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95  Chapter 4 Shakespeare and Black Women’s Clubs In 1899, the front page of the Topeka, Kansas, black newspaper the Plaindealer reported on the tenth anniversary of a women’s literary group called the Ladies’ Coterie. Made up of eleven black women, including founding members the artist Fanny Clinkscale and prominent society woman Mrs. Robert Buckner, the group was described as “the nucleus around which modern Topeka society was formed.”1 The Coterie hosted a lecture by Ida Wells Barnett titled “The Evils of Lynching’”in 1895 during her antilynching tour, as well as “church suppers, whist parties, literature selections, relief work.” It centered its literary work on “the best known writers of this country and England,” with a goal of “advanced thought and knowledge and progressiveness generally in its members.”2 And it began by studying Shakespeare. Like the members of the Coterie, black club women across the country saw knowledge of Shakespeare as a way to attain “advanced thought and knowledge and progressiveness”and frequently included Shakespeare as part of their educational programs, but they usually read Shakespeare in ways very different from those employed by the white women’s clubs already discussed.3 First, few black clubs read only Shakespeare. Rather, the most common practice was to read Shakespeare as part of a wider curriculum that included other classic authors, African American writers,women authors,and usually a substantial component of civic work, more so than for most white women’s clubs.4 In this context, reading Shakespeare was not the only goal for most black women readers, but it was a significant step in their commitment to education as a component of 96 SHE HATH BEEN READING racial progress.5 As this chapter shows, numerous black club women across the country claimed Shakespeare for their educational and social agendas. Although black women had a long history of “organized self-help” before the formation of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, the NACW expressed “the aspirations of a middle class that was better educated and more confident.”6 The NACW, aptly termed by one historian a “collective self-help project,” began with 5,000 members in 1896, but by 1904 it had grown to 15,000 women in thirty-one states and added a department of literature .7 According to one estimate, by 1910 black women may have formed even more voluntary associations than white women.8 The motto of the NACW, “Lifting as we climb,” embodied the dictum of helping (“lifting”) the entire “race,”as opposed to improving individual women (thus the term “racial uplift”),and claimed for women the “moral leadership of the black community.”9 As one black woman put it, “we have more to do than other women. Those of us fortunate enough to have education must share it with the less fortunate of our race.”10 Similarly,Fannie B. Williams’s oft-quoted description (from 1900) of the differences between white and black clubs was that white women focused on “the forward movement of the best women in the interest of the best womanhood” whereas black women concentrated on “the effort of the few competent in behalf of the many incompetent.” This imperative left little time for the type of intensive reading and study that often occupied white women’s clubs.11 Even so, many black women discovered that Shakespeare could be an effective part of their agenda for “social uplift of a race.”12 Education was one of the central tenets of the black women’s club movement , and the NACW worked to promote “moral, mental, and material progress .”13 In an 1894 essay,Fannie Barrier Williams argued that black women “are eagerly demanding the best of education open to their race. They continually verify what President Rankin of Howard University recently said,‘Any theory of educating the Afro-American that does not throw open the golden gates of the highest culture will fail on the ethical and spiritual side.’”14 The “golden gates of the highest culture” frequently included Shakespeare.15 Black women were charged with the imperative to improve education and thus uplift the race; as Deborah Gray White puts it, “the uplift of women was the means of uplifting the race,” and clubs operated on the principle of “racial uplift through self-help.”16 Although black women agreed that racial progress was the goal of the club movement, progress “meant different things to different people, and not all black women, let alone black men, measured...

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