Women were welcomed at the 1869 founding convention of the National Colored Labor Union. As the Black workers explained in one resolution, they did not want to commit ‘the mistakes heretofore made by our white fellow citizens in omitting women’. 5 This Black labor organization, created because of the exclusionary policies of white labor groups, pro

Fannie Barrier Williams, whom white women in Chicago had excluded from their club, summed up the difference between the white club movement and the club movement among her people. Black women, she said, had come to realize that … progress includes a great deal more than what is generally meant by the terms culture, education and contact. The club m

Once the pattern of capitulation to racism had taken hold – and especially at that historical juncture when the new and ruthless monopolist expansion required more intense forms of racism – it was inevitable that the suffragists would eventually be hurt by its backfire.

Contrary to Kearney’s and Tillman’s logic, racial conflict did not emerge spontaneously, but rather was consciously planned by the representatives of the economically ascendant class. They needed to impede working-class unity so as to facilitate their own exploitative designs.

Had Anthony seriously reflected on the findings of her friend Ida B. Wells, she might have realized that a noncommittal stand on racism implied that lynchings and mass murders by the thousands could be considered a neutral issue.

Myrtilla Miner may have been ‘frail’, as Frederick Douglass observed, but she was definitely formidable, and was always able, at lesson time, to discover the eye of that racist storm. Early one morning, however, she was abruptly awakened by the odor of smoke and raging flames, which soon consumed her schoolhouse. Although her school was destroyed,

The most outstanding examples of white women’s sisterly solidarity with Black women are associated with Black people’s historical struggle for education. Like Prudence Crandall and Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner literally risked her life as she sought to impart knowledge to young Black women.17 In 1851, when she initiated her project to establis

And like Douglass’ master, the former slaveholders realized that ‘… if you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world.’

Black people learned that emancipation’s ‘forty acres and a mule’ was a malicious rumor. They would have to fight for land; they would have to fight for political power. And after centuries of educational deprivation, they would zealously assert their right to satisfy their profound craving for learning.