Black women urged self-governed institutions rather than white-defined approbation

Evidence

Johnson traced the rise of great nations and challenged her own people to rise similarly and to look to their own leaders for admiration and inspiration rather than “trying to prove to the world that we were born into it for the sole purpose of admiring the white people of the United States, and this is all we will ever be fit for.” She urged black control of educational, financial, and religious institutions—insisting that “if our white brethren close their avenues to us because of this determination, we must create avenues for ourselves.” — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 337

Categorization

• XREF: The demand to look to own leaders rather than seek white admiration clarifies the boundary between ‘respectability’ as self-valuing and ‘respectability’ as white appeasement — central to the coined concept. — connects to: Black Baptist women held a double consciousness of simultaneous separateness and alliance — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 390; Black women’s separatist organizing added gender consciousness to racial self-help — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 338; Black women needed a separate feminist intellectual tradition (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Black women needed a separate feminist intellectual tradition #expands (0.85)