Black Manhood and Community Building in North Carolina, 1900–1930

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Marby, The Negro in North Carolina Politics since Reconstruction; Buggs,“The Negro in Charlotte, North Carolina as Reflected in the Charlotte Observer and Related Sources, 1900–1910.” 2.“An Address by the Negroes,” Morning Post (Raleigh), 2 January 1900. 3.Ironically,the gains in political power that blacks achieved in the late 1800s were largely the by-product of the state’s white Redeemers, who in conceding the difficult task of disfranchising all black voters resorted to isolating (and thus diminishing) the extent of black political power.Redeemers thus sometimes gerrymandered black voters into racial districts (including the“Black Second”), sacrificing some political offices to blacks. See Williamson, A Rage for Order, 154. 4. North Carolina’s disfranchisement campaign and its gendered implications have been examined in a number of works,including Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow; Edmonds, The Negro & Fusion Politics in North Carolina; Prather, We Have Taken a City; Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina; and Cecelski and Tyson, Democracy Betrayed. 5.“Southern Negroes’Plaint,”New York Times,26 August 1900; Gilmore,Gender and Jim Crow, 130. 6. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 131. 7.“A Negro Exodus,” Star of Zion, 13 March 1902. 8. See for example, Black, Dismantling Black Manhood; and Litwack, Trouble in Mind.Litwack’s stress on black oppression mutes the theme of black empowerment. See also Packard, American Nightmare. Scholars have begun to demonstrate the varied ways blacks continued to act“in their own interests”during Jim Crow.See,for example, Lewis, In Their Own Interests; Chafe, Gavins, Korstad, and the Behind the Veil Project, Remembering Jim Crow; Wright, Life behind a Veil; and Leyburn, The Way We Lived. 9. Studies emphasizing women’s activism after disfranchisement are extensive. They include Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race; Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope; Salem, To Better Our World; 174 Scott,“Most Invisible of All”; Frankel and Dye, Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era; Shaw, “Black Club Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women,” 10–25; Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do; White, “The Cost of Club Work, the Price of Black Feminism,” 247–269. For working-class black women, see Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom. For comparisons between black and white women’s activism, see Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow; and Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women. While many studies have examined black and white women’s views of each other in the early-twentieth-century South, scholars have failed to examine black men’s attitudes toward and their relationships with black women in any depth for this time period. A notable early exception to this is Nimmons, “Social Reform and Moral Uplift in the Black Community,” 20–23, 52–60.Nimmons argued that ministers,deacons,Masons,and other concerned citizens worked in a similar manner as women to uplift their communities. 10. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a nineteenth-century black suffragist, cast the late nineteenth century as“woman’s era,” as did one of the earliest black clubwomen, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin. Ruffin founded the New Era Club in Boston and later became a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women. She published the first black woman’s newspaper, calling it Woman’s Era. Many black women believed that given the shared legacy of slavery and the absence of the vote for either gender, black men and women shared equally in improving the race and race relations. See White, Too Heavy a Load, 37–39. 11. The black women’s club movement began in 1892 when Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Jane Patterson formed the Colored Women’s League in Washington, D.C. The league, which established branches in the South and in the West, urged black women to play a role in solving the race problem. Three years later, the first Congress of Colored Women of the United States met in Boston; it developed into the National Federation of Afro-American Women. In 1896, the National Federation and the National League of Colored Women merged to form the National Association of Colored Women in Washington, D.C. This group was a coalition of 200 clubs across the country. White, Too Heavy a Load, 27. 12. Several historians record that both black and white women rose out of the shadows of their men in the period 1880–1920. See Baker, “The Domestication of Politics”; Scott, From Pedestal...