Children's Welfare and Children's Rights

By: Dorothy E. Roberts

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Children's Welfare and Children's Rights

One of the chief aims of black women's organizing has been to improve the welfare of children. Yet black women were excluded from mainstream child welfare organizations before World War II, and black children were virtually ignored by child welfare institutions founded by elite whites in the late nineteenth century to rescue poor immigrant children from parental abuse and indigence. As a result, black women created a movement at the turn of the twentieth century to provide services to black children, one that tied child welfare to racial advancement and justice. Later in the twentieth century, black women continued to create programs for black children who received inferior treatment from public child welfare agencies, and they played key roles in efforts to champion children's rights and to reform national child welfare policy.

Child Welfare and Racial Uplift in the Early Twentieth Century

After slavery ended, black communities had to look to their own resources to meet children's needs. The communities relied primarily on informal arrangements among relatives and neighbors, primarily women, to take in children whose parents were unable to care for them. African American women have a rich tradition of communal childcare involving networks of extended family and neighbors that has historically served as a critical safety net for struggling families and an alternative to formal child welfare services. This was especially important in the 1900s because black children were more likely to be labeled “delinquent” and sent to prison than to be admitted to the asylums and orphanages established by whites.

At the turn of the twentieth century, black women led a multifaceted campaign to improve the status of the race, one that focused primarily on institutions and programs that benefited black children. Women's clubs and church groups engaged in a variety of social work that differed dramatically from the mainstream views of their time. Black women believed that resisting racial injustice, advancing the race, and reforming society entailed properly educating and caring for the next generation. They emphasized preventive social work that improved mothers' skills and children's opportunities, in stark contrast to the white-dominated child welfare system's reliance on punishing mothers and removing children from their homes.

Children's March for Survival, 25 March 1972. Shown here taking a rest are some of the protestors who joined the demonstration.

© Bettye Lane

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Although black women's organizations, like their white counterparts, were often led by relatively prosperous, educated women, they tended to focus their activism on the concerns of poor and working mothers and their children. They saw the fate of the entire race as linked and understood that racial betterment necessitated universal programs for the benefit of entire communities. By design, they concentrated on the status of black motherhood and the quality of home life to defend mothers and children from the prevailing stereotypes of immorality and depravity.

Black club women's activism and philanthropy attained national status when a group of well-educated, middle class women, including Mary Church Terrell, Ida Wells-Barnett, Janie Porter Barrett, and Margaret Murray Washington, founded the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in Washington, DC, in 1896, uniting the three largest federations and more than one hundred local women's clubs. With the motto, “Lifting As We Climb,” NACW held national conferences in a number of northern cities and became a powerful advocate for racial uplift, which included improving black children's welfare. Mary Church Terrell, a graduate of Oberlin College and the first president of the NACW, exhorted educated Negro women in her numerous speeches and writings to “listen to the cry of the children” by placing them on a strong foundation of morality and education that could withstand the prejudice and persecution they would certainly confront.

Child welfare activities within the black community, then, developed as part of black women's broader social welfare vision. Some activities directed toward orphaned, abandoned, and neglected children, such as the establishment of orphanages, corresponded with later concepts of child welfare programs. But most services were aimed at improving the lives of all black children by giving them better access to education or by helping their mothers to become better caregivers. Such services included establishing schools and training teachers, holding mothers' meetings, running day nurseries and kindergartens, and opening homes for working girls.

African American women responded to the needs of parentless or neglected children, largely denied entrance to orphanages established by whites, by organizing in-formal as well as institutionalized services. Individual women founded and operated orphanages that relied entirely on their fundraising and leadership abilities. Unlike white child savers of the time, who sought to rescue poor immigrant children from what they perceived as a corrupting environment, black women were motivated to rescue black children from the punitive institutions created by whites. On 3 October 1907, Elizabeth McDonald established the Louis Juvenile Home for dependent and neglected children in her Chicago home. She taught the fifty-six children and two mothers who resided there such domestic tasks as washing, cooking, sewing, and embroidering. McDonald failed to attract sufficient charitable donations and supported her home by lecturing, evangelizing, and collecting small fees from parents. She traced her motivation to the disproportionate numbers of blacks in prison and saw her home as saving children from future imprisonment.

Other orphanages established by black women grew into more formal institutions, with boards of trustees, hired directors, and more stable sources of funding. Carrie Steele, a former slave, sold her autobiography to raise enough money to purchase four acres of land in Atlanta to start an orphanage in 1890 that cared for five children. By 1900, the Carrie Steele Orphanage had sufficient support from club and church groups to expand to a three-story building housing 225 children, a hospital, and a school. Similarly, Amanda Berry Smith, an internationally renowned evangelist and missionary, raised money by selling her autobiography to found the Amanda Smith Industrial Home for Abandoned and Destitute Colored Children in Harvey, Illinois, in 1899. With financial assistance from clubs and the state of Illinois, the orphanage was able to continue caring for more than sixty children after Smith retired in 1912 at age seventy-six.

Other orphanages supported by black women's organizations include the Home for Destitute Negro Children in New Castle, Pennsylvania, sponsored by the State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, and Etland Home for Wayward Girls, operated by the North Carolina State Federation of Negro Women's Clubs, under the direction of Charlotte Hawkins Brown, who served as the federation's president from 1915 to 1936.

After 1910 the strength of club federations enabled black women, particularly in the North, to amass the funds and enlist the support of white organizations and state legislatures needed to create large and stable institutions.

Building reformatories was another avenue African American women took to respond to black children's disparate involvement in the juvenile justice system. One of the most successful was Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls in Peake, also known as Peake's Turnout, established in 1915 by Janie Porter Barrett, president of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs. Barrett raised more than $5,000 for the reformatory by conducting tours of her Locust Street Settlement in Hampton and lecturing about her settlement work. She put the reformatory on sound financial footing by garnering support from the Russell Sage Foundation and appropriations from the Virginia State Legislature. As head resident, Barrett preferred to shape the girls' character through “loving discipline” and not through corporal punishment.

Black club women also participated actively in juvenile work by becoming probation officers, by advocating on behalf of youth treated unfairly by white authorities, and by adding reformatory work to other institutions such as schools and orphanages.

Kindergartens and day nurseries were the earliest and most common services provided by black women's clubs and church groups. They reflected black women organizers' philosophy that the education of children and mothers was the best means for racial uplift and social reform. Kindergartens and day nurseries also offered critical assistance to black mothers who were far more likely than white mothers to work outside the home. The Women's Union Day Nursery in Philadelphia, established in 1898, for example, operated from 6:30 A.M. to 6:30 P.M. Black club women's acceptance and facilitation of mothers' paid labor differed starkly from white women reformers' support of the “family wage,” which assumed female dependence on a male breadwinner. The Colored Women's Kindergarten Association developed out of an 1899 meeting of black women in Montgomery, Alabama, presided over by Margaret Murray Washington, a principal at Tuskegee Institute and wife of its prominent founder, Booker T. Washington. Black women in Atlanta opened several kindergartens in poor parts of the city under the auspices of the Gate City Free Kindergarten Association formed in 1905.

Black women's groups often combined other services with their kindergarten and day nursery programs. The Colored Women's League of Washington, DC, which opened a model kindergarten in 1896, trained kindergarten teachers. The league's seven free kindergartens were eventually incorporated into the public school system and employed primarily graduates of the league's teacher training center. One of the league's leading members, Sara I. Fleetwood, also led so-called Mothers' Meetings in which working mothers received advice about child care and home economics. The day nursery run by the women of the Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, offered residential care for black children under the supervision of the juvenile court.

Black women also expressed their faith in education as the path to racial betterment by providing and improving educational opportunities for black children beyond their primary years. Public education in the South, especially at the high school level, was segregated and largely for white children only. In 1910 half of southern black high school students attended private schools and were financed mainly by private donations and tuition. Distribution of educational funding was blatantly inequitable, and the few public schools available for black students were plagued with dilapidated and overcrowded facilities, insufficient equipment, reduced school terms, and under-qualified and poorly paid teachers.

African American women filled the gap left by the public school system by establishing private schools and industrial training centers for black children. Mary McLeod Bethune, who served as NACW president from 1924 to 1928, founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro girls in Daytona, Florida, on 3 October 1904. The school merged with Cookman Institute, a men's college, in 1923, and Bethune served as president of Bethune-Cookman College for many years.

Another important educational institution was the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC, opened on 19 October 1909 by Nannie Helen Burroughs, the corresponding secretary and future president of the Women's Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention. Seeking “the highest development of Christian womanhood,” the curriculum emphasized industrial skills such as housekeeping, household administration, home nursing, interior decorating, and laundering, in addition to the studies required of a more traditional classical education. Burroughs summed up the school's mission as the three “Bs”—the Bible, the Bath, and the Broom. Burroughs raised almost all the funds needed to maintain the school from black donors like Maggie L. Walker, a banker from Richmond, Virginia, who contributed $500 when the school was in its planning stages.

Black schools typically served important child welfare functions beyond teaching children academic subjects. They were often the site of social work, public addresses, conferences, teachers' training institutes, and other activities related to fostering the education of black children. Mothers' Clubs and Home Makers' Clubs, which raised money for school improvements such as playgrounds and offered after-school and summer programs, formed as extensions of public schools in many cities in the early 1900s.

In addition to establishing their own kindergartens and schools, black women lobbied for improvements in the quality of public education for black children and often raised private funds for black public schools. Mothers in New York City boycotted schools in the 1890s to demand increased employment of black teachers. Ida Wells-Barnett, a newspaper journalist and publisher and leader in the antilynching crusade, organized women in Chicago, with the assistance of Jane Addams and other prominent white reformers, to preserve integrated education in the face of calls to segregate the city's schools.

Especially effective was the Women's Civic and Social Improvement Committee formed in 1912 by the Atlanta Neighborhood Union to address the deplorable conditions of the city's colored schools. After inspecting every black school in Atlanta, committee members met with the mayor and members of the city council to gain support for their cause and persuaded white religious leaders and prominent citizens to visit some of the schools. The committee held public meetings, complete with slide shows to display inferior school conditions, and circulated petitions to mobilize community and government action for change.

The Atlanta Board of Education responded by adding a school, raising black teachers' salaries, and increasing expenditures on school facilities, though it continued to discriminate against black students. The Atlanta Neighborhood Union also established a health center in 1915 with a medical clinic that examined and treated thousands of children, and dispensed milk, cod liver oil, and health-related information. Other black women's clubs offered health programs in an effort to reduce mortality, malnutrition, and tuberculosis among children.

African American women worked to improve the quality of schools in other black communities as well. Laura J. Wheatley organized black women in Baltimore to protest the unsanitary and hazardous conditions she discovered at a local school. These women formed the Civic Aid Association, named Wheatley their president, and joined ranks with the city's African Methodist Episcopal ministers and the Colored Citizens' Equitable Improvement Association of East Baltimore to pressure the school board to request funds from the Board of Estimates for a new high school for black children. The Paul Lawrence Dunbar School opened in September 1916, equipped with twenty-four classrooms, teachers' rooms, industrial training rooms, and an assembly hall. Wheatley later became president of the Baltimore Federation of Parent-Teacher Clubs, which in 1925 boasted ten thousand members and branches at twenty-seven schools, and agitated to equalize the salaries of black and white teachers. Black teachers, mostly women, also organized to advocate for direct representation on school boards, better educational opportunities for black children, and more equitable allocation of educational resources. To this end, they formed the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools (NATCS) in 1904.

Another child welfare service provided by African American women's organizations in the early twentieth century was the establishment of homes for working girls. These homes may be considered child welfare work because they often sheltered teenaged working girls as well as the children of working mothers who lived there. African American women responded to the needs of their younger and less fortunate sisters who migrated from the South to northern cities in search of better lives and jobs as domestic servants. Poverty wages and racial discrimination often made these young women vulnerable to the lure of prostitution in order to survive. Black women established homes not only to rescue these girls but also to subvert negative stereotypes of black women as sexually licentious and to replace them with an image of moral womanhood. Homes for working girls filled the need for housing, employment, and training in domestic service for thousands of impoverished black girls who might otherwise have perished in urban slums.

One example that eventually served as a model for boardinghouses for black girls across the country was the Phillis Wheatley Association in Cleveland, Ohio, founded by Jane Edna Hunter in 1912. Hunter, who moved from South Carolina to Cleveland in 1905 to work as a nurse in white homes, organized other black domestic servants to establish the association and open a home with financial aid from the local whites-only YWCA. Hunter secured the home's financial stability by soliciting sizeable contributions from white elites in Cleveland, who were invited to serve on the association's board of directors. By the 1930s, the Phillis Wheatley Home offered a variety of services, including an employment agency, summer camp, and housing for an average of 150 girls each year. As a prominent member of the NACW, Hunter directed the establishment of Phillis Wheatley Homes in cities throughout the United States.

Child Welfare after the New Deal

Government child welfare agencies did not recognize black children until the 1930s, when services shifted from orphanages to foster care and from private charities to public agencies. After World War II, the proportion of African American children served by the public child welfare system climbed steadily. By 1961, almost one-quarter of the child welfare population was black, and that population received woefully inferior care from state agencies. They spent the most time in foster care and were the least likely to be either returned home or adopted.

During the New Deal, black women activists began to work to improve local and federal child welfare policy that increasingly affected black children. Mary McLeod Bethune was the first black woman in a position to place the concerns of black children on the national agenda. She was invited by President Calvin Coolidge to attend the 1928 White House Conference on Child Welfare and the 1930 White House Conference on Child Health by President Herbert Hoover. Bethune was appointed director of the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936, becoming the first black woman to serve as head of a federal agency. Bethune took full advantage of her appointment to document discriminatory federal support of black youth, demand more equitable allocation of federal funding, and ensure black participation in distributing funds to their communities.

Bethune's efforts to affect federal policy marked a change in African American women's activism on behalf of children. Early black club women, with little access to government officials or mainstream organizations, concentrated on establishing their own institutions for black children who were excluded from white child welfare services. The National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), founded by Bethune in 1935, broke with the NACW's tradition of racial uplift to focus on fighting racism and poverty by lobbying the federal government for favorable legislation and programs.

Black women also played significant roles in national black organizations, such as the Urban League and the NAACP, to advocate for better services for black children who were victims of discrimination by child welfare agencies. Camille Jeffers, a prominent black social worker and staff member of the New York Urban League, was instrumental in launching Adopt-A-Child, a project that succeeded in placing increased numbers of black and Puerto Rican children in New York City in adoptive homes from January 1955 to December 1959. The Women's Christian Alliance, a child welfare agency created expressly for black children by black women in Philadelphia, began a similar adoption program in 1959.

African American women were leaders and the majority of participants in the welfare rights movement that successfully agitated for the removal of barriers to federal aid for poor black children during the 1960s and 1970s. The most prominent was Johnnie Tillmon, a Los Angeles mother of six, who helped to found the National Welfare Rights Organization in 1967 and in 1972 became the first welfare recipient to be elected executive director. The movement was based on the grassroots, often militant, activism of thousands of black welfare recipients who fought for compensation for their work as mothers in the form of increased benefits or a guaranteed annual income to create a better life for their children. Many black mothers also worked cooperatively on child welfare issues as staff and volunteers in Head Start, an early education program for poor children launched in 1965 by the Office of Economic Opportunity as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty.

Child Welfare at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

The relationship of black children to the child welfare system changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. No longer denied entrance to mainstream child welfare institutions, black children became the system's main clients. During the 1980s and 1990s, both the size of the foster care population and the proportion of black children skyrocketed. By 2000, there were almost 600,000 children in foster care, more than 40 percent of whom were black, though black children were less than 20 percent of the nation's youth. At the turn of the twenty-first century, black children were the most likely of any children in the country to be placed in foster care.

Informal kinship care continued to serve as a family-preserving alternative to foster care for black children. During the 1980s, high incarceration rates, the AIDS epidemic, and maternal substance abuse, combined with cutbacks in social services, led to a resurgence in caregiving by black female relatives, especially grandmothers. Since the numbers of licensed foster homes could not keep up with the escalating foster care population, states increasingly placed black children with kin. Formal kinship foster care soon became the main type of out-of-home placement for black children in some cities. As with the orphanages established by individual black women in the early twentieth century, black women's homes were often the site of child welfare work.

African American women, frequently in their roles as case workers and other service providers in state-funded agencies, worked to reduce the placement of black children in foster care and to make child welfare programs more responsive to the needs of black families and communities. The National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW), with a predominantly female membership, has been committed since 1968 to educating social workers to better serve black communities, transforming the white agencies in which they work, and establishing black institutions for children. In 1972, the NABW issued a controversial resolution calling for the placement of black children only in black foster and adoptive homes. Eventually, the organization would drop its absolute stance in opposition to transracial adoption and focus instead on promoting adoptions within the African American community.

One of the leading national voices in the children's rights movement was Marian Wright Edelman. A graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School and the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar, Edelman became a renowned civil rights attorney during the 1960s when she served as director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Mississippi and counsel to the Poor People's March in Washington, DC. In 1973, Edelman founded the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), the nation's foremost organization dedicated to children's welfare, whose mission is “Leave No Child Behind.” As CDF president, Edelman infused the organization's projects, which include the Black Community Crusade for Children, with her strong sense of social justice, community involvement, and spiritual heritage. Focusing on the needs of poor and minority children and those with disabilities, CDF advocated for preventive measures to avoid harm to children in the areas of child care and early education, child health, child abuse and neglect, violence prevention, and family income.

See also Childhood and Children's Defense Fund.

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