SEIZING WARTIME OPPORTUNITIES FOR INDUSTRIAL WORK

Jackson's experience at the 1918 industrial conference was not the norm in the YWCA, which the sole Black woman at the 1915 National Convention had deemed a “spiritual farce, not a spiritual force.”Footnote ²² Though Colored YWCAs had formed outside the South by 1870, White national and local leadership had marginalized them, treating Black women as a “Southern problem,” and accepting segregation as part of any solution, ostensibly out of deference to Southern White women's concerns. Black women had been vocal in contesting their exclusion.Footnote ²³

World War I provided Black YWCA women unprecedented access to association resources, both in service to soldiers and because tens of thousands of Black women joined many White women in entering factory work.Footnote ²⁴ In 1917, as one of seven national organizations called to help the U.S. government deal with wartime upheavals, the YWCA created a War Work Council to target the cultural and demographic disruptions caused by the huge surge in women's manufacturing employment.Footnote ²⁵ War work included the YWCA's first commitment to national African American program work, a wartime Colored Work Committee headed by Eva D. Bowles.Footnote ²⁶

Bowles, who had overseen Colored Work in cities since 1912, used the committee's budget to greatly expand YWCA work for African American women, especially around war centers.Footnote ²⁷ She recruited dozens of staff through the National Association of Colored Women, which had provided education and other services since the late nineteenth century, and she organized training for new staff at the YWCA's National Training School. The Colored Work Committee was interracial, but Black women ran and staffed most work, gaining access to national YWCA finances for the first time. Bowles quickly established Black women's control over this first YWCA national program designed for Black women.Footnote ²⁸

Among other projects, Bowles set up YWCA services for Black working-class women who had been excluded from the YWCA's Industrial Program. The Industrial Program had, for more than a decade, provided tens of thousands of working women with recreation, meeting spaces, education, and political allies. Serving the most working women of any organization, it operated hundreds of industrial clubs all over the country, and held conferences planned by the working women themselves.Footnote ²⁹ The Industrial Program was experiencing its own wartime surge in membership and resources. However, since industrial clubs followed the national YWCA's broader segregation practices, Black women were generally unwelcome at club meetings in White associations. Poor funding for Colored YWCAs and the lack of a national staff member to coordinate Black industrial work had left Black working women underserved.

Bowles appointed Mary E. Jackson as national Industrial Secretary for Colored Work. Jackson, a Rhode Island club woman and state labor official, brought significant experience and skills in both labor and racial issues to the new position.Footnote ³⁰ [Fig. 2] Jackson and her national staff could circumvent local White resistance to Black industrial work. They used wartime Colored Work Council funds to create an African American parallel to the Industrial Program.

Figure 2.

Mary Jackson portrait photo, from “Colored Girls in the Second Line of Defense,” Association Monthly (Oct. 1918): 363.

Jackson fought Black women's invisibility as war workers, arguing for their inclusion in the YWCA's dramatic wartime expansion of resources for working women. War Work Council reports omitted information on Black women from the “Industrial War Work” section, as though they were not part of the factory workforce. Jackson launched a series of investigations, surveying government officials and labor groups about racial attitudes and cataloguing areas in which industrial workers were most needed.Footnote ³¹ She documented material and ideological barriers to Black women's full and equal participation in the labor force. She gathered information about employment numbers, occupational statistics, wages, unionized status, and whether Black and White women workers shared workspace or restrooms. In reports to various YWCA committees and national leaders, Jackson pointed out the large numbers of Black wage-working women, their range of occupations, and their often brutal working conditions.Footnote ³² She, like other Black staff, also carved out a role for Black women as trained YWCA professionals.Footnote ³³ Jackson vividly rendered Black women's dramatic entry into new occupations and their need for YWCA support.

Jackson and others also drew on a growing wartime network of reformers and government staff interest in Black people's industrial labor and women's wage labor. Woodrow Wilson's administration had introduced segregation into the civil service soon before the war, signaling a grim racial climate. Jackson's wartime network, in which some members held positions in both government and reform groups, created lonely outposts of more progressive thinking on race and gender. Jackson and Black YWCA worker Elizabeth Ross Haynes, in particular, forged ties with a range of social reformers, government workers, and educators. Staff in the Labor Department's Division of Negro Economics and the Women-in-Industry Service of the War Administration Board (later the Women's Bureau) helped support arguments to White YWCA leaders.Footnote ³⁴ The DNE and the WIS cooperatively researched Black women's working conditions, investigated major changes in Black working life, coordinated Black workers in war industries, and advised the government and private organizations. Nongovernmental reformers also were engaged in trying to make visible and remedy Black women's significant workplace disadvantages.Footnote ³⁵ For instance, in Chicago, whose African American population was large and growing, Jackson obtained detailed information about Black women in factories from Women's Trade Union League organizer Irene Goins, who had been organizing Black women stockyard workers.Footnote ³⁶ Jackson used the information to advocate for increased funding for Colored YWCA industrial work, and built up a significant Chicago program. The industrial committee she created included renowned anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells-Barnett, who was, Jackson noted, “prominently connected with all forward movements” for racial justice.Footnote ³⁷

This critical interracial research network, inside and outside the government, contributed racial and labor expertise that, as Mark Hendrickson has argued, would help expose the uneven benefits of the labor market during the conservative 1920s.Footnote ³⁸ Their studies and discussions, which highlighted Black women's growing presence in industry and the particularly brutal conditions they faced, also helped increase the wartime YWCA budget for Colored Work.

Mary Jackson and her staff created YWCA Industrial Program work for thousands of Black working women where none had existed before. They launched industrial work in dozens of cities and towns in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia, sometimes building on existing YWCA work and often organizing the first YWCA effort for African American women. They created dozens of industrial clubs for domestic workers, laundresses, seamstresses, and women in tobacco and garment factory work. [Fig. 3] The clubs' emphasis on safe and wholesome recreation sometimes reflected earlier YWCA emphases on uplift, but they also provided young Black women encouragement about their right to industrial jobs, which offered them relief from the sexual vulnerability and isolation of the household occupations to which they had been largely confined.Footnote ³⁹ Unlike the Industrial Program work for White women, the industrial work carried out by the wartime Colored Work Committee entailed fighting racism at every turn and creating committees to educate the public about Black women's right to decent work conditions and wages. Like the Industrial Program, it also provided working women a place to discuss their problems and seek solutions, and created rare recreational and social opportunities, as in Louisville, where 1,000 women attended “industrial girls' parties” in 1918.Footnote ⁴⁰

Figure 3.

“A new day for the colored woman worker: skilled work and skilled workmen's wages” from Jane Olcott, The Work of Colored Women (Woman's Press: 1919). YWCA of the U.S.A. Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

YWCA workers also sought to increase Black women's job opportunities. In St. Louis, for instance, the new industrial secretary, Nellie Agee, visited 125 factories, urging employers to hire African American women. Some refused, but many were “willing to try out colored girls and the girls made good as a rule when given a chance.”Footnote ⁴¹ However, employers were not the only barrier. The federal director of the U.S. Employment Bureau of Connecticut emphasized the need “to protect the white workers from close association with colored people” and “felt it a very definite part of his personal responsibility,” Jackson reported, “to prevent colored and white workers from association on terms of equality.”Footnote ⁴² Jim Crow was enforced in the North, here, by the very official in charge of employment policies.

All this hard work produced a dramatic increase in Black YWCA industrial members, who gained access to safe spaces, education about labor issues, and recreational opportunities. By war's end, fifty-seven industrial clubs in twenty-two cities served about three thousand Black working-class YWCA members, and another seven thousand women attended club meetings without joining. Ten local industrial secretaries focused on African American women.Footnote ⁴³ Wartime efforts by dozens of local workers, regional field workers, and national workers created institutional structures and resources for thousands of Black working women, who had little access to labor unions and were likely to face significant racism from most White-led organizations.Footnote ⁴⁴

RACIAL JUSTICE AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

Jackson explicitly linked YWCA industrial “Colored Work” to the civil rights struggles Black soldiers were waging. Articulating a widespread hope among African Americans that wartime service would earn better treatment, Jackson celebrated Black women workers' contributions. “Everyone realizes,” she wrote, “that both justice and efficiency demand that white and colored soldiers be treated alike. We are just beginning to awake to the necessity of giving colored girls fair” working conditions and wages.Footnote ⁴⁵

In fact, “everyone” did not acknowledge that Black soldiers should be treated equally. Black men's military service aroused deep anxieties among white supremacists and evoked responses ranging from petty denials of cake and hot chocolate from the Red Cross, to newspaper attacks on the “Negro in uniform [who] wants the whole sidewalk,” to attempts to keep overseas troops from interacting with French women, to assigning troops the worst and most difficult labor, to attacks by White soldiers. “Jim Crow sailed to Europe” on the same ships that transported African American troops, Adriane Lentz-Smith has observed, and military service entrenched rather than weakened racial hierarchies.Footnote ⁴⁶

When Jackson referred to Black soldiers' equal treatment, then, she was invoking a dramatic, highly visible struggle between the ideals of democracy for which soldiers fought and the reality of racism, placing Black women discursively into the battle as home-front soldiers in service of the nation. Writing in the Association Monthly, another Black YWCA war work staff member observed: “The same grave questioning is taking place among women, which one hears from the soldiers back from the front.” She wondered whether “the soldiers in the trenches waiting for the grenades” would have agreed that a Black woman, denied a job, was unfit to work in a grenade factory, and noted that the woman's grandfather had fought for American independence.Footnote ⁴⁷

Jackson connected this struggle with the wartime discourse that encouraged working people to claim citizen rights based on their labor. The Black woman was “no longer a ward of America, but a citizen with the rights, duties, and responsibilities of citizenship”—willing to work hard for the war effort, and worthy of full citizenship in return. Wartime labor agencies were less supportive of Black workers than of White female workers, but nonetheless they created conditions that helped Jackson make her claims.Footnote ⁴⁸ She linked Black working women's status with racial progress, writing that present labor responsibilities built “future opportunities … a future hope of economic freedom and industrial democracy.” Like the NAACP, whose wartime rhetoric Steven Reich has skillfully explored, Jackson used a language of patriotism and sacrifice to demand democracy at home.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, unlike NAACP leaders, Jackson based her claims neither on military service nor on men's labor, but on women's patriotic labor contributions, making them symbolically and literally central to civil rights claims.

Dating the claims further back, though, Jackson also pointed out the “skilled and unskilled woman labor of the South” performed under slavery, work that had been repaid “neither in gold nor in gratitude.” (The term “skilled” countered portrayals of Black women as unskilled and therefore deserving lower wages.) Even aside from Black women's war service, she suggested here, postwar economic rights were due as reparations, because much of the U.S. economy had been built by the labor of enslaved Black women. “Is this not the day,” she asked, “for the nation to repay to the daughters of to-day its debt to the mothers of yesterday” by allowing Black women equal economic opportunities?Footnote ⁵⁰

Mary Jackson's reports and articles assumed Black women's permanence in industry and argued that they should not be penalized for their earlier lack of opportunity; rather, their occupational segregation had created problems that must be remedied in the face of wartime labor shortages.Footnote ⁵¹ Her “carefully … workable plan through which to reach and develop the colored industrial girl” emphasized equal treatment and appropriate training.Footnote ⁵² No less moral than White women, Black women needed the same protections. They also needed and deserved “vocational training on the same basis as … the white girl.”Footnote ⁵³ Unlike many middle-class (and nearly all White) observers in the early twentieth century who viewed Black working-class people as struggling to enter the modern industrial age, she insisted on solutions beyond training women for household service.Footnote ⁵⁴ She argued for identical workplace conditions regardless of race, and insisted that any mistakes Black working women might make were due to “inexperience and human weakness rather than to some racial defect.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Emphasizing the need for Black women to have safe housing and protection, Jackson countered stereotypes of Black women—particularly Black working women—as sexually loose and morally dangerous, an image common beyond the YWCA as well as in it.Footnote ⁵⁶ Here she invoked the working-class respectability of laboring women. Emphasizing the inherent capabilities and morality of African American working-class women was a rare position at the time, when even elite African Americans often blamed their laboring migrant counterparts for what they saw as inappropriate behavior.Footnote ⁵⁷

Jackson's rhetoric advanced a long effort, within and beyond the YWCA, to defend the respectability of African American women. The association's White national leaders portrayed Black and White women in quite different ways. They emphasized keeping young White working women out of trouble during leisure hours and safeguarding the moral condition of women and girls affected by war conditions.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Association Monthly argued for the YWCA's “wholesome influence” on “inexperienced young folks during the tumultuous, bewildering period of war,” with the threat of the “irresponsible khaki hero” waiting to “look after her good times.”Footnote ⁵⁹ It also focused on protecting them through good working conditions and wages.Footnote ⁶⁰

However patronizing their language, these authors did not raise the specter of masses of idle, dependent, diseased, and criminal women, as did some association portrayals of Black women. One article warned that inefficient or untrained migrant Black working women might “through misguidance … drift into inefficiency, disease and lawlessness.” The author emphasized the need to “discourage in every way the transfer of the undesirable and unfit from one community to another” and warned of the potential “menace to society.” The source of feared irresponsibility here was not a “khaki hero”; the protection evoked was from, not for, the working women, and, as Judith Weisenfeld has documented, invoked Whites' stereotypes of venereal disease as particularly common among black people.Footnote ⁶¹

White association national leaders treated Black working women's presence as a temporary and a moral problem. A Social Morality Committee sent women physicians touring the country, targeting “those who are innocent, emotional and in most cases, actually ignorant,” a War Work Bulletin put it.Footnote ⁶² However, the War Work Council suggested it was especially important for Black women, who were deemed less innocent. While council publications claimed to treat Black and White workers equally, they presented Black working-class women as morally weak and dangerous to others. Fundraising efforts depicted Black women as an excessively sexualized threat to Whites, urged war work in “colored” communities to contain Black women's threat to White and Black soldiers in cantonments, and emphasized its “social morality talks” for them.Footnote ⁶³ The Colored Work Committee protested negative stereotypes such as a War Work Council bulletin that portrayed African Americans in stereotypically menial positions.Footnote ⁶⁴

By war's end, Jackson had helped shift how Black women workers were portrayed in the YWCA. Noting that war emergency had “created the demand for colored labor,” a December 1918 War Work Bulletin article argued for “the permanence of that demand.” The article noted that the YWCA's purpose included educating “the white worker to her responsibility to the colored girls.” Accompanying the article was a photograph of a row of “white and colored girls working together in perfect amity,” making Red Cross buttons, with a caption that the war had given African American women “the chance to show they are as good Americans as white girls.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Such interracial cooperation, a goal Bowles signaled early on, was one of the cornerstones of Jackson's civil rights rhetoric.Footnote ⁶⁶ While the photograph and article may have promoted a rosy view of working women's race relations, Bowles, Jackson, and White Industrial Program staff members Annetta Dieckmann and Grace Coyle had been working hard to promote interracial labor cooperation.

FROM SOCIAL SERVICE TO SOCIAL SCIENCE: WHITE WORKING WOMEN'S RESPONSIBILITIES

A wartime YWCA document laid out White working women's role in welcoming Black women who were newly entering many industries. Though likely a talk Mary Jackson gave at White industrial conferences, but possibly by Grace Coyle, it noted the wartime labor shortage as the “greatest national problem.” Inverting Black women's double burden of race and gender, the document emphasized White women's double duty, asking “what is the white woman's supreme test of patriotism industrially expressed?” The task, argued the author, included both recognizing her responsibility for war production “and also the more difficult and delicate task of unifying the womanhood of the country regardless of race, to supply needed output.” Invoking the wartime emphasis on work's patriotic aspects, the author concluded:

As radical Black labor leaders such as A. Philip Randolph and Frank Crosswaith would argue in the postwar period, the document urged that interracial cooperation among working people was essential to achieve workplace justice.Footnote ⁶⁸

This language illustrates what may be the least known aspect of wartime YWCA work: its insistence that White working women challenge their own racial prejudices and treat Black coworkers as equals. In October 1918, the Colored Work Committee formally asked the Industrial Committee “to take up the matter of industrial discrimination among colored girls and women,” and to make it “a national matter and brought to the attention of the government.”Footnote ⁶⁹ After the war, Jackson and her allies astutely harnessed Industrial Program resources to make up for a postwar decimation of YWCA Colored Work funding. At a time when national leaders of the YWCA, the nation's largest women's organization, signaled a lack of commitment to Black women, the Industrial Program's White national staff proved more receptive. Just when many Whites were attacking African Americans who sought economic equality, and when conservative Blacks and White supremacists both feared interracial labor cooperation, the Industrial Program became a site for civil rights struggles that demanded White working women's participation.Footnote ⁷⁰

As we have seen, some YWCA industrial members already were considering this issue in summer 1918. At the mid-Atlantic regional conference that opened this article, some White women urged their conference colleagues to cast aside prejudice. They cited various reasons: to protect wages and standards; because “Christianity demanded a sisterly attitude”; because in wartime, “a democracy for which colored men were willing to die should be vital enough to ensure their sisters a chance to work side by side with white girls,” especially because Black women were crucial to home-front production.Footnote ⁷¹ Grace Coyle, the conference executive, reported with pleasure that soon thereafter, in a laundry where Black women had begun to work, a White woman who had attended the 1918 conference “has felt herself responsible for seeing that there was as friendly an attitude as she could bring about toward these girls. She has been quite successful.”Footnote ⁷² [Fig. 4]

Figure 4.

Photograph of black and white laundry workers. YWCA of the U.S.A. Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Coyle was part of a new generation of YWCA staff, trained in social work and inspired by the Social Gospel, and she and Annetta Dieckmann, the national Industrial Program executives for the East Central field (the mid-Atlantic region), represent some of the most ambitious early efforts by White staff to include race in the Industrial Program. Their social work training predisposed them to search for concrete solutions, and changing religious currents in the YWCA influenced their goals. Inspired by John Dewey's emphasis on building democracy through education, staff deeply interested in social change flocked to the Industrial Program by the late 1910s. Grace Coyle would go on to be a pioneer social worker, after years in the YWCA Industrial Department, and Annetta Dieckmann followed decades of YWCA work with an illustrious career in the Illinois American Civil Liberties Union.Footnote ⁷³ They and other Industrial Program staff were shaped by contact with working women and by the more radical strand of the Social Gospel movement, which urged engagement with social problems.Footnote ⁷⁴

Grace Coyle, a new Special Industrial Secretary for war work, quickly rebutted Black working women's portrayal as a source of disorder, emphasized the need for more attention to their problems, and reported a sense of interracial class solidarity. In one of her first reports, Coyle wrote that time and experience were disproving the stereotype that Black women were unsuited to factory work. In garment work, Black and White women belonged to the same union, had joint meetings, and were “working out their economic problems together,” and a White member had told her that Black women were “especially loyal members.” Most White women, she reported, did not plan to engage in hate strikes if workplaces were racially integrated.Footnote ⁷⁵ These Black women were hardly the diseased forces of social disorder, the “menace to society,” that figured elsewhere in YWCA coverage, and the portrayal of interracial cooperation contrasted with the race riot accounts that filled the news.

The YWCA Industrial Program's East Central Field soon became the most important site of interracial cooperation.Footnote ⁷⁶ In December 1918, Jackson met in Pittsburgh with the local Industrial Committee and with Coyle, Dieckmann, and other regional field workers and was pleased by the “interest shown in the colored industrial girls by” the field executives. Jackson continued attending the Nepahwin industrial conference, and Dieckmann and Coyle consulted extensively with her throughout the year about Black women workers' needs.Footnote ⁷⁷ Dieckmann incorporated her strong interest in Black working women's problems into her broader YWCA work.Footnote ⁷⁸

Meanwhile, the Nepahwin delegates showed signs of the “democratic attitude” they had pledged in 1918. In 1919, they reported that Black industrial club members sometimes used their local facilities. One reported that her club had admitted African American women “to teach them how to form and lead clubs for colored girls,” and the Religious Work Commission proposed members “make a special effort to know and understand … and help the colored girl all we can” and “help them organize industrial clubs for themselves.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Despite overtones of uplift and a language of segregation, these were attempts to share resources with Black women and to incorporate them into the Industrial Program.Footnote ⁸⁰ Indeed, Black women may have epitomized the Industrial Program's broader shift toward politics: a White delegate reported that the two clubs of black women who used the YWCA library and gymnasium “were the first clubs in Wilkes-Barre to endorse the eight-hour bill for women.” The 1919 Nepahwin Social Service Commission, evolving from a charitable to a political focus, recommended all clubs endorse a set of industrial standards that included “Equal pay for equal work and no distinction between the races in privileges of employment.”Footnote ⁸¹

Racial justice appeared in other Industrial Program conferences. The 1919 Northeastern summer industrial conference passed a resolution “that Colored Girls should be given the same opportunity in industry as the White Girls.”Footnote ⁸² The Industrial Program's first national conference, in November 1919, was the place where “interracial instead of bi-racial clubs were first suggested” in the YWCA, a YWCA staff member later noted.Footnote ⁸³

These ties between Colored Work and the Industrial Program proved crucial at war's end, when a resource crisis hit both federal resources for Black women and YWCA industrial work for Black women. At the federal level, the government eliminated the Labor Department's appropriations for Colored Work. Within the YWCA, postwar cuts in Colored Work affected working women, because YWCA industrial work for Black women had been organized and funded under the auspices of the Colored Work Council rather than the Industrial Program. Mary Jackson's position was eliminated in 1921, leaving no national staff assigned to Black industrial work, and still no Black national staff in the Industrial Program itself.Footnote ⁸⁴ Conditions were bad, and wartime advances were eroding. Black working women faced layoffs, closed doors, and discrimination on all sides, as Jackson warned in one of her last reports. All across the nation, even in areas considered racially progressive, employers were reneging on promises to hire Black women, and the government was little help.Footnote ⁸⁵ Just as returning Black soldiers found White hostility, Black women war workers faced dismal postwar prospects.

Within the YWCA, African American members still lacked autonomous structures after the war. They remained in separate local “branches,” in charge of daily operations but under the direction of White-led “affiliating committees” at the “central” White branch. They lacked a structural base at national conventions, and reports on their programs fell under “city work” or “student work.” Most White YWCA leaders continued to emphasize education, rather than legislation, insisting racial problems could be solved when the “better sorts” reached “mutual understanding.” Many Black women despaired of the association's commitment to interracial work after the 1920 National Convention, where the all-White National Board rebuffed and silenced their attempts to raise racial issues.Footnote ⁸⁶

By contrast, the Industrial Program emerged from the war significantly larger and institutionally stronger than it had been. Before the war, working-class members and progressive staff had begun reshaping its initial goals of protection and moral uplift to focus on education, class-based solidarity, and self-determination. By the late 1910s, program activities had shifted from sewing and Bible study to study of economics, history, trade unions and labor laws. Considered full YWCA members, industrial members also found their distinct needs and interests acknowledged in the Industrial Program. In local associations, they had their own clubs but could participate in other programs. At the regional level, they had organized federations and held conferences. Wartime work dramatically increased membership, strengthened regional program structures, and highlighted members' interest in organized working-class power.Footnote ⁸⁷

After the war, industrial members and staff allies convinced the national YWCA to endorse legislative solutions to labor problems, a dramatic shift and one that national White leaders refused to make on racial issues. At the same 1920 National Convention where White leaders dismissed Black members' concerns, industrial members pushed through a platform supporting labor unions and other workers' rights.Footnote ⁸⁸ Members ran their own governing council, based on the program's philosophy of “self-governance,” and by 1922, met separately in an Industrial Assembly at National Conventions.

Amid the postwar YWCA funding crisis for Black women, Bowles emphasized the need to racially integrate local industrial programs, and called on national industrial staff to help. She drew on the Industrial Program's staff and conference structure to compensate for low Colored Work staffing levels and black members' lack of a structure through which to bring concerns to the entire YWCA. In her 1922 annual report to the City Department, she recommended that White national industrial staff who traveled to oversee local programs spend time with local staff for African American working women and “help to develop in that community a working relationship with the city wide Industrial program to include the Colored girl.”Footnote ⁸⁹

The Industrial Program provided crucial spaces and relationships that staff used to protect and extend the political and economic gains that that they had claimed for Black working women during World War I. Coyle and Dieckmann reported on Black working women and helped organize conferences. Dieckmann showed particular enthusiasm, viewing the YWCA's Industrial Program as a rare opportunity to build better race relations. Her reports to the national Industrial Program staff included extensive descriptions of Black industrial work in her region, and thoughts on how to improve underfunding and difficult situations.Footnote ⁹⁰ Dieckmann studied the myriad factors that shaped possibilities for interracial cooperation among working-class people. She noted in her master's thesis that groups of “influential white and colored leaders” such as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation only reached a few thousand people directly, and called the “continuous contact of a large and increasing number of whites and Negroes” in industry a crucial factor in race relations.Footnote ⁹¹

Dieckmann and colleagues organized an industrial conference in 1919 designed to offer Black working women what white working women had been getting for years from Industrial Department conferences: a sense of solidarity and a group setting in which to relax, discuss common interests, gain skills, and read and hear from key figures in American reform.Footnote ⁹² Conference attendees discussed why factory work was preferable to domestic work; affirmed a commitment to strengthen trade unions despite their sometimes discriminatory practices; and agreed “that colored women do not have equal opportunity to secure desirable work.”Footnote ⁹³ The conference likely provided the sort of “space for homo-social camaraderie, black self-organization, and critical intellectual engagement” that Chad Williams has found Black male veterans were enjoying through such sites as the radical Messenger, during a period of growing claims for racial justice.Footnote ⁹⁴

By 1920, this group of YWCA staff had developed an annual Conference of Colored Business and Industrial Girls in Cheyney, PA. The conference served as a Black parallel to the White Nepahwin conference, and was the only place Black working women in the YWCA could meet regionally to discuss common problems, forge club strategies, gain leadership skills, and feel part of the YWCA industrial movement. Cheyney drew dozens of women from a range of occupations, including elevator operators, teachers, clerks, laundry workers, and domestic workers.Footnote ⁹⁵ Delegates sought to nurture both pride in cultural heritage and a sense of belonging to a larger group of working women, urging local clubs to study “Negro history, current events, literature and art” and “industrial movements of the world.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Reflecting Industrial Program goals, various committees recommended building working-class solidarity abroad as well.Footnote ⁹⁷ Members returned with enthusiasm and sought new challenges “such as special study of Negro history or of industrial and interracial problems” to keep things fresh for long-standing members.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Cheyney conference helped solidify a sense of unity among Black working women in YWCAs across the country in the postwar period, when their local program work struggled for lack of national support.Footnote ⁹⁹ It reinforced ties among BlackYWCA women and created and publicized program ideas.

Cheyney also made African American women a part of the broader YWCA Industrial Program. It drew Black and White staff from all over the country and helped develop greater commitment to racial issues among White staff.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Cheyney exchanged greetings with other YWCA industrial conferences, reminding them that Black women had a place in the movement. Cheyney delegates maintained contact with national and regional industrial staff, with “colored” industrial clubs outside their region, and with the YWCA industrial movement at national conventions. The East Central staff played an especially key role this progress, staffing both East Central conferences, helping to build ties between them, and fostering local program work.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Dieckmann also reported closely to the national Industrial Program on Black industrial work in the region, and worked to remedy harmful staff situations in the region's YWCAs, for instance removing a local industrial committee member hostile “to allowing Colored women to serve” on the committee.Footnote ¹⁰²

All of this organizing created possibilities for Black working women's leadership just as industrial members' power within the Y increased. In 1922, industrial members gained their own separate, autonomous body within the YWCA, the National Industrial Assembly. When they created a National Industrial Council, an executive committee of industrial members to work with the National Board's Industrial Committee, they voted to guarantee African American women two out of the fourteen elected council seats.Footnote ¹⁰³ By contrast, no Black woman served on the YWCA's National Board until Elizabeth Ross Haynes joined it in 1924 after intense pressure from African Americans within and beyond the YWCA.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Besides facilitating the creation of an interracial national council, the conference structure fostered regional contacts among Black and White working women. In the early 1920s, the two East Central conferences, Cheyney and Nepahwin, began exchanging delegates, and the Eastern region's conference included “Colored” delegates in 1924.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ White YWCA industrial members began treating African American industrial club members as colleagues, with Social Service recommendations shifting from 1922's “volunteer service in … colored branches” to 1923's “[c]ooperation” with them.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In 1924, a list of social science classes held in local White clubs included “Race Relations” for the first time.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ White delegates had shifted from viewing African American women as subjects for “Social Service” to partners in “Social Science.” These changes were evident at the local level as well.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

By the mid-1920s, all YWCA industrial conferences except the Southern one had begun admitting African American women. In 1924, Black and White delegates agreed to merge into a cooperatively planned joint East Central conference, and a conference executive described the integrated 1925 conference as “so natural and accepted so as a matter of course that it needed no further discussion”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ By contrast, Black women remained unwelcome at the YWCA Business and Professional Girls' summer conferences.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In the Industrial Program, Black women gained conference leadership positions and national council slots, not only as racial representatives but also as general leaders.

Discussions of race at regional and national conferences spread to local clubs and led even Southern White industrial members to question their conference's racial exclusivity by the late 1920s. In some locations, industrial members led the charge against YWCA racism.Footnote ¹¹¹ They also challenged segregation in the lively 1920s labor education movement, resulting in the desegregation of the Bryn Mawr Summer School and the Wisconsin Summer School. Footnote ¹¹² The National Industrial Assembly, the institutional voice of working women in the YWCA, advanced racial justice and fostered interracial organizing for the next three decades. Black women came to constitute 20 percent of the industrial membership, the highest proportion anywhere in the YWCA. These efforts helped create a new interracial space for working-class women that became, from the 1920s through the 1940s, a site of coalition-building and of critical discussion of race issues among tens of thousands of women from many ethnic, racial, religious, and occupational backgrounds, well before the YWCA became a better-known site of interracial justice organizing.Footnote ¹¹³

These developments fostered early, critical links between labor and racial justice movements through both members and staff. For instance, Floria Pinkney, a Brooklyn member active through at least the 1930s, joined the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and became the first Black organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (which, as Daniel Katz has demonstrated, was building its own multicultural labor movement). Perhaps she had met Black labor leader and BSCP founder A. Philip Randolph when he spoke at a 1925 planning conference for Black industrial members. Annetta Dieckmann closely followed landmark efforts to form Black labor organizations, and other staff helped push the NAACP toward support of labor unions in the 1930s.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Thus, the YWCA Industrial Program was part of that critical transition in Black Freedom Struggle strategies.