When Fannie Lou Hamer started a Freedom Farm near Ruleville, Mississippi, the farm's Pig Bank provided families with a rolling supply of meat, combating hunger in the impoverished area. It was the National Council of Negro Women, an organization of women's organizations begun in 1935 by Mary McLeod Bethune, who provided the original “fifty white Yorkshire gilts and five brown Jersey boars” (130). Five years later, more than three thousand pigs had been produced on the farm. “Every time I kill them hogs, I think about the National Council of Negro Women,” one recipient remarked; without them, “[we] wouldn't have this meat” (130).

These and other fascinating facets of the NCNW's place in the black freedom struggle are revealed in a new study by Rebecca Tuuri called Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. A historian at the University of Southern Mississippi, Tuuri offers a compelling intervention in the historiography of the black freedom movement, which has largely overlooked the ways in which middle- and upper-class African American women helped to make the movement.

Strategic Sisterhood begins with a sweeping account of the NCNW's founding and first three decades before detailing several key projects the council developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Focussing largely on the southern struggle, especially in Mississippi, several chapters follow the origins and work of Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS, later Workshops in Mississippi.) WIMS mobilized mostly middle-class and elite women from the North to visit their counterparts in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. These interracial teams from the North segregated themselves in Mississippi as they visited moderate white women and African American families. Tuuri argues that through WIMS, northern women provided a “personal witness” (56) to the severity of segregation, violence and black poverty.

This “witness” then morphed, first, into “liberal dialogue” groups in 1965, and then in 1966 into “workshops” that brought together “black women in Mississippi and government agencies distributing War on Poverty funds” (108). Here – with Workshops in Mississippi – is where Strategic Sisterhood provides its most compelling sense of the dynamic relationship between middle-class, moderate organizations like the NCNW and the radical efforts swirling around them. WIMS hired a well-connected local woman, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party activist Unita Blackwell, to recruit workshop participants (whom the NCNW paid for their time). These women not only reoriented the ways in which the NCNW thought about “expertise,” but also schooled the officials in the room. In one workshop with a US Department of Agriculture agent who had “implied” that poverty resulted from personal choices, they told the agent that her assumptions about income were wrong, as “many of them made less money” than the “assumed lowest salary” (110) in the presentation. Polly Cowan, the white director of WIMS, taped the conversation and promised Fannie Lou Hamer that she would “play the tape for high-ranking officials at the US Department of Agriculture” (111).

In shifting its ideas about who possessed poverty “expertise,” the NCNW was clearly influenced by SNCC, MFDP and other grassroots groups in the movement, many of whom had long questioned top-down expertise. However, Strategic Sisterhood largely stops short of unpacking other ways in which the NCNW took its cues from the radical milieu in which it operated. To what extent did Council of Federated Organization groups see the value in WIMS and other NCNW efforts in Mississippi, and vice versa? Did the NCNW moderate the viewpoints, ideas or strategies of these groups in any way? These and other questions lack full answers, even as the book makes a successful case for seeing the NCNW as a complex civil rights organization.

Tuuri's account moves from WIMS to a number of ways in which the council promotes “black self-help and community survival,” including through its support of the Freedom Farm and low-income housing. Moreover, Tuuri shows that Height, as the long-serving president of NCNW, takes a shining to a number of young women like Prathia Hall and Frances Beal who cut their activist teeth in radical groups like SNCC, and she hires them in various capacities at NCNW, which provides them the capacity to carry out other, more radical projects. For instance, Frances Beal did the work to publish the Third World Women's Alliance's Triple Jeopardy newspaper while working for the council in New York. Here, Tuuri claims that hiring women like Beal “allowed for more radical views to permeate the generally staid organization” (159), but this is not effectively evidenced. Tuuri has done black freedom movement historiography a service in detailing the contributions of the NCNW but stops short of a compelling analysis of this work in relation to the larger movement.

Strategic Sisterhood releases the NCNW from the sober, elite frame that it is often captured within. While its central arguments might have gone further, overall the book contributes to a more multilayered view of the movement in the South.