Black women have been organizing in the United States since their arrival on this continent. Many of their early organizations were unnamed and unknown, such as the networks formed by slave women as they worked together, educated each other, protected their children, and escaped to freedom. (See
Leslie Schwalm, A Hard Fight For We, 2001). More popular formal organizations began in the Northeastern U.S. and the women in these groups often connected their social, educational, and civic concerns under one umbrella. Research has shown that records of Black women's organizations go back as far as 1793--the birth of the Female Benevolent Society of St. Thomas in Philadelphia. Black women began their own mutual aid organization in Rhode Island in 1803 when the African Benevolent Society there would not allow women to vote within the organization. These groups, other Black women's groups that would form in the years to come, focused on filling needs in the Black community in whatever ways they could. They provided care for children of working mothers, funded orphanages, encouraged education and moral improvement, protested political injustices, and so much more. But despite all of their work, their groups were largely unrecognized by the White community until the arrival of large anti-slavery organizations in the 1830s such as William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society that invited the participation of these previously invisible Black organizations. The anti-slavery heightened the importance of Black activism in the antebellum North and these groups were seen in a new light. But Blacks were already organized against slavery long before Garrison and his peers came along--just look at the extensive networking of
David Walker or
Prince Hall, founder of the
African Masonic Lodge. Black women founded the first women's anti-slavery society in Salem, Massachusetts in 1832 and were influential in founding and encouraging interracial societies in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.
One of my favorite early Black women's groups was the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society, founded in Boston in 1831, who got together to improve their own education and provide financial support to each other and Black women in the area. They even had their own library (women after my own nerdy heart). But it would be misleading to imply that Black women's societies were solely in the Northeast during the 1800s. Black women organized in the Midwest in growing cities such as Chicago but also in the new pioneer lands like Kansas, and as far West as California and the Pacific Northwest. Black women's societies exploded following the Civil War....Stay tuned for Part II....
For a Little More Reading...
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