Black women’s clubs organized around a propertied middle class

Evidence

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: connects to: Local black women’s clubs rapidly multiplied and raised growing sums for education. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 421