Conclusion

This conclusion offers a brief overview of the National Council of Negro women (NCNW) from 1980 to the present, looking especially at its changes during the Regan era. After Ronald Regan's election, the NCNW lost a significant proportion of its federal grant funding. NCNW then began to build connections with private businesses through its network of professional black women. One example of this was that in 1986 the NCNW created the Black Family Reunion with significant support from Procter and Gamble. As government funding dried up, NCNW turned inward and began to focus again on broadening opportunities for professional and elite women. Today, NCNW continues to ensure that black women be given educational, political, and economic opportunities and serve in leadership positions in mainstream America.

Mississippi, Who Has Been the Taillight, Can Now Be the Headlight

This chapter explores the National Council of Negro Women's (NCNW) international work, focusing especially on NCNW's postwar work for human rights and its later formation of an international division in the 1970s. In 1973 Congress passed the Percy Amendment to the U.S. Foreign Service Act that pushed the U.S. government to ensure that women were beneficiaries of international development projects. In this climate, NCNW won $1.7 million dollars in funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) between 1975 and 1985. The U.S. government saw the women of the NCNW, as a black American women-led nonprofit organization, as the "natural allies" of women of African descent worldwide. With this money, the NCNW first hosted a concurrent conference for women of African descent at the International Women's Year conference in Mexico City, established an international division, and tried to create international poverty programming like it had in Mississippi.

But If You Have a Pig in Your Backyard … Nobody Can Push You Around

Following its local workshops in the late 1960s, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) began to create self-help community programs. This chapter focuses on NCNW's programs in Mississippi--a pig bank for Fannie Lou Hamer's Sunflower County Freedom Farm; low-income home ownership (also known as Turnkey III); and childcare centers in Okolona, Ruleville, and Jackson. To fund these programs, the NCNW utilized financial support from public sources--such as the federal government--and private sources--such as foundations, businesses, and voluntary organizations. Drawing upon its new concept of grassroots expertise as well as the War on Poverty concept of "maximum feasible participation" of the poor, the NCNW recruited local civil rights women such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Unita Blackwell to lead these programs that provided black communities with much-needed food, housing, and childcare. The NCNW's efforts boosted Mississippi women's interest in the larger national organization.

We Have, Happily, Gone beyond the Chitchat over Tea Cups Stage

This chapter examines the second and third years of Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS), an interracial, interfaith civil rights organization sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). In the summer of 1965, around fifty black and white, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic women returned to Mississippi to help with Head Start, the newly formed War on Poverty program. Despite increased activist calls for more participation and leadership from the grassroots and poor, WIMS continued to promote its elite pedigree by highlighting its members' expertise in teaching, social work, librarianship, and child development. In 1966, WIMS began to shift its focus to bridge building in the North, promoting the liberal strategy of interracial and interfaith conversations as a method to create personal change and combat racial discrimination. However, by 1966, WIMS leaders began to realize the limitations of such a strategy when they were rebuffed in both Mississippi and Boston.

High Heels on the Ground

This chapter examines the first summer of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW)-sponsored civil rights organization Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS). WIMS brought down forty-eight black and white, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic women from northern and Midwestern cities to personally witness and provide support for the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, sponsored by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). WIMS relied on a behind-the-scenes approach that did not publicly challenge segregation, but sought to quietly reason with local women to support civil rights activists fighting for voting rights and desegregation of schools, businesses, and other facilities. Although the strategy of personal witness proved limited, WIMS helped connect NCNW to local black activists in Mississippi who advocated for more direct action protests and planted the seeds for a later change of NCNW's direction.

Creating a Ministry of Presence

In the fall of 1963, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) took steps to become more directly involved in the civil rights movement when Dorothy Height travelled with a small interracial team of elite clubwomen to investigate the abuse of activist children imprisoned in Selma. The team moved behind the scenes and tried to establish ties with local black and white women to better support the movement. After the Selma trip, white team member Polly Cowan developed plans to bring additional teams of interracial middle and upper class women down to the South. At a March 1964 Atlanta meeting of black and white southern clubwomen, Clarie Collins Harvey, a black businesswoman and clubwoman from Jackson, Mississippi, invited Cowan and the NCNW to provide support to civil rights efforts in Jackson. Her invitation led Cowan and Height to develop plans for Wednesdays in Mississippi to help with Freedom Summer.

Maneuvering for the Movement

This chapter explores the first three decades of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). In 1935, educator, clubwoman, and politician Mary McLeod Bethune founded the NCNW as an organization of black women's organizations to create a united lobbying voice. By utilizing a strategy of broker politics, the NCNW opened up professional opportunities for black women and lobbied for civil rights legislation. NCNW women also enforced strict standards of respectability as they sought such power. While the NCNW claimed to speak on behalf of all black women, a majority of its membership came from black sororities. This college-based membership, as well as the council's focus on black professionalization, meant that many working class women viewed the organization as elitist and uninterested in their concerns. However, beginning in the mid 1950s and continuing through the 1960s, the NCNW became more significantly involved in civil rights and the needs of the poor.

The Power of Four Million Women

In the late 1960s, the National Council of Negro Women's (NCNW) poverty programs in Mississippi, drew interest to the organization. The NCNW tried to use this enthusiasm to help build its membership in the 1970s. In hopes of building its direct membership, the NCNW tried to push members of its affiliate organizations to become NCNW direct members as well. It also created more local sections at this time. In addition to building its membership, the NCNW continued to sponsor black self help by founding the Women's Center for Education and Career Advancement, sponsoring Operation Sisters United to help girls deemed at risk of delinquency, and advocating for reformed federal food policies. The NCNW's poverty programming also bolstered its reputation as a national organization that could work both with politicians, professionals, and other formal leaders and with working class and radical women.

You Know about What It’s Like to Need a Good House

Recognizing the limitations of Wednesdays in Mississippi's personal approach to creating racial change, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) helped WIMS re-envision itself as "Workshops in Mississippi." Workshops in Mississippi connected grassroots, local, and impoverished women with government officials and private foundations to help the women implement self help programs. Also, following NCNW's securing of tax-exempt status in May 1966 (retroactively to December 1965), it won a $300,000 Ford Foundation grant for Project Womanpower, a program to bring together black women across to the country to strengthen their community activism. Finally, NCNW created the Commission on Community Cooperation, which hosted a series of workshops in the aftermath of the 1967 Newark and Patterson rebellions. Through these workshops in the late 1960s, NCNW leadership embraced a new model of community expert as a local and/or impoverished woman who understood poverty first-hand.

Introduction

This introduction highlights how the current scholarly focus on radical women's activism often overlooks the important bridge-building activism of black moderate and middle class women such as those in the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). These black clubwomen were able to move between mainstream political and business leaders and marginalized activists who often demanded radical solutions to racism and poverty. Black middle class NCNW women not only engaged in community-focused racial uplift, but they also utilized a national network of professional and elite women to bring resources to those who could not attain them on their own. At times, the NCNW was hindered by its focus on respectability, which sometimes limited NCNW's criticism of the United States in order to build and maintain power in mainstream America.