Recovering Five Generations Hence: The Life and Writing of Lillian Jones Horace

Lillian Horace and the Respectable Black Woman: Black Women’s Activism in Combating Jim Crow

244 Nikki Brown strengthened when the individual is empowered, and the strength of African American communities relied heavily on the empowerment of their individual citizens. If we think of respectability as a step on the path to political empowerment or as a form of community activism, then respectability is much more complex than it has been perceived as being. How did Lillian Horace and other middle-class African American women teachers incorporate respectability into their activism for black political empowerment? Black Menace and Black Respectability in 1900 Black respectability is an idea best understood within the context of Jim Crow and the widespread fear of the black menace. The provocative and incendiary stereotypes of the promiscuous black woman, the lazy black woman, the thieving black woman, the foul-mouthed black woman, and the criminal black woman were commonly represented in newspapers, magazines, radio, and cinema at the turn of the twentieth century. Of course, these stereotypes did not appear out of nowhere; manufactured by a racist culture, they had long been used to pigeonhole and police black women. A single letter written in 1895 by John Jacks, a Missouri journalist claiming that African American women were “prostitutes, liars, and thieves” immediately led to at least two national conventions of African American women keen on making a rebuttal.1 Scholars such as Darlene Clark Hine, Paula Giddings, and Deborah Gray White have explored how the insult engendered one of the most proactive and community-oriented social movements in the twentieth century, the African American women’s club movement. Within this movement, the members worked toward repealing the predominant stereotype of black women as menaces.The club movement was devoted to presenting African American women instead as respectable and committed to instructing future generations on the value of respectability. It is important to note that by 1900, the South had thrown itself fully into the arms of Jim Crow.The successful efforts led by southern states to deny African American men the right to vote and the right to engage in politics or hold political office are well documented.2 The last thirty years of African American historical literature have also concentrated on the system of racial etiquette that was emerging in the South. The institutionalization of white supremacy in the South engendered a 247 Lillian Horace and the Respectable Black Woman movement, respectabilityamong African Americans was a domain controlled by African American women. Teachers and nurses operated as walking, talking models of good behavior, and entering the teaching class afforded African American women opportunities to concurrently challenge Jim Crow in the short term and shape the minds of future generations of African Americans for the long term. Thus, teaching offered African American women like Lillian Horace freedom to act on their larger goals for social justice and to hold a privileged place within an African American community. However, the field of teaching was not without its pitfalls. African American women teachers enjoyed more professional freedom than African American domestic workers and farmers, but Jim Crow heavily proscribed the personal and professional mobility of all African American women. Furthermore, African American male sexism played a significant role in determining the limits of respectability. African American women teachers molded young minds and pressed the importance of good training and schools, but black men had the final say about whether a schoolteacher could demand the same respect as a minister or pastor.4 For example, John William Gibson, American author and illustrator, suggested in Golden Thoughts on Chastity and Procreation that there were just two paths for middle-class African American girls in 1903.The first path began with “bad literature,” wound its way through “flirting and coquettery and fast life dissipation,” and ended with its followers being “outcast” and undergoing social death. The second path started with “study and obedience,” and went straight through “virtue and devotion” to “loving mother[hood].” In her old age a girl who had followed it was “an honored and beloved grandmother.”5 This little allegory of the paths illustrates a larger theme of uncertainty about women’s trustworthiness. Respectability among African American women was bounded by conservative, even sexist, beliefs about the need to confine women to a narrow behavioral sphere, and it was also a response to the prevailing stereotypes of black women’s promiscuity and laziness. It was a fine line...