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Introduction When Zora Neale Hurston suggested in a newspaper interview in 1943 that the segregation of southern blacks from whites was not necessarily undesirable , she provoked an outcry. Her critics charged her with endorsing Jim Crow and providing ammunition to white supremacists. Her friends wondered at her hypocrisy, since she had herself benefited from the blessings of integration through her education at Barnard College. How, wondered Joel A. Rogers, the Afrocentric historian, could Hurston legitimately grab the benefits of integration while advocating black separatism?1 But Hurston was far from unique; black women had a long history of weaving a course that relied on integrationist and separatist strategies. In early-twentieth-century America , black women sought the benefits of both black separatism and integrationism : at a grassroots level, they became members of both Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the interracial National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); on an individual level, businesswomen like Madam C. J. Walker lent their philanthropy to both separatist and integrationist organizations; at a leadership level, black clubwomen set up pan-African organizations while also joining with white women in interracial movements, such as the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). Bridging Race Divides examines the careers of a group of black women activists , clubwomen, writer-intellectuals, and businesswomen who had multiple affiliations with both black nationalist and interracial organizations, made important contributions to black feminist thought, and, through their use of multiple strategies, shaped debates over the solution to the race problem. Included in this study are three prominent clubwomen, Margaret Murray Washington, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Mary McLeod Bethune; black women leaders in the YWCA, including Eva Bowles and Cecelia Cabaniss Saunders; Madam C. J. Walker and her daughter A’Lelia Walker, who founded the Walker Manufacturing Company’s hair treatment and beauty schools; Amy Jacques Garvey, UNIA leader and Negro World journalist; and Jessie Fauset, novelist and literary editor of The Crisis during the Harlem Renaissance . Through an examination of the political thought and activism of these  / Bridging Race Divides women in the years between the founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896 and the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) in 1935, this book puts forward three main arguments: first, that these women challenged the dichotomy between black nationalism and integrationism and with it the presumed triumph of an interracial America; second , that black women were at the forefront of black nationalism and worked to shape it within a feminist framework; third, that they made a significant contribution toward the development of a black feminist tradition. As such this study engages with three current historiographical debates: studies that understand black political thought as having overlapping rather than oppositional strands; feminist scholarship that has redefined the meaning of the political and the nature of essentialist feminism; and interdisciplinary studies concerning the role of feminism within nationalist organizations. Black women in early-twentieth-century America consciously chose to support a range of race and women’s organizations, and drew on a variety of strategies to address the “multiple jeopardy” of gender, race, and class. Their flexible approach was manifested in their political groupings, economic initiatives, cultural protests, and organizational strategies, which challenged the integrationist versus black nationalist dichotomy constructed by their contemporaries and built up by later narratives of American history. The religious, literary, social reform, women’s rights, antilynching, pan-African, interracial, party political, and myriad other clubs to which these women belonged had wide crossover in their membership, and their activities were faithfully reported and given publicity by women journalists like Fauset in The Crisis and Alice Dunbar-Nelson in the Pittsburgh Courier.2 Time and again, Washington, Burroughs, Bethune, the Walkers, Fauset, and many others offered their homes, schools, and wider contacts to help other black women launch new organizations and initiatives. For example, Margaret Murray Washington founded the pan-African International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR) at Nannie Helen Burroughs’s National Training School in Washington, D.C.; Mary McLeod Bethune founded the NCNW at the Colored Branch of the YWCA in Harlem, which was also used as a meeting place for many other local and national black women’s initiatives, including the Women’s Auxiliary of the NAACP. A’Lelia Walker also hosted the Women’s Auxiliary at her 136th Street Studio, while her mother’s homes in Indianapolis and at Irvington-on-Hudson had welcomed many prominent clubwomen.3 In her will Madam...

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