Precursor to Women of Color Feminism: The International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World and Their Internationalist Orientation

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World (ICWDR) was founded in 1922 by prominent members of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). This exclusive council, initially comprising eighteen well-educated and highly respected middle-class African American women, was actively engaged in a variety of political agendas and social reform efforts locally and nationally. Situating discrimination of African Americans across the United States into the larger context of ongoing global European and American racialized colonial oppression and imperialist interventionism, this group of women pursued a Pan-Africanist agenda promoting “racial uplift” by “undermin[ing] American racism within larger global processes of racism, imperialism, and eventually decolonization” (Materson 2009: 36). More specifically, these reformers directed their energies toward a transnational endeavor of raising the racial consciousness of women of “darker complexions” across the globe by creating reading and conversation groups. These groups would “study any question or all questions in a systematic way, relative to the darker races. No matter whether these races are races willing to be affiliated with us or not,” as member Margaret Murray put it, with the aim of fostering solidarity based on shared history as oppressed people “of the darker races” (Washington 1923).

Although a majority of the founding members—women such as Mary Church Terrell; Addie W. Hunton; Mrs. Booker T. Washington, Margaret Murray Washington; Maggie L. Walker; and Mary B. Talbert—were also actively involved in other women’s rights groups such as the International Council of Women, International Alliance of Women / International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the National Association of Colored Women. As Black women they recognized the necessity and importance of a transnational forum that would highlight the shared oppressions of racialized minority women, a focus that existing women’s organizations had yet to address. Expanding W. E. B. Du Bois’s Pan-Africanist approach to include gender as a political issue and organizing strategy, the ICWDR’s members were ambitious and optimistic about the organization’s ability to unify women on a global level and to garner international support for progressive social change that would improve the disadvantaged status of African-descended women worldwide (Rief 2004: 218).

Unfortunately, their membership exclusivity based on social class, along with the extensive responsibilities of council members already committed to various personal, professional, and political causes, ultimately led to the ICWDR disbanding sometime in the early 1940s.¹ Nonetheless, although the organization itself faded away, the ideological principles on which it was founded acted as a “transition site between nineteenth-century strategies of racial uplift and newer global race consciousness ideas, [and] was an antecedent to the women of color feminism that would emerge in the late twentieth century” (Materson 2009: 36). The ICWDR archival piece that follows highlights how the internationalist, feminist, antiracist and decolonizing orientations of the council employed strategies that unified, advanced, and sought to address the disadvantaged condition of women of the “darker races” globally.