Race women's organizing base, writes Cooper, was the women's club movement, which Williams described as "organized anxiety." In Williams's article, "The Club Movement Among Colored Women in America" (1900), she characterized the movement, and its umbrella organization, the
National Association of Colored Women (NACW), as an outgrowth of black women's recognition of their low social standing and their desire to change it.
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.
As an affiliate of the
National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACW), the organization had dedicated itself to reaching back to help those less fortunate and less able, in accordance with its motto, "Lifting As We Climb." Under the leadership of its president, Mrs.
The
National Association of Colored Women was formed in 1896 to coordinate philanthropic and self-improvement efforts.
DuBois and other early 20th century giants, and as a philanthropist who made substantial contributions to the YMCA, the
National Association of Colored Women, the NAACP, Tuskegee Institute and Mary McLeod Bethune's Bethune-Cookman College.
The initial chapter provides a discussion of the events that motivated black women to create the
National Association of Colored Women (NACW) as their collective vehicle for reform and justice.
Last July, I attended A two-day conference celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the
National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, an event that made me think again about the many activist black women working for change a century ago.
In 1896 Ruffin's vision became a reality with the founding of the
National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC), which merged the National Federation of Afro-American Women, the Women's Era Club of Boston and the Colored Women's League of Washington, D.C.