Black middle-class women’s clubs asserted unity with the wider race

Evidence

A useful instance demonstrating the psychological distance traversed by the Black middle class is given by Jeremiah Moses in his discussion of the Black women’s club movement in the late nineteenth century: “The club movement among Afro-American woman (sic) had its beginnings in the early 1800s with the formation of groups in those cities of the United States where the black middle class was large enough to provide a membership. ‘As a general rule,’ says Fannie Barrier Williams, ‘those who, in the proper sense, may be called the best women in the communities where these clubs were organized, became interested and joined in the work of helpfulness.’ Mrs. Williams saw this as a refutation of the charge that ‘colored women of education and refinement had no sympathetic interest in their own race.’” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2167

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to reader’s interest in the Black middle class’s evolving relation to the mass of Black people. — connects to: Black church women’s drive targeted internal community inequities, unlike club women’s external racism defense — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 696; Racism’s lumping of all black women together justified elite uplift toward the lowly — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 943