Dr. Dorothy Height’s longevity and 40-year tenure as head of the National Council of Negro Women made her perhaps the best-known Black female activist in America, respected by Whites and revered by Blacks. When she died in April at age 98, The Washington Post referred to her as “a founding matriarch of the American civil rights movement whose crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned more than six decades.”
In a sense, however, she was just the latest in a long line of Black church ladies who turned their zeal for God into the justification and engine for the campaigns against racial and gender injustice, as well as for social progress for African-Americans.
Dr. Bettye Collier-Thomas, a professor of history at Temple University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has labored in this voluminous work to write such women into history where they belong. The book’s title comes from a 1958 speech by Nannie Helen Burroughs, whose accomplishments included founding a training school for young Black women in Washington, D.C., in 1908 and leading the National Baptist Convention’s women’s auxiliary for many years.
“The Negro must have Jesus, Jobs and Justice,” she declared, proclaiming an agenda for Black Americans once segregation ended.
The author discusses the centrality of religion to the Black experience in this country and the role of spirituality as the catalyst for social action in the pursuit for racial justice. While Black churches served as the organizing force and often the meeting place for many activists, women, as the backbone of the church (constituting at least two-thirds of membership), became the foot soldiers of the struggle.
More importantly, Collier-Thomas documents how African-American women, Protestant and Catholic, established their own strongholds inside and outside the church to address the social and corporal needs of Blacks at home and abroad as they pressed for justice for their race and sex. The professor traces the rise of such groups as the African-American Female Intelligence Society, the Colored Ladies Freedmen’s Aid Society, the National Association of Colored Women, the Women’s Political Council of Montgomery, Alabama, various missionary societies, and the women’s auxiliaries of various large denominations.
The National Association of Colored Women, for instance, grew out of a movement that sprang up “in defense of Black womanhood” in response to a White editor’s insult in 1895.
