Interracial women’s missions offered real but limited hope against racial caste.

Evidence

The role of women’s missions proved a noteworthy exception to the betrayal of blacks’ hopes for equality and justice during the late nineteenth century. As the white South structured a segregated society and sanctioned, either explicitly or implicitly, the violence perpetrated upon black communities, evangelical religion in the form of organized women’s missions fostered bonds of interracial cooperation in an effort to uplift the quality of black life in the South. Notwithstanding its imperfections, interracial cooperation between black and white Baptist women did find concrete ways to offer hope and opportunity. For most black women, such a sisterhood promised too little to nullify the oppressive effects of racial caste. For a few, like Mary Cook, it indeed made upward mobility possible and instilled a new and gendered vision of self, inspiring dreams of racial justice and women’s rights. This unlikely sisterhood, having been forged in the crucible of racial oppression, could deliver no panacea, but it could and did convey to many nameless black women greater optimism and sense of strength. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 557

Categorization

• XREF: Nuances white complicity in black uplift — connects to the chapter 18 claims about white mission aid both helping and patronizing blacks. — connects to: Divergent interests can still yield genuine political coalitions between unequal groups; Black Baptist women held a double consciousness of simultaneous separateness and alliance — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 390