A Forgotten Sisterhood

Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South

By (author) Audrey Thomas McCluskey

Publication date:

30 October 2014

Length of book:

192 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442211384

Emerging from the darkness of the slave era and Reconstruction, black activist women Lucy Craft Laney, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Nannie Helen Burroughs founded schools aimed at liberating African-American youth from disadvantaged futures in the segregated and decidedly unequal South. From the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, these individuals fought discrimination as members of a larger movement of black women who uplifted future generations through a focus on education, social service, and cultural transformation. Born free, but with the shadow of the slave past still implanted in their consciousness, Laney, Bethune, Brown, and Burroughs built off each other’s successes and learned from each other’s struggles as administrators, lecturers, and suffragists. Drawing from the women’s own letters and writings about educational methods and from remembrances of surviving students, Audrey Thomas McCluskey reveals the pivotal significance of this sisterhood’s legacy for later generations and for the institution of education itself.

1. The World They Inherited
2. "Moving Like a Whirlwind": Lucy Craft Laney, Activist Educator
3. "The Best Secondary School in Georgia": Building the Haines Institute Culture
4. "Ringing Up a School": Mary McLeod Bethune's Impact on Daytona Beach
5. "Show Some Daylight between You": Charlotte Hawkins Brown and the Schooling Experience of Memorial Palmer Institute Graduates, 1948–1958
6. "Telling Some Mighty Truths": Nannie Helen Burroughs, Activist Educator and Social Critic
7. "The Masses and the Classes": Women's Friendships and Support Networks among School Founders
8. Passing into History: Commemorations, Memorials, and the Legacies of Black Women School Founders
Milestones and Legacies
Bibliography
Special Collections

"In this chronicle of a 'sisterhood of purposeful women,' McCluskey, a professor at Indiana University, examines the lives of . . . four African American activist women who gained notoriety for their dedication to educating African American youth and their mission to sustain schools among the harsh conditions of the Jim Crow era. Confronted with issues of class, race, and gender 'in an era of harsh racial repression, as well as a social order that constricted and confined women,' Lucy Craft Laney, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Nannie Helen Burroughs all succeeded in educating black girls and boys, young women and men, as well as establishing Institutions, three of which survive today. McCluskey explores their supportive, although occasionally competitive relations with one another, their links to the networks of black women’s clubs, and white philanthropists who supported their efforts, their writing, and their emergent feminist and political activism as well. Of special interest are the interviews with several surviving graduates of Palmer Memorial Institute, which was founded by Charlotte Hawkins Brown in 1902 and closed in 1971. The graduates detail their experiences—how they came to study there, how the school commemorated Brown, and what the daily regimen was like. McCluskey’s well-researched account articulates the importance of this particular movement in education, appropriately and skillfully, to memorialize the four pioneering women at the forefront."