In 1853, at the tenth anniversary banquet of the African American fraternal society the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows (GUOOF), Grand Secretary William M. Nelson articulated the organization’s central purposes:
When we speak of education, let it never be forgotten that the Odd Fellow’s Lodge is a real educational institution; when we recommend forethought and providence, let it be remembered that the working man’s bank and his insurance society is his lodge, and that this educational institution was established long, very long before governments had found it worth while [sic] to provide means for the instruction of the people.Footnote 1
What began as a series of local lodges under British leadership—because White lodges in the United States refused to sponsor Black ones—had grown to become one of the largest African American fraternal organizations in the United States, boasting three hundred thousand members across three dozen states in the 1910s. This figure represented more than 11 percent of all Black men in the country.Footnote 2 While heralding the fraternal lodge’s importance among African American men, Nelson’s observation also reflected how the challenges of obtaining an education were multiplied by the dearth of adequate school facilities for Black youth and by the legacy of educational restrictions imposed on enslaved African Americans, which continued to affect their descendants decades later.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the GUOOF was one of dozens of Black fraternal orders in the US, founded primarily to provide sickness and disability benefits and to cover funeral costs for members. In the early twentieth century, these organizations, such as the GUOOF, the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World (IBPOEW), and the Prince Hall Masons, were part of a larger universe of civic voluntary associations that expanded their activities to encompass a range of educational, political, and civic initiatives. Robin D. G. Kelley argues that even though African American organizations were not necessarily all working toward the same ends, they shared a common vision of mutual support, cooperative wealth, and dedication to the fight for civil liberties.Footnote 3
While the historiography of African American education includes the efforts of major national Black organizations, they remain positioned as peripheral supporting players. In this historiographical essay I posit that instead of being on the margins, Black voluntary associations were at the center of efforts to educate African Americans, and they were also part of a series of interlocking networks that promoted Black education in counterpublic spaces. In fact, reading across secondary sources on Black organizations’ efforts reveals that the education of African Americans originated in Black counterpublics—voluntary organizations, churches, and periodicals—and, during the Jim Crow era, was sustained in them.
In what follows, I investigate the meaning and purpose of Black civic organizations in the historiography and call for greater attention to their involvement and impact. My contention is that organizational leaders and members viewed the education of youth and adults as a primary focus of their activities. Some were explicit in construing their associations as learning institutions, as evidenced in Grand Secretary Nelson’s report. In the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, Black Americans were especially active in forming voluntary civic organizations to meet their needs, which were only second in number and influence of the church, the most central institution in African American life.Footnote 4 African American churches, organizations, and the Black press created a sense of community consciousness and opened up opportunities for race progress.Footnote 5 These many and varied voluntary organizations worked collaboratively as educational institutions that were focused on improving local public schools and on providing educational opportunities for youth and adults in informal settings. By the early twentieth century, Black association leaders directed their energies toward civil rights and school desegregation, while maintaining a focus on equitable education for all.
The notion of civic voluntary associations as educational settings was first observed in North America by Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s. The proliferation of voluntary associations in the United States was a curiosity to Tocqueville, which he deemed an American innovation. In Democracy in America, he recorded how multitudes joined together to create large-scale associations that allowed them to carry out their objectives. Tocqueville observed that “associations can therefore be considered great schools, free of charge, where all citizens come together to learn the general theory of association.”Footnote 6 In 1909, Booker T. Washington, echoing Tocqueville, referred to Black secret societies as “schools in which the masses have been taught the value and the methods of [civic] cooperation.”Footnote 7 A century after Tocqueville’s visit to the United States, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, in a foundational overview of the development of civic voluntary associations in the United States, called Black and White civic associations the “greatest school of self-government.”Footnote 8
Lawrence Cremin drew on Tocqueville to argue that there were a variety of “educative agencies” in the nineteenth century, which included churches, civic organizations, and communities.Footnote 9 However, he likely was not referring specifically to enslaved or free Black Americans in his consideration of informal places of teaching and learning, and many historians consider his definition to be too broad and expansive. Thus, Cremin’s line of inquiry has not been sustained in the historiography of US education, much less in the history of African American education, in which informal learning sites had developed out of necessity. Black civic organizations as educational settings have been largely obscured in the historiography because of historians’ emphases on formal schooling, the professional lives of Black educators, and the desegregation of schools. There are a few exceptions, such as V. P. Franklin’s investigation of the educational activities of Black social organizations in Philadelphia from 1900 to 1930, in which he argues that free African Americans created educational institutions in the form of public and private schools, as well as community educational agencies and social organizations.Footnote 10 It bears noting that the majority of the groups in Franklin’s study were local units of major national associations, such as the YMCA and National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACW). Few works in the history of education since then have centered the educational importance of Black organizations, while most have treated them as supplementary to the central narrative of formal schooling. This oversight in the scholarship is particularly striking when one considers that it is well understood among historians that informal spaces—churches, families, neighborhoods, and organizations—were indeed vital teaching and learning settings in and for Black communities.Footnote 11
Black Associationalism and the Counterpublic Sphere
The origins of this historiography are rooted in a book project I undertook on one Black civic organization, the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers (NCCPT), or Black PTA, which, as the segregated counterpart to the White PTA, had separate national, state, and local units in the American South. In conducting research on the NCCPT, I observed that it did not act alone but was part of a web of relations consisting of other major national groups, such as the NAACP, the National Association for Teachers in Colored Schools (NATCS)/American Teachers Association (ATA), and the National Urban League (NUL).Footnote 12 These linkages were created via individuals’ memberships in multiple organizations and the concerted efforts that were undertaken by leaders of these groups. For instance, one might join a fraternity or sorority in college and then join a women’s club, fraternal society, and/or civil liberties organization as an adult. What I learned, which this historiographical study bears out, is that the constellation of organizations—staffed and led by Black educators and community leaders—comprised interlocking networks of autonomous spaces that played a central role in the development of education for African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In recent years, historians of education have begun to bring to light these “networks of advocacy” through which Black educators and civic leaders operated.Footnote 13 In his biography of Chicago educator Madeline Morgan, Michael Hines demonstrates that she was sustained by “robust networks of support,” such as the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), the National Council for the Social Studies, local history clubs, sororities, and civil rights groups.Footnote 14 Morgan was not unique. She and others like her endeavored, through myriad voluntary associations, to support education and to work toward uplifting the race. For instance, Mary McLeod Bethune was active with the National Council of Negro Women, the NACW, and the women’s auxiliary for the Elks, the Daughter Elks. Also, she was elected president of the ASNLH in 1936. H. Councill Trenholm, the president of Alabama State Teachers College, was a member of the ATA, ASNLH, Prince Hall Masons, and YMCA, and sought to dovetail efforts between and among these various associations.Footnote 15 These individuals and others, through their memberships, were afforded autonomous spaces that, W. E. B. Du Bois asserted, allowed for “black public discussion, interaction, and exchange.”Footnote 16
Employing the conceptual framework of Black associationalism in his book on Carter G. Woodson and the ASNLH, Jarvis R. Givens calls for the intersection among these organizational networks and African American education to be explored in future scholarship.Footnote 17 Imani Perry notes that African Americans’ practice of associational life was rooted in the traditions that Tocqueville noted, but took place “behind the veil.”Footnote 18 Thus, for the purposes of this historiography, I define Black associationalism as the robust political and social institutions, including churches, organizations, and businesses, that were largely invisible to—and thus, not threatening to—White people. This counterpublic sphere allowed for the exchange of ideas, mobilization of support, cultivation of leadership, and gathering of intellectual and monetary resources focused on the education of African American citizens.
According to the Black Public Sphere Collective, the counterpublic is a global space that was shaped by the Black diaspora. It is a space in which new democratic ideas are developed, and different viewpoints interact and challenge one another outside of the exclusionary national narratives of Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. Likewise, the Black counterpublic has consistently been the central place where politically active and self-interested African American communities are able to form in the United States.Footnote 19 John L. Brooke locates the origins of Black associationalism in the work of Jürgen Habermas on the public sphere and in Nancy L. Fraser’s research on subaltern counterpublics. However, Joanna Brooks challenges this story of origin, claiming that Black associationalism emerged instead from enslavement and the years immediately after Emancipation. Thus, Brooks’s framing contrasts Fraser’s model of the subaltern realm as (White) women “publicizing that which had been declared private.”Footnote 20 She explains that the creation of a Black counterpublic involved a withdrawal from public ownership alongside the creation of Black collective spaces. These spaces, according to Hughey and Parks, “provided a buffer from the ferocity and surveillance of Jim Crow.”Footnote 21 The cooperative reappropriation of spaces that previously had been controlled by Whites, which eventually became the web of a multitude of separate associations, was purposed to educate, sustain, and support African Americans. Nina Mjagkij succinctly articulates the significance of Black associationalism as a “racially autonomous world that shielded African Americans from racial abuse and humiliation, while enabling them to serve the needs of the black community with honor, dignity, and respect.”Footnote 22
Using Givens’ contention as a springboard—that the interrelationships between African American education and Black associationalism must be investigated—this article assesses the types of African American civic organizations that appear in the historiography in order to provide a foundation on which others can build. Considering my scholarly interest in national civic voluntary organizations and the vast networks afformed by them, I focus on those entities in particular. By adopting the interpretive lens of Black associationalism, I am able to explore the linkages between and among individual members, organizations, and initiatives. Reading across the many studies cited below, while not an exhaustive list, it becomes evident that Black organizations provided autonomous spaces within which to educate members and community youth in schools and in informal settings; to teach Black history and culture; to fundraise for material needs and programs; and to cultivate leadership and organizational skills that would benefit the race and society as a whole.
A Historiography of Black Civic Voluntary Associations
No fewer than five hundred Black civic organizations—many of them local and short-lived—existed from the end of the Civil War until the late twentieth century.Footnote 23 Like White civic organizations, they brought together members of different socioeconomic classes; unlike the majority of those organizations, they were inclusive of women. Some Black groups included both men and women in the regular membership, but often women were relegated to separate groups. For example, the Black PTA was gender-integrated, but the IBPOEW, like many fraternal societies, had a separate women’s auxiliary, the Daughter Elks.
As Black associations multiplied at the turn of the twentieth century, contemporary historians and sociologists parsed them into categories to delineate the associations’ contributions (see table 1). Du Bois examined what he termed “social betterment efforts” as part of the Atlanta University Studies, which were carried out between 1899 and 1914. Setting aside churches, schools, and business enterprises, he reviewed a range of voluntary groups, such as women’s clubs and the YWCA and YMCA, as well as social, literary, and art clubs. Du Bois listed fraternal and secret societies under “Miscellaneous General Efforts,” and observed correctly that they were “more than [just] social and business organizations.”Footnote 24
Typology of Black Organizations
Another early chronicler of the Black experience, sociologist Monroe Work, produced compendia of African American activities and associations in the Negro Year Book, which was published periodically from 1912 to 1947. He sorted Black associations into national and fraternal groups, after which he further subdivided national organizations into five categories: educational advancement, economic advancement, professional advancement, women’s interests, and the general advancement of the Negro.Footnote 25 In An American Dilemma, Gunner Myrdal devoted space to Black associations, labeling them as social, protest, improvement, business, professional, fraternal, civic, trade, and religious groups.Footnote 26
In reconsidering these categories in light of the historiography, I concluded that all organizations were dedicated to advancement, whether they were focused on educational, economic, or political matters. In the discussion below, I have derived five major types from the table to review, while recognizing there is overlap among them: fraternal, women’s, school-related, civil rights, and Black Power associations. I included Black Power groups even though the term did not come into use until later in the twentieth century. These five categories form a typology of the Black associations that appear in the history of education, while I acknowledge that there are other kinds that may be explored, such as professional and social associations. In the following, I explain the origins of each type of group and its goals, point out where each appears in the historiography, and suggest paths for future historical study. I discuss them in chronological order according to when they emerged, and I discuss selected relevant secondary sources to highlight key insights into the educational work of the different organization types. As a collection, these national organizations form the sinews of Black associationalism, and each type merits fuller exploration by historians to reveal the ways that informal networks have shaped the history of African American education.
Fraternal Organizations
Both fraternal orders and Black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs) were founded to cultivate personal excellence, create and strengthen kinship ties, and foster racial uplift through community service, philanthropy, and civic participation.Footnote 27 Originally, fraternal societies, also referred to as “secret societies,” were founded for social purposes and to provide financial support to members in instances of illness or death. The earliest fraternal order, the Prince Hall Masons, was founded in 1775, while the other three foremost Black fraternal societies were founded in the mid- to late nineteenth century: the Odd Fellows (1843), Knights of Pythias (1880), and IBPOEW (1898). What distinguished BGLOs was their origin on college campuses in the late nineteenth century and the role they played in fostering unity among Black college students, cultivating leadership skills, and promoting academic achievement. Organized during the Jim Crow era, they offered a space for belonging and support for Black students attending predominantly White institutions.
For their myriad efforts regarding education, Black fraternal societies and their women’s auxiliaries get no more than a passing mention in the educational historiography. By contrast, BGLOs have been more widely studied, as scholarship has increased in the last two decades.Footnote 28 Important differences exist between the two types of fraternal organizations, however. Fraternal orders and women’s auxiliaries were largely cross-class organizations, while BGLOs, by comparison, had less socioeconomic diversity because they were founded at colleges and universities. Additionally, fraternal orders were often perceived as frivolous, owing to members’ penchant for dressing up in military-style regalia and marching in parades.Footnote 29 Both fraternal orders and BGLOs were largely unknown to White audiences and operated in the counterpublic sphere. Because they are less covered in the historiography, I dedicate more space to fraternal orders in this section.
In the early twentieth century, the Black autonomous space of fraternal societies was generally unknown to Whites. One White observer in 1913 remarked, “Almost without the knowledge of the white man, a vast network of lodges has spread all through the negro race in the last few years.”Footnote 30 Sociologist Howard Odum remarked that in the postbellum years, African Americans naturally became involved with fraternal groups, and “such societies prospered alike in town and country and city, and when once organized they immediately become a vital part of the community life, often its center.”Footnote 31 Likewise, women’s auxiliaries, such as the Eastern Star (Prince Hall Masons), Daughter Elks (IBPOEW), and Household of Ruth (Odd Fellows), undertook charitable work and led educational initiatives.Footnote 32 In addition to providing a space for socialization and mutual support, the majority of Black fraternals and women’s auxiliaries supported education and worked closely with teachers and schools. For example, Vanessa Siddle Walker mentions that in the fight for better schools for African American children in 1919, some children in Georgia were attending school in churches, lodge halls, and tobacco barns. She also points out that the Georgia Teachers & Education Association had shared a building with the Odd Fellows in Atlanta in the early twentieth century.Footnote 33
In their book What a Mighty Power We Can Be, Skocpol, Liazos, and Ganz trace the growth of the fourteen most prominent Black fraternals—out of approximately sixty of them—to argue that they were incubators of civil rights activism. Black lodges gave men and women “virtually the only chances they might have to get elected to offices, to run organizations, and to learn and exercise organizational skills.”Footnote 34 While the authors draw on Schlesinger’s ideas about fraternals being schools for self-government, they do not construe the activities of the fraternal societies as primarily educational, nor do they ground their analysis in the extant history of education scholarship. My read of their book alongside primary sources of African American fraternals and women’s auxiliaries leads me to argue that they were chiefly educational organizations.Footnote 35 For example, the IBPOEW ran a successful oratorical contest to send African American youth to college beginning in the 1920s; held an annual “Schools Week” to involve Black communities in their local schools in the early twentieth century; and organized adult education classes that in 1939 began to teach literacy skills so that African Americans could vote. The Daughter Elks was founded by teacher Emma V. Kelley, who was educated at Hampton Normal School and later taught in rural Virginia. Under Kelley, the Daughter Elks promoted youth participation in the organization through the creation of Junior Elk herds and gradually assumed leadership on the oratorical contests (Figure 1).Footnote 36
Winners of the IBPOEW annual oratorical contest with parents and IBPOEW members, June 1968, Columbus Call and Post Photograph Collection, Columbus Metropolitan Library. Available through fair use.
Financial education was also emphasized in fraternal societies. The gender-integrated Independent Order of St. Luke, an independent fraternal order (i.e., not created as a segregated Black counterpart to a White association), began as a cooperative insurance society that emphasized economic independence. Economic self-sufficiency was central to the mission of fraternal orders, as financial viability was linked closely with social justice, because it shored up political strength, liberty, and the ability to direct one’s future as well as to create stable communities. The first local St. Luke association was founded in Baltimore in 1867 to provide sickness and disability benefits and to pay death claims to members. After several iterations, in 1869 it became the Virginia St. Luke Society, and in 1899 its best-known leader, Maggie Lena Walker, was named as Right Worthy Grand Secretary of the association. Walker had been with the Society for two decades and had held many different roles, including national deputy. In that role, she organized juvenile councils starting in 1895.Footnote 37
Much of the work of the Independent Order of St. Luke focused on economic education and enlisting youth in various scholastic endeavors. When Walker assumed the leadership of the organization, her plan was to use resources to create businesses to employ women and youth. She emphasized manufacturing as well, founded on the notion that African Americans should be producers as well as consumers. Walker supported and promoted the teaching of Black history—a common initiative in Black civic organizations—and the Order started an education loan fund under her leadership (Figure 2). In 1903, she started the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, which grew from $8,000 to $500,000 by the mid-1920s. Walker led the organization until her death in 1934.Footnote 38
Maggie Lena Walker with Neighborhood Children, n.d., Maggie Lena Walker National Historic Site, National Park Service, NPS.gov collection. Public domain.
Comparatively, Black Greek-letter organizations have been studied more widely than Black fraternal societies and women’s auxiliaries, owing to their prominence on college campuses and their public-facing social service activities. Thus, BGLOs are among the more visible organizations in the Black counterpublic, even though they were often perceived as elitist and secretive.Footnote 39 BGLOs have continued to emphasize volunteer work, cultural pride, and professional development. They have historically been at the forefront of social justice movements, contributing to civil rights advocacy, voter registration drives, and scholarships, positioning themselves as leaders in equity and opportunity efforts. Some historians consider BGLOs to be among the most prominent philanthropic organizations that have been dedicated to service, self-help, and educational advancement. Moreover, BGLOs provided nascent networks for students that would later be built upon in social and professional venues.Footnote 40
Scholarship on BGLOs has tended to center on the “Divine Nine,” or the major nine fraternities and sororities founded in the early twentieth century. The four sororities in the Divine Nine—Alpha Kappa Alpha (1908), Delta Sigma Theta (1913), Zeta Phi Beta (1920), and Sigma Gamma Rho (1922)—were focused on helping those in need. Their educational efforts included raising money for scholarships and school libraries, developing programs to prevent juvenile delinquency, and tutoring students in science, math, and literacy. Gasman, Louison, and Barnes describe a library project carried out by Delta Sigma Theta members in 1937 that raised significant funds to purchase books—many of them about Black history and achievement—and distribute them to schools around the South through the assistance of local universities. In some instances, the effort resulted in the establishment of local libraries in rural areas. As a collective group, the five fraternities of the Divine Nine—Alpha Phi Alpha (1906), Kappa Alpha Psi (1911), Omega Psi Phi (1911), Phi Beta Sigma (1914), and Iota Phi Theta (1963)—emphasized economic empowerment, education, and civic engagement. To advance these goals, fraternity brothers developed campaigns to promote high school and college attendance, including awarding scholarships and building self-esteem through the promotion of Black history and culture.Footnote 41 The educational efforts of the Divine Nine and other BGLOs retained a central place in the volunteer activities of these organizations. Investigations into case histories of local-level accomplishments would complement the existing historiography.
In 2012, Brown, Parks, and Phillips argued that scholarship on BGLOs was still in its infancy. They assert that the first major contributions were Walter Kimbrough’s Black Greek 101: The Culture, Customs, and Challenges of Black Fraternities and Sororities and Ricky Jones’s Black Haze: Violence and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities.Footnote 42 Around the time the second edition of their book was published, however, a several other studies of BGLOs were published. Among them were Deborah Whaley’s Disciplining Women, a history of Alpha Kappa Alpha, and Hughey and Parks’s Black Greek Letter Organizations 2.0.Footnote 43 Acknowledging issues with the historiography of BGLOs, such as criticisms that the work was not scholarly enough and was not written by historians, scholars of the field encourage future work that explores lesser-known BGLOs, the intersections of race, religion, and sexual orientation, and other aspects of the “founding elements” (e.g., White fraternities) and culture of Greek-letter organizations. In terms of the history of African American education, institutional contexts and influences could be explored more fully.Footnote 44 Additionally, much more work remains to be done to probe the civic education efforts of fraternal orders and their women’s counterparts. For example, the Prince Hall Masons and their auxiliary, the Order of the Eastern Star, promoted the teaching of “race history” and the instilling of “black ideals … into our young people thus fitting them for the leadership of the next generation.”Footnote 45 African American fraternals formed the backbone of civic life, and their efforts on behalf of education merit a fuller investigation.Footnote 46
Women’s Associations
In a 1974 article in the Journal of Negro History, historian Gerda Lerner observed that there was to that point “no adequate history of the black women’s club movement and no interpretive literature.” Her article, an overview of the early community work of African American clubwomen, emphasized the point that the clubs were organized to undertake educational, philanthropic, and community support activities.Footnote 47 Despite her argument that there was no sufficient history, Lerner cited—on the very first page of her article—early twentieth-century works by Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, and Hallie Quinn Brown, among other African American teachers and scholars. Inadvertently emphasizing the existence of a Black counterpublic, White scholars in the late twentieth century claimed to discover and document the history of Black women’s clubs.Footnote 48 Nonetheless, their works elevated important findings and added much-needed syntheses to the work of scholars of color. While Black women’s efforts around education and schooling are through lines in these publications, additional scholarship in the history of education should investigate and center the educational efforts of the sprawling national network of women’s clubs.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Black women acknowledged the counterpublic sphere of their clubs and national associations. “Less is known of our women than of any other class of Americans,” claimed Fannie Barrier Williams at the World’s Congress of Representative Women in 1894. Despite their having organized associations in the North before Emancipation and in the South after Reconstruction, Black women had remained fairly invisible to White society.Footnote 49 One White observer corroborated this comment in 1914: “We know very little about the educated, prosperous members of the race. As fast as they enter this class they withdraw into a world of their own—a world which lies all about us white folks, yet of whose existence we are scarcely aware.”Footnote 50 Behind the veil, Black women’s associations created a space to undertake a multitude of educational uplift initiatives to attend to those who were less fortunate. Organizations of Black women outnumbered those of White women and were geographically far-reaching as well as sustained across class. Their efforts included opening homes for the elderly and for unwed mothers, hospitals for Black patients, and settlement houses for the poor and the working classes.
The National Association of Colored Women (NACW), founded in 1896, united a network of state and local clubs that allowed Black women to undertake educational work in communities around the country. NACW clubs and state and regional federations grew quickly; by 1914 there were fifty thousand members in a thousand clubs and twenty-eight state and local federations.Footnote 51 African American women’s clubs were dedicated to the uplift of the race; therefore, education, schooling, and the curriculum drew the attention of women’s club members. Soon after its founding, the NACW dedicated a significant amount of energy to forming local mothers’ clubs, establishing kindergartens and day nurseries, and opening homes for orphans. In 1915, the Virginia statewide organization of Colored Women’s Clubs founded the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, the state’s only reformatory for Black girls. Under the leadership of Janie Porter Barrett, clubwomen sought both to protect the young women from the unsuitable circumstance of being incarcerated with adult criminals, and to give them skills to prepare them for jobs by training them in the “domestic arts.” Working with considerable networks of Black women, Virginia clubwomen raised money and enlisted political support for the endeavor.Footnote 52 In other instances, Black women’s clubs became involved in issues in higher education. For example, clubwomen in Iowa opened a residence for Black women students who were refused dormitory accommodations at the University of Iowa in the early twentieth century.Footnote 53
Black associationalism, expressed through the overlapping webs of women’s organizations, allowed for coordination across class, locale, and gender. In Birmingham, Alabama, while Black men were publicly credited with creating the first schools for African American children, the city’s clubwomen also played a central role. For example, Carrie Tuggle founded the Tuggle Institute in 1903, which was supported by club members and the city’s Black community. Tuggle worked through her network of associations, most of which were the women’s auxiliaries to men’s fraternal societies, such as the Courts of Calanthe, Rising Sons and Daughters of Protection, and the Knights and Ladies of Honor of the World. Tondra Loder-Jackson explains that Tuggle’s fellow club members were teachers and administrators at the school, which emphasized an academic and industrial curriculum and taught Black history to its students.Footnote 54
In addition to starting schools, women’s clubs emphasized the teaching of race history and pride. The women’s auxiliaries to men’s organizations typically organized juvenile departments to provide youth a meeting space to socialize and to educate them in the principles of democracy.Footnote 55 Women’s associations undertook a range of other educational activities, such as coordinating college scholarship contests for Black youth. These efforts continued into the twentieth century, as Black middle-class and professional women founded Jack and Jill, Inc. (1938) and the Links, Inc. (1946) to promote education, health, and cultural awareness. Both organizations continue to offer scholarships to Black youth, and as one scholar points out, both require financial investments as part of their membership requirements, in addition to social capital in the form of professional clout and authority or personal ties to others in positions of power and authority.Footnote 56
The historiography includes rare syntheses of the relationship between Black women’s clubs and schooling. In “Beyond the Classroom,” Sharon Harley investigates the organized activities of African American teachers in Washington, DC, and argues that teachers who were involved in the women’s club movement believed they had a special responsibility to uplift their communities.Footnote 57 Exploring the boundaries of the counterpublic sphere, Stephanie J. Shaw considers the efforts of Black professional women during Jim Crow in public and private work. Her study necessarily considers the intersections of voluntary work in communities and the importance of schooling and education.Footnote 58 Extending further into the twentieth century, a look at the National Council of Negro Women and its efforts regarding education and schooling is warranted.Footnote 59 With a few exceptions, there appears to be less scholarship being produced on the history of women’s clubs in recent years as well as of twentieth-century professional women’s organizations, such as Links, Inc., leaving plenty of room for historians of education to document more fully and to synthesize the educational work of Black women’s organizations.
School-Related Associations
Some organizations were explicitly linked to schools and the teaching profession, while others were composed of volunteers who had an abiding interest in public education and the curriculum. The National Association for Teachers in Colored Schools (NATCS), founded in 1903, had a membership that largely consisted of college instructors. Most African American elementary and secondary teachers belonged to separate state-level associations, which helped organize and provide leadership to teachers in the segregated schools of the American South. The goals of the NATCS included improving instructional methods, promoting higher rates of pay for Black teachers, cooperating with local White school boards, and fundraising to build schools and supply them with needed materials. In 1926, the NATCS forged a working relationship with the National Education Association (NEA), which that year had initiated an effort to study the conditions of segregated schools. In 1937, NATCS changed its name to the American Teachers Association (ATA), and it continued to collaborate with the NEA until the two merged in 1966.Footnote 60 Before joining with the White organization, ATA members were able to maintain decision-making control over their careers and segregated schools, to attain a gratifying level of occupational status, and to engage in professional development activities at local, state, and national meetings.
The Black PTA (called the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, or NCCPT)which served the segregated schools in the South, encompassed a range of activities, including the financial support of schools, professional development of teachers, and the inclusion of Black history in the curriculum. Unlike its White counterpart, it was founded, led, and run mainly by African American professional educators who also were clubwomen. The association grew from the ground up; local units—often affiliated with the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACW)—started meeting during the late 1890s. Then, over the next three decades, these local clubs and school improvement associations combined to form state organizations, which led to the founding of the Black PTA, in 1926. The NCCPT and its state and local units coordinated fundraisers to support segregated schools, helped cultivate leadership skills among its officers, and shaped curriculum for African American youth. Overall, the Black PTA contributed to creating an institutional infrastructure for African American education.Footnote 61
While the ATA and NCCPT were parallel segregated organizations to their White counterparts, Carter G. Woodson’s ASNLH was founded as an independent education-oriented association in 1915 to provide a “forum for black intellectual production and the study of race.”Footnote 62 Several books have treated the history of the association and Woodson’s influence, the best known of which are Givens’s Fugitive Pedagogy, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie’s The Early Black History Movement, Carter G. Woodson, and Lorenzo Johnston Greene, and Jacqueline Goggin’s Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History. Givens calls the organization of the ASNLH “unprecedented” in terms of it being the first and longest-running association dedicated to the study of race. He rightly asserts, “This organization is essential to the story of black education.”Footnote 63 The majority of the organization’s members, African American teachers, were integral to the success of the ASNLH, by writing and teaching curricula and celebrating Negro History Week, which began in 1926. The Negro History Bulletin was created in 1936 by Mary McLeod Bethune, then president of the ASNLH. It became a significant resource in the counterpublic for Black teachers to “supplement and critique” the prescribed curriculum.Footnote 64
Through Black educational associations, the PTA, ASNLH, and ATA, African American professional educators and volunteers were able to build schools and communities in the American South in the early twentieth century, to hold fundraisers for books and materials, and to promote the teaching of Black culture and history. Owing to the overlap in leadership and membership, educational organizations played an integral role in establishing local schools in the first three decades of the twentieth century and providing leadership and direction for those schools as the century wore on.Footnote 65 Most importantly, they were deeply embedded in Black associationalism, as they worked closely with civil rights groups (NAACP, NUL), fraternals (Elks, Knights of Pythias, Prince Hall Masons), and women’s clubs (NACW, National Council of Negro Women) to carry out their work. While histories of the national school-related organizations exist, local and state-level histories are few and far between, as are studies of the relationship between and among these units and other associations in the Black counterpublic.
Civil Rights-Focused Organizations
Civil rights organizations seem to be the most frequently studied in the history of education scholarship, with the NAACP figuring prominently, due to the myriad studies investigating school desegregation. Other organizations have also enjoyed treatment, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Studies of such organizations typically include discussions of educational approaches and the role of teaching in the civil rights movement. They highlight how the emphasis on training and education in nonviolent resistance by these two groups played a central role in advancing civil rights.Footnote 66 Additional works examine Freedom Schools, which were founded by SNCC to educate and politicize students and adults in the segregated South.Footnote 67
Founded as an interracial organization in 1909 by Black and White liberal leaders, the NAACP focused on the long-term objective of full political, social, and economic equality for African Americans, including bringing an end to lynching and the debt slavery of sharecroppers, working toward the enfranchisement of southern African Americans, and ending segregation in public places. It was originally headquartered in New York City but had local units throughout the country. In 1935, the NAACP launched a campaign led by Charles Hamilton Houston to equalize public schooling for all students. Zoë Burkholder explains that the NAACP strategy under Houston paved “the way for a revolution in Black educational activism.”Footnote 68
The NAACP figures prominently in a number of works in the history of education, such as V. P. Franklin’s The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement. Franklin draws on the activities of the organization’s Youth Councils to explore the ways that young people participated in marches, demonstrations, and school boycotts to engage in civil rights activism to desegregate public schools and challenge disparities in educational resources and curricula. Many other studies draw on the papers and activities of the NAACP, including Vanessa Siddle Walker, The Lost Education of Horace Tate, Vincent Willis, Audacious Agitation, and Richard Kluger, Simple Justice.Footnote 69
Another civil rights-oriented association that was dedicated to training workers, the National Urban League (NUL), was created in 1911 by the merger of the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions of Negroes and the League for the Protection of Colored Women. Since its founding, it has focused on social work in local communities, much of which has encompassed educational initiatives. The NUL’s emphasis on education, especially social work training, was central to the organization’s original vision of uplift.Footnote 70 In the early twentieth century, local units oversaw day nurseries, schools for pregnant teens, and parent-teacher associations. They also organized training schools for janitors and domestic workers.Footnote 71 Considered a “promotional and coordinating” body rather than one that served communities directly, the core of the Urban League’s educational program was vocational training for youth (Figure 3).Footnote 72 The NUL undertook informal educational activities as well, such as its efforts to uplift working-class African Americans, including the circulation of instructions to the Chicago, New York, and other branches on “proper comportment in the city with the Black press and clubwomen providing outreach support.Footnote 73
Children and Teenagers at the Chicago Urban League Headquarters, n.d., Chicago Urban League Records, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections and University Archives Department. Available through fair use.
Historians who have investigated the efforts of the NUL include Zoë Burkholder in An African American Dilemma and Jack Dougherty in More Than One Struggle. Both scholars also draw on the papers of the NAACP. Pointing out linkages between the two organizations, Burkholder explains that “Black educator activists” in the North worked in and through the NAACP and NUL.Footnote 74 Dougherty’s study also highlights networks through his investigation of Milwaukee activists’ “multiple perspectives within black-led reform organizations” to argue that there were many different civil rights movements that played out in differing ways in various regions of the country.Footnote 75 These and other studies concentrate on civil rights voluntary organizations’ roles in the desegregation of schools and the equalization of teachers’ salaries in the South and Midwest, which leaves an opportunity for historians to investigate the educational efforts and ideas within these organizations. For instance, the NAACP’s early initiatives included increasing school attendance, promoting college and university education, and providing training for industry.Footnote 76 Both organizations comprised Black counterpublics that allowed leaders and members to carry out educational work. For example, the finding aid for the National Urban League Papers, Southern Regional Office (1919-1979) reveals that the organization surveyed segregated schools and worked with the NATCS, the Black PTA, and fraternal societies, such as the Knights of Pythias and Prince Hall Masons, to improve education for African American students in the 1920s. Also, their reports on vocational education are voluminous.Footnote 77 The lens of Black associationalism can enrich the historiography in this area by examining how civil rights organizations worked through multiple networks to promote educational initiatives in training programs and at local schools.
Black Power Groups
Until relatively recently, Black Power was a “neglected era” in the history of postwar America.Footnote 78 Trailing behind developments in US history scholarship, the educational efforts of Black Power organizations are an under-researched area in the history of African American education. While the Black Power movement is commonly associated with the 1960s and 1970s, its roots can be found in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914. Steven Hahn posits that Garveyism influenced every major African American social and political development of the twentieth century, at home and abroad. This sentiment also appeared in studies of the later years of Black Power, about which one historian asserted that the organization “transformed American democracy.”Footnote 79 Contrary to common perceptions that the working class was underrepresented in the UNIA and that it was concentrated solely in the northeastern United States, the organization included many working-class African Americans, and three-fourths of its divisions were concentrated in the former slaveholding states of the American South.Footnote 80 The UNIA advanced the goals of race pride, self-determination, and economic self-sufficiency, and, as with other Black civic voluntary organizations, education was the vehicle to reach those ends. However, to date there is very little scholarship on the educational efforts of the UNIA.
This is not the case for perhaps the best-known national Black Power association, the Black Panther Party (BPP). The BPP was founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 to challenge police brutality and racial inequality. Its founders, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, embraced Marxist theory to understand oppression and inform their efforts to work toward a racially and economically equitable society, a focus which has largely been obscured by scholars’ emphasis on the BPP’s militancy. Joy Ann Williamson explains that the BPP believed in the liberatory power of education and critiqued public schools, so they developed both formal and informal educational opportunities for Black youth and adults.Footnote 81 The fifth point of their Ten Point Program outlines the organization’s educational goals: to provide an “education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self.”Footnote 82
Black Power groups in the twentieth century established independent schools and community programs to promote Black pride, cultivate political consciousness, and exert control over education. Zoë Burkholder’s An African American Dilemma looks at both the UNIA and BPP in her study of Black educational activists in the North, and she examines the ways these groups favored separate, Black-controlled schools. Burkholder observes, “Garvey’s faith in separatism and his celebration of African heritage resonated with the Black masses in ways that the NAACP’s plans for integration and assimilation did not.”Footnote 83 Later in the book, she discusses efforts in the 1960s and 1970s by the Black Panthers and other Black Power proponents to establish separate schools focused on Black culture and history. Williamson’s work on the BPP reveals that efforts for youth included the organization’s out-of-school programs, such as the Free Breakfast Program (Figure 4) and Liberation Schools, which espoused an overtly political agenda while teaching about oppression and emphasizing interconnectedness with other oppressed people around the world. The BPP formal school initiatives included the founding of the Oakland Community School, which operated from 1971 to 1972 and followed a traditional elementary school curriculum with the addition of emancipatory ideas. Efforts for adult education included political education classes and activities on college campuses.Footnote 84
Black Panther free breakfast for children program, 1969, Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones Photographs, UCSC Special Collections and Archives. Available through fair use.
Russell Rickford’s We Are an African People is a wide-ranging study of Black Power organizations and education that includes the Black Panthers, Congress of African People, and UNIA, as well as the civil rights organizations SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP. Beginning his study in the 1960s, Rickford explores the historical legacy of Black nationalist and Pan African education and schooling. He points out that starting in the latter half of the decade, scores of organizers, such as parents, university students, artists, public school teachers, and public figures, helped start independent schools—more than sixty of them by 1970—focused on supporting Black youth’s academics and sense of self-worth. In Rickford’s description, these were not learning settings aspiring to become formal institutions, but rather “cooperatives, collectives, cultural centers, organs of community action and agitprop, and laboratories for a spectrum of ideas.”Footnote 85 Framed more as a study of a movement than of associationalism, We Are an African People highlights the desire for educational justice through a range of activities, including the creation of advocacy groups, demands for a relevant curriculum, and the enlistment of parents and community members.
These works are but a mere glimpse into the rich history of Black Power organizations in formal and informal education. There is much more to be mined. In terms of Black associationalism, historians could explore the significance of the overlap in membership and the activities undertaken by the organizations’ youth groups.Footnote 86 In fact, many Black civic voluntary organizations had youth groups that were focused on education, training, and civic habits and dispositions.Footnote 87
Conclusion
Dunbar argues that the story of Black America cannot fully be told without investigating the impact of African American civic organizations, which through their web of relations have enabled Black communities to address social, political, and economic problems.Footnote 88 In this historiographic essay, I contend similarly that the history of African American education has overlooked the centrality of vast networks of voluntary organizations, which need to be woven into the broader narrative of Black education. Such a reweaving would largely, and rightly, change the landscape to reveal the influence of a multitude of counterpublic spaces that were of critical importance in and to Black communities. The reader may have noticed by this point that I have merely scratched the surface. This was not intended to be a comprehensive review of informal spaces or of civic voluntary organizations, but a glimpse at the range of associations that have played a role in schooling and education to expose the potential for significant further research.
Critical to the study of associations is to recognize them as parts of a greater whole. Examined through the lens of Black associationalism, this historiography of Black civic voluntary associations shows how members, citizens, and leaders built schools, developed and taught curricula that centered racial pride and achievement, and educated adults for literacy, economic self-sufficiency, and citizenship. Moreover, there are plenty of opportunities for historians who wish to add to the historical record. In recent years, scholars have begun to bring voluntary associations more fully into the historiography, but much work remains to be done to excavate the educational work of these organizations, their auxiliaries, and their youth groups. Black voluntary associations contributed to the education of African Americans through massive untold efforts around schooling, educational leadership, and curriculum development. In these organizations, African American men and women of different classes came together to determine the aims and means of education for adults and youth. They fought discrimination and, in the twentieth century, worked for the desegregation of schools, though some maintained that separate schools were best for Black children and youth.
In this article, I also sought to build on the extant scholarship on Black associationalism and use it as an organizing frame to think about educational work outside of schools and formal learning institutions. This necessitates investigating Black civic voluntary associations’ positioning as autonomous spaces. The lack of analysis of Black associationalism—or the ways that networks allowed for the sharing of ideas and the transference of skills—is a significant gap in the history of education. African American education is inextricably linked with Black associationalism. In the historical battle for equality and opportunity since Emancipation, Black educators, volunteers, and civic leaders have used their connections and social capital through overlapping organizational networks to reach their goals. In other words, we cannot separate political battles from educational striving. In the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, Black civic voluntary organizations formed a web of relations that supplemented the segregated schools and promoted and offered educational opportunities for youth and adults. Moreover, these associational links sustained connections between and among educators, communities, and Black civic and political leaders. As the opening quote of this article reveals, voluntary organizations were viewed by their members as educational institutions to further the goals of equality, justice, and racial uplift.
Informal settings in African American communities, such as churches, families, and voluntary organizations, were sites of teaching and learning for youth and adults, which raises the question whether there is an artificial distinction between formal and informal education in Black communities. Also, informal or out-of-school spaces often were founded and run by Black citizens, unlike local segregated schools, which in many instances were under the purview of White boards of education and community leaders. Again, organizations offered autonomous spaces wherein Black leaders and community members could direct and control the education of their own. By failing to include voluntary associations in the broader history of African American education, we do not get the fuller story of how educational and civic leaders worked through networks of advocacy to bring education to youth and adults in Black communities. Furthermore, by considering Black voluntary organizations, the narrative shifts from a through line of oppression and segregation to one of leadership, agency, and advocacy.
Christine Woyshner is Professor of Education at Temple University. She wishes to thank the HEQ editorial staff, anonymous reviewers, the NYU writing group, and Michael Hines for their suggestions. Any errors or omissions remain her responsibility. This research was supported by Temple University and the Spencer Foundation grants, and the author is grateful for the assistance of Jasmine Clark in locating photographs.
Disclosure Statement
The author has reported no competing interests.
