), www.dol.gov/asp/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm.
251
Outside of the African-American struggle for equality, girls in general suffered
under ‘backlash’ politics after Second Wave feminists successfully secured Title IX
protections for girls, paving the way for their achievement in academics and athletics.
By the 1980s and into the 2000s, educational experts began to decry girls’ educational
success and entire institutions began to concern themselves with helping boys ‘catch up’
with girls, who began outperforming, outscoring and out-graduating their male peers. As
girls grew into women who also demonstrated marked achievement in schools, colleges
and universities and graduate-professional education, a group of critics emerged to
castigate schools for not providing enough resources to accommodate boys and their
distinct learning style. By the late 1990s, educators began experimenting with separating
boys and girls in the classroom.581
Similar debates about African-American boys specifically also emerged during
the backlash years. Yet, in African-American discourses on boys underperforming their
girl peers, the stakes were much higher than simply degrees earned. In language that
echoed the racialized sexism of the Moynihan Report of the late 1960s, AfricanAmerican leaders started to discuss the ‘war on boys’ in public and in the press as a threat
to the Black (patriarchal) family and community. While African-American boys were
experiencing lower graduation rates, higher juvenile incarceration rates and difficulty in
securing employment, the suggestion of ‘war on boys’ grandstanding repeatedly ignored
girls problems, including vulnerability to sexual violence, child abuse and negative
representations in media. African-American groups began to organize around this issue
of boys’ problems, and even national women’s organizations contributed to ‘war on
581
See New York Times, “Boys Will Be Boys? Then Teach Them Separately, Perhaps,” March 23, 2008.
252
boys’ thinking at the exclusion of girls. The Black Star Project, endorsed by AfricanAmerican women’s groups in the city, is representative of the organizational response to
trying to bridge the ‘achievement gap.’ Despite the organization’s goal of “working to
eliminate the racial academic achievement gap,” the group devoted itself exclusively to
issues pertaining to boys and enlisted men to visit schools to serve as role models for
boys. Black Star leader Phillip Jackson penned an article entitled “America has lost a
generation of Black Boys,” without a single mention of how the social conditions that
endanger Black boys could possibly hurt girls.582
Instead of advancing a politics of resisting racism and sexism inside and outside
African-American communities, the ‘war on boys’ discussions pathologized AfricanAmerican girls’ success and assumed there was no role for girls in the leadership of
Black homes or organizations. These pronouncements served as an erasure of AfricanAmerican women’s activism and girls roles in the salvation of the race in an earlier
period. The Most Interesting Girl of this Country is a small contribution in repositioning
these contemporary discussions historically, emphasizing the works of women who truly
believed that girls could and did serve a purpose in their larger worlds.
More research is needed to discuss the ways in which girls have historically been
included in African-American discourses on the directions of the race to remind current
leaders, both male and female, not to forget them. As African-American community
leaders struggle to address educational inequalities and economic justice, intellectuals
must remind these figures that boys cannot stand in for youth as a whole when discussing
African-American youth and political needs. Although the latter half of the twentieth
582
Chicago Defender, “Black students to be helped by Male Mentors,” February 7, 2007; also, Chicago
Sun-Times, “Enough, May 17, 2007.
253
century appeared woefully out of touch with responding to girls’ needs, there were
women and organizations that heeded the call to serve girls in substantial ways that will
give future generations of scholars interesting topics of inquiry.
Regardless of how the undertaking was expressed—an industrial school, a girls
group within a Black nationalist project, sorority women serving as career counselors or
creating camp opportunities—we know that African-American women had a keen
understanding of the ways their part (Black girlhood and womanhood) could work on
behalf of the whole (the entire race). In her essay on African-American women and
urban culture in the 1920s, Hazel Carby argues that the policing of female sexuality in the
urban context, for Whites and upper class Blacks was a means of predicting the successes
and failures of all African-American people in the new contexts of the cities.583 I agree
with Carby’s analysis in light of the research on racial uplift during the Great Migration.
In relationship to girls in the African-American urban context, I add that girls were not
only policed but also projected upon in an age of growing anxiety about social status,
class position and claims to leadership. African-American women participated in racial
uplift out of benevolence and self-interest, and they sought out work with girls in hopes
that this work could help the communities and their moral authority. African-American
women were the mothers of all the race, yet work with girls took on a different meaning
in their identification with their collective and shared plight, and they saw works with
girls as a safe place to exercise power.
The Most Interesting Girl of this Country explores a period in which AfricanAmerican girls symbolized hope for African-American communities, and it presents how
583
Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18:4 (Summer
1992), 738-755.
254
African-American girls played a role in economic, social and political projects. This
dissertation examines the relationship between the organizers of girls’ programs and their
particular social, political and economic contexts during the Great Migration. This
project is consistent with and departs from the field of African-American women’s
history by highlighting women’s leadership in their communities, while also attempting
to provide insights into the resources available to girls during urbanization.
This research is one step toward seeing how gender relations and the vulnerability
of girls compelled the Migration process for their mothers and entire families as
Migration could have been a means of protecting them from future abuse or exploitation
under the Southern labor and sexual exploitation market. In addition to what pulled
migrants out of the South, this study also looks at how the Migration changed the way
African-Americans could live in the city through industrial education, career
development, consuming goods and entertainment, and enjoying recreational
opportunities. The lives of African-American girls is a topic largely untouched by
African-American historians, but it is not only worthy of a thorough treatment in
recognizing their roles in shaping African-American life, it is essential.
In addition to unlocking the world of girls, this project contributes to the larger
body of work on African-American women’s activism. As the field expands and grows
in its rigorous asking of questions, we find that African-American women’s work in the
public sphere was wrought with contradictions, conflicts and deep commitment. In
understanding how racial uplift operated in the day-to-day pronouncements and work of
African-American women leaders we gain a far more nuanced look at just how ‘heavy a
load’ race work was, and helps us recognize the challenges of our time.
255
Finally, this project is an intervention into the field of girls’ studies to create more
space for historical analysis and studies of girls of color within the existing framework.
Girls’ studies can only develop as its own area of inquiry if it makes certain that all girls
are represented equally and with care to understanding the context of their histories. As
Fannie Barrier Williams discovered, although African-American girls were profoundly
interesting, she also worried that “the term ‘colored girl’ is almost a term of reproach in
the social life of America is all too true; she is not known and hence not believe in…”
This project is one step to knowing this girl, in the past and the present. Williams was
perceptive and hopeful when she proclaimed: “The character of American womanhood is,
in spite of itself, affected by the presence of the colored girl.”584
584
Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Colored Girl,” in Mary Jo Deegan, ed. The New Woman of Color: The
Collected Writings of Fannie Barrier Williams (DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 58.
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