KY women and civil rights history

Women'S Clubs are voluntary organizations that were originally formed by women who had been denied access to the major institutions of America's democratic civil society.

Working women formed working girls' clubs and small-town women formed civic improvement associations. In bigger cities, women organized citywide and neighborhood women's clubs and women's educational and industrial unions. Ethnic, church-based, African American, and settlement house women's clubs were founded across the country.

Although women continued to belong to literary, social, and charitable clubs, the majority of women's clubs organized after the Civil War had specific civic and political agendas. The specific purposes of each club differed according to the type of club and its stated purpose.

The economic and social circumstances of their community affected black women and their perceptions of the world. The informal networks that characterized much of their nineteenth-century efforts remained important, but the increasing population compelled them to give way to new formal, structured groups designed to improve their status and that of their community. African American women in Buffalo had keen notions of the meaning of community and they were deeply involved in the creation of their twentieth-century Buffalo. These women persistently had struggled to improve the lives of their people. 

A prominent form of voluntary organization in the United States from the nineteenth century through the mid–twentieth century, fraternal associations are self-selecting brotherhoods and sisterhoods that provide mutual aid to members, enact group rituals, and engage in community service.

Synthesizing primary and secondary evidence, this article documents that African Americans historically organized large numbers of translocal fraternal voluntary federations. Some black fraternal associations paralleled white groups, while others were distinctive to African Americans.

In regions where blacks lived in significant numbers, African Americans often created more fraternal lodges per capita than whites; and women played a much more prominent role in African American fraternalism than they did in white fraternalism.

These are the papers of high school principal William Henry Fouse and his wife, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beatrice Cooke Fouse. The papers reflect the Fouses efforts on behalf of black education in Lexington during the first half of the 20th century. Family letters, notebooks, printed materials, pamphlets, financial records, broadsides, receipts and mementos comprise a large portion of the collection. Correspondence relating to Dunbar High School and Dr. Fouse's other educational concerns are included, as is Mrs. Fouse's correspondence which reflects her involvement with educational, social, religious and temperance organizations. A journal contains records of various activities at Dunbar High School, including sports events. A ledger (dated 1910-1918) includes addresses and expense account records. There is also information on the Henry Hughes Educational Fund and a radio script by Dr. Fouse for a broadcast on WLAP radio (April 30, 1939) on the history of blacks in Lexington. There is a notebook containing clippings on a variety of topics, especially black education. A few photographs are among the papers.

The Fouses of Lexington, Ky. were actively involved in the education of blacks in the area.

Instead, women formed missionary societies to address all manner of local and international needs, from the support of job training in their communities to funding for African American missionaries to Africa. They worked on urban ills, established reading groups, and advocated for better living conditions. They also wrote for religious periodicals, promoting quite traditional ideals of Victorian womanhood, respectability, and racial uplift. Women also continued work among their less fortunate counterparts in the rural South, in what continued to be an uneasy alliance. Like male religious leaders, too, they protested the creeping effects of Jim Crow laws and the systematic violence of lynching.

une was a pioneering American educator and civil rights leader. Born Mary Jane McLeod on July 10, 1875, in Mayesville, South Carolina, the daughter of former slaves, Bethune won scholarships to attend Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina (now Barber-Scotia College), and the Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago (now the Moody Bible Institute). In 1904, she moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, to found her own school. Her one-room school house became the Daytona Normal and Industrial School for Negro Girls before merging with Cookman Institute for Boys in 1923. The merged school later affiliated with the United Methodist Church and became the historically-black college named in her honor, Bethune-Cookman College (now Bethune-Cookman University). In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Bethune the director of the National Youth Administration's Division of Negro Affairs, making her the first black woman to head a federal agency. She also founded the National Council of Negro Women and was an active member of the National Association of Colored Women until her death in May 1955. Date Created Around 1905 Place North America > United States of America > Florida > Daytona Beach Time 1900 AD - 1949 AD Topic Social sciences > Political science > Civil & political rights Social sciences > Education > Schools & their activities; special education Additional Subjects African American girls ; African Americans--Segregation ; Bethune, Mary McLeod, 1875-1955 ; Women ; Women's history Type of Item Prints, Photographs Physical Description 1 negative: black and white; 4 x 5 inches Institution State Library and Archives of Florida External Resource http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.wdl/ftasa.4013

Mary McLeod Bethune was a pioneering American educator and civil rights leader.

In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Bethune the director of the National Youth Administration's Division of Negro Affairs, making her the first black woman to head a federal agency.