Philanthropy

By: Joan Marie Johnson

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Philanthropy

African American women have always been at the forefront of philanthropic work for their local communities and fund-raising for national campaigns against racial oppression. Black women raised millions of dollars for charitable causes through early church-based charity work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through fund-raising for social reform and race uplift at the turn of the twentieth century, and through donations by wealthy individual black women in the late twentieth century. Whether they raised money through soliciting donations from white donors and white foundations or through bake sales, fairs, and other community activities, African American women created and sustained many of the charitable and reform institutions aiding their communities. While their primary focus was the social welfare needs of blacks in their community, they also aided causes of particular interest to the race, such as the movement to abolish slavery or the campaign to end lynching.

The most striking aspect of black women's philanthropic work was perhaps its ability to raise the money needed for a variety of programs and institutions, despite a relative lack of wealth within the community. Through a range of fund-raising techniques, black women did the “wholly impossible.” As members of organizations led by men, ladies' auxiliaries to men's groups, women's clubs and other female-led organizations, they were central to the success of much of the social welfare work for African Americans.

Early Efforts

For many years, black women's philanthropy tended to take the form of local charity work, where women knew the individuals they assisted. African American women provided service as well as funds, rather than large-scale anonymous financial contributions. While some women's organizations limited their membership to the most educated or wealthy, many groups, especially church groups, had poor and working-class women alongside their wealthier sisters. These organizations believed that the work they did serviced the entire community as it uplifted the race.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most black women's philanthropic work was done through women's church groups, lodges, and mutual improvement or benevolent associations, primarily in the North. Local benevolent groups composed of free blacks, such as the African Benevolent Society of Newport, Rhode Island, founded in 1808, and the African Marine Fund of New York City, had both male and female members. Women were most often included in societies dedicated to education or literary associations and usually were excluded from mutual aid groups that provided funeral assistance and aid to widows and orphans. One of the earliest women's benevolent societies, the African Dorcas Society, was founded in 1828 in New York City for the benefit of needy black schoolchildren in want of clothing and shoes to wear to school. Meeting in sewing circles, society members made and mended clothing for poor children.

Anita Stroud devoted herself to caring for the children in the housing project where she lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. A park in Charlotte is named after her.

Public Library of Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, by permission of the Charlotte Observer

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Women's church associations were the most popular vehicles for women's philanthropic work in the nineteenth century. As women and as mothers, they followed their Christian duty to minister to those in need, particularly other women and children. Members of Philadelphia's St. Thomas Methodist Episcopal Church, for example, formed two women's groups, the Female Benevolent Society in 1796 and the Daughters of St. Thomas in 1822 with separate treasuries. Like white women, black women raised funds through a variety of fairs and sales. New York City's African Methodist Episcopal Church women, held a fair in 1837, where they sold “a general assortment of Fancy Articles, Dry Goods, Toys, Confectionery, &c.” The funds were usually used to purchase or build church property or to pay off debts.

Black women also played an integral role in the abolitionist movement, often raising funds as well as organizing public events that promoted the cause. They belonged both to interracial organizations such as the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and to exclusively black societies such as the Female Colored Union Society of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

While men often applauded women's efforts, they sometimes disapproved of work that took women away from their homes. The debate over what roles women should play became a particularly thorny source of discord in the abolitionist movement. However, black women remained committed to the cause and their varied courses of action in its behalf. They published abolitionist-themed articles and poetry, signed petitions, and gave public speeches supporting not just abolition but also immediate abolition with an extension of full rights for former slaves and free people of color. Not only did they give their time and talent to abolition but also their earnings and inheritances. They realized that financing a national reform movement was a costly affair that needed every donation possible. With this in mind, they sponsored sales of baked goods, handmade cloth goods, and more eclectic bazaars—donating the proceeds from such sales to the abolitionist cause. The importance of the money these abolitionist women raised became evident in a rift among the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society members, which resulted in the two factions holding competing fund-raising fairs in 1839.

Post–Civil War

After the Civil War, black women continued to have among their ranks some of the most important fund-raisers for their communities. A primary goal for all communities was the provision of schools for their children. Black women, like black men, emptied their pockets to help finance school buildings and to pay teachers and school administrators. Some black women, like Mary Peake and Maria Stewart, opened and operated schools for recently freed black children.

Much of the black community-based philanthropy after the Civil War was centered in black churches, as it had been before the war. It was through these churches that women made their primary financial impact. As the majority members in almost every African American church, black women of every region and class were the backbone of black philanthropic endeavors. Indeed, African American churches could not have provided the social services that families and communities needed—from food and clothing for the needy, to building schools, orphanages, and homes for the elderly—without the funds raised by women. Women in the National Baptist Convention were exemplary in their efforts. They exhibited and sold needlework. They instituted Stamp Day, an annual drive to save stamps and donate them to be used by their national women's convention for much-needed mass mailings, as well as solicited funds from nonmembers.

Driven by the need to support ongoing self-improvement efforts, black Baptist women began to organize themselves in statewide organizations in the 1880s. In Kentucky, for example, the first statewide convention of black Baptist women took place specifically to raise money for the State University at Louisville (later Simmons University), a private university owned by black Baptists. Between 1883 and 1900, they raised $12,000, erected a dormitory for female students, retired the school's debt, and successfully raised a matching grant from the all-white American Baptist Home Mission Society. At the national level, they formed the Women's Convention, whose first project was to raise money for a missionary, Emma Delaney, to go to Africa. They also supported Nannie Helen Burrough's National Training School for Women and Girls, giving it 59 percent of the money donated to the Women's Convention between 1900 and 1920.

Black female philanthropists also sustained their fight against racial oppression in more direct and radical ways. Of primary concern to African Americans at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, was the growing problem of lynching taking place in the South. Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a leading crusader in the antilynching movement. She owed much of her success in this effort to the fund-raising work and support of other black women. In 1892 Maritcha Lyons and Victoria Earle Matthews, active in community work in Brooklyn, wanted to rally New York women's clubs behind Wells-Barnett. They held a testimonial dinner that raised $200 to fund the printing ofWells-Barnett's best-known antilynching pamphlet, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” Not to be outdone by New York women, African American women gathered in the following year at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, to raise funds and hear Wells-Barnett speak.

Church Groups and Federated Women's Clubs

Black women's clubs began to flourish at the end of the nineteenth century. They were, however, the natural descendants of literary- and reform-oriented clubs that elite black women had founded in the earlier decades of the century. Now free to openly agitate their causes nationally, black club women felt a keen need to create an umbrella organization under which they could coordinate and support their broadly based efforts. In 1896 they formed the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Thousands of black club women in local clubs across the country joined. Through both their local clubs and the national federation, club women raised thousands of dollars for a variety of causes, particularly education, health, and the protection of young black women. The protection of young girls was central to their mission of uplifting the race by defending black women's morality and promoting the home and respectability. Led by Janie Porter Barrett in 1915, the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs raised over $6000 while soliciting state funding to purchase a farm on which to build the Industrial Home School for Wayward Colored Girls.

Club and church women recognized the need to protect young women migrants. Whether from rural southern communities or cities, they were in need of skills and connections to acquire work, safe housing, and the support of a community. In Detroit, local women feared that unsuspecting or desperate female migrants would be lured into prostitution or unsavory living arrangements, and they were determined to protect them from such a life. In 1919 one hundred women at the city's Second Baptist Church formed the Big Sister Auxiliary. The original group quickly recruited three hundred more members, and within four years they had raised $5000 and purchased a building, creating a home for young women.

Because fund-raising for the institutions they built was so difficult, many black women eventually turned to the state to solicit support for their programs. It was a way not only to get additional funding for efforts they believed were worthy, but it also signaled the state's recognition of the rights of African Americans to solicit and receive funds to assist their protection and improvement. These kinds of fund-raising efforts often paid off—Virginia gave $6000 to support a girls' home. Yet, these grants rarely were enough to sustain an institution or program. States and municipalities sometimes were willing to fund an institution entirely, but that meant the women had to relinquish control.

Given the spotty and uncertain state support for their efforts, black women philanthropists continued to work in innovative ways in their fund-raising. The South Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs used a number of fund-raising techniques to support the Fairwold Home for Colored Girls, which included pledging their own salaries, appealing to local congregations for donations, and “planting” Fairwold Christmas Trees that had to be “decorated” with money. In 1925 they raised $235 on the tree in only twelve minutes. The Culture Club of Columbia raised money through admission receipts from an annual play, a turkey raffle, a baby contest, and a baseball game for the benefit of Fairwold and numerous other causes, including the Good Samaritan Hospital. Another club planted and picked an acre of cotton and donated the receipts from its sale. South Carolina club women raised money for kindergartens through the sale of a pamphlet, “The Progress of Colored Women,” authored by the NACW president Mary Church Terrell. Clubs with an elite urban membership held charity balls. Chicago's Silver Leaf Charity Club, for example, sponsored grand charity balls that were attended by the best families, with women dressed in their finest to raise money for their less-advantaged neighbors.

African American philanthropists not only helped to support the needy and to create necessary community institutions like schools, hospitals, and orphanages but they also helped to preserve historic and cultural sites that documented the unique contributions of African Americans to American society. One of the NACW's largest early twentieth century fund-raising efforts allowed them to purchase and restore Frederick Douglass's home. Under President Mary Talbert, the NACW formed a Douglass Home Committee, started a fund drive, and paid off the mortgage in only two years, by 1918.

African American women kept up their philanthropic endeavors as much as possible during tough economic times like the Great Depression. One solution was to solicit funds from white donors and foundations. This was the manner in which Charlotte Hawkins Brown was able to finance the creation of a normal school for black women in North Carolina, the Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, named for one of her white patrons, the Wellesley College president Alice Freeman Palmer. Accepting financial assistance from whites sometimes meant political compromise. Jane Edna Hunter, who established the Phillis Wheatley Association and home for working class young women in Cleveland, Ohio, understood that many whites donors hoped that its existence would help ensure that the local Young Women's Christian Association remained all-white. Furthermore, many local whites who hired black domestic servants assumed that the Association would train them to be better servants.

It was a constant struggle for economic survival for Brown, Hunter, and other African American women who founded schools and other institutions. Black women supported one another both financially and morally. Hunter and Nannie Burroughs sent each other contributions from their own salaries and helped each other raise funds by lecturing on behalf of each other's institutions. Their correspondence with each other underscores the moral support and inspiration each drew from the other.

Other Avenues

African American women provided philanthropy through a variety of organizations in addition to church groups and federated women's clubs. Selena Sloan Butler organized the first African American Parent Teacher Association (PTA) in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1919, branches of which aided schools all over the nation. By 1927 there were 770 local associations in North Carolina alone, which raised more than $65,000 for local black schools. Black branches of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) not only fought for temperance but also assumed much of the charitable work in African American communities. Greek-letter sororities for black women also contributed significantly. Alpha Kappa Alpha began donating grants-in-aid in the 1950s, beginning with a $6,000 grant to the Howard University College of Medicine for research in child development. With its focus on education, AKA gave $25,000 to Central State University to restore a rare book collection, $500,000 to the United Negro College Fund, and by the 1990s, annual awards of up to $300,000 for scholarly pursuits through its Educational Advancement Foundation. Women in Jack and Jill of America, Inc., created a foundation that routinely donated thousands of dollars to various community groups that serve black youth. The Links, Inc., also promoted educational, cultural, and civic activities through its Grants-in-Aid program. These women contributed over $10 million to various causes, including pledges of $1 million each to the United Negro College Fund and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

The Links, Jack and Jill, and black sororities represented groups of elite female philanthropists. Still, working-class women gave consistently through the years, especially within their various church organizations. While most confined themselves to aiding children, distressed families, and various church-driven charitable initiatives, some also used their funds for political purposes. Pullman maids and the wives of Pullman porters, through the Ladies' Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, raised much of the money used to organize African American Pullman porters into one of the most successful black unions of the early twentieth century. The Ladies' Auxiliary was particularly important because the nature of their husbands' work kept the men on the railroad, forcing their wives to sustain the union at times.

Individual Philanthropists

Most black female philanthropy was traditionally a group effort. There were, however, significant numbers of wealthy black women who gave generously as individuals to various causes. Madam C. J. Walker, for example, was the first black woman to amass a significant fortune and make a name for herself as a philanthropist. She gave willingly to the NAACP's antilynching fund, the YWCA, and homes for the aged. Walker was active in the NACW and made substantial contributions to several educational institutions for women established by NACW members, including Charlotte Hawkins Brown's Palmer Memorial Institute, Mary McLeod Bethune's Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls in Florida, and Lucy Laney's Haines Institute in Augusta, Georgia. Walker also contributed money for women to attend Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute and made a significant gift to the fund to secure the Frederick Douglass home.

As the twentieth century progressed, more black women—principally artists, entertainers, athletes, real estate magnates, and successful professionals in various fields—gained popular and financial success. The gains of these African American women allowed them to continue the legacy of groups and individuals who gave in the past. Women like Oprah Winfrey, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, and Venus and Serena Williams made donations to many causes, including organizations dedicated to aiding African Americans in particular, such as the NAACP and the United Negro College Fund.

As individuals and as members of organizations, African American women raised and donated tens of millions of dollars, along with their skills and service, to a number of charities, institutions, and causes. Even with little state support, publicity, financial resources, and political power, for centuries they provided assistance to other African Americans.

See also National Association of Colored Women; Protestant Churches, Black; Sororities Movement; and Walker, Madam C. J.

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