The ANA’s specific objectives were to defend Black people against racist attacks; publish scholarship about the Black experience by Black authors; foster higher education and intellectual projects; promote literature, science, and art in the Black community; and create a Black intellectual elite, whom W.E.B. Du Bois would later conceptualize as the “talented tenth.” During this era, many Black women intellectuals made outstanding contributions, among them Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Ida Wells-Barnett. Yet not one of them was ever invited to join the ANA. Though they believed a natural alliance existed between them and Black men, they were rejected on the basis of their sex.
More recently, a small group of predominantly Black feminist scholars has been responsible for reconstructing the androcentric African American intellectual and activist tradition by making visible Black women’s significant contributions to political discourse on a range of issues going back to the nineteenth century. An example of these reclamation projects is my own 1995 collection, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought, which makes the case for a robust Black women’s intellectual tradition dating back to 1831, with the publication of Maria Stewart’s speeches.
The period 1909–14 was pivotal in the annals of African American political history. Perhaps the best-known civil rights occurrence was the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Ida Wells-Barnett, the legendary antilynching crusader, journalist, newspaper editor, clubwoman, and suffragist, was one of only two Black women signers of the 1908 call for the establishment of the organization.
Less well known than the NAACP was the founding, by white reformer Frances Kellor, of the New York–based National League for the Protection of Colored Women in 1905. Four years later Nannie Helen Burroughs founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C. In 1910 the league merged with the Committee for the Improvement of Industrial Conditions Among Negroes in New York. Renamed the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, it was a precursor of the National Urban League, founded in 1920.
Other significant developments in Black political history during this period include Margaret Murray Washington’s 1912 founding of National Notes, the newsletter of the influential National Association of Colored Women (established in 1896); and the founding of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) by Marcus Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey in Jamaica in 1914.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s “Lynch Law in America,” written in 1900, is a powerful critique of the institutionalized racism and sexism that render Black men and women vulnerable to previously unspeakable acts of violence. Less visible in the annals of history is her militant struggle for woman suffrage. In the summer of 1913, Illinois had passed the landmark Equal Suffrage Act, which granted women in the state limited suffrage. That year, in one of this period’s most significant yet historically occluded political occurrences, Wells-Barnett founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. It was the first Black woman suffrage organization, committed to enhancing Black women’s civic profile by encouraging them to vote for and help elect Black candidates, especially men; in 1915 it would be critical to the election of Oscar De Priest as the first Black alderman in Chicago.
Wells-Barnett founded the club because Black women were prohibited from joining white suffrage organizations, such as the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). In 1913 NAWSA organized the Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C., to garner broad support for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. But because Southern white women were opposed to integration and to granting suffrage to Black women, the parade’s organizers informed club president Wells-Barnett that she and her sixty-five members could march only in the segregated Black section at the back of the parade.
As instructed by the NAWSA organizers, most Black women, including club members, participated in the march at the rear, but Wells-Barnett refused. When the all-white Chicago delegation drew near, she left the crowd and joined that procession. The Chicago Daily Tribune captured an iconic image of Wells-Barnett marching with the Illinois delegation.
By 1916, the Alpha Suffrage Club had nearly two hundred members and published a newsletter entitled The Alpha Suffrage Record.
Ignoring or minimizing the political work and writing of African American women such as Ida Wells-Barnett renders invisible the important ways these women have contributed to a broad range of social justice initiatives, such as the passage of antilynching legislation, the attainment of voting rights for women regardless of race and national origin, and the election of Black officials. Black freedom struggles and women’s liberation movements since then would not have been possible without the courageous and visionary leadership of Ida Wells-Barnett and the brilliant strategizing of women’s organizations such as the Alpha Suffrage Club in the early twentieth century.
1914–1919
THE GREAT MIGRATION
Isabel Wilkerson
They fled as if under a spell or a high fever. “They left as though they were fleeing some curse,” wrote the scholar Emmett J. Scott. “They were willing to make almost any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket, and they left with the intention of staying.”
It was the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century, and the vast majority of African Americans were still bound to the South, to the blood-and-tear-stained soil of their enslaved foreparents. It had been twenty years since Plessy v. Ferguson formalized an authoritarian Jim Crow regime that controlled every aspect of life for African Americans, from where they could sit in a railroad car to which door they could walk into at a theater to the menial labors to which they were consigned. They were now bearing the full weight of a racial caste system intended to resurrect the hierarchy of slavery and were living under the daily terror of its brutal enforcement.
By this time, an African American was being lynched every four days somewhere in the American South, and for the majority of African Americans, as the Southern writer David Cohn would later put it, “their fate was in the laps of the gods.”
The incendiary film Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915, romanticizing the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, glorifying the very violence to which African Americans were being subjected, and helping to revive the Ku Klux Klan. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the nations of Europe were at war in what was being called the War to End All Wars, which had begun in 1914 and had disrupted European immigration to the United States just as the industrial North needed more workers for its factories and steel mills. Northern labor agents traveled to the South to recruit cheap Black labor, and word spread among Black Southerners that the North was opening up.
It was then that a silent pilgrimage took its first tentative steps, within the borders of this country. It began without warning or notice or very much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach. The nation’s servant class was now breaking free of the South, in quiet rivulets at first and then in a sea of ultimately 6 million people whose actions would reshape racial distribution of the United States. It would come to be called the Great Migration.