Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (53 page)

The testimonial dinner was a triumph for its organizers as well. “It was the real beginning of the club movement among the colored women in this country,” Wells wrote in her memoir. “The women of New York and Brooklyn decided to continue that organization, which they called the Women’s Loyal Union.”
¹³
Maritcha, Victoria Earle Matthews, Sarah Garnet, and Susan McKinney were among the club’s founders.

We’ve come to know Maritcha, but what of the others? To this day, they stand in the shadow of better-known men. We need to credit Maritcha for much of our information about these women, since she proved just as determined to preserve the memory of her friends as of her family. When Hallie Quinn Brown, a professor of rhetoric at Wilberforce University, published a biographical collection of black women activists,
Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction
, in 1926, Maritcha was one of the main contributors, memorializing several heroines in her short sketches.

Sarah Garnet was the oldest child of a large and prosperous Long Island family. A student in the New York public school system, at age fourteen she was appointed monitor under the supervision of John
Peterson. Like Maritcha, she spent her entire career in education; she was the first black woman appointed principal of a Manhattan grammar school. Married to the widowed Henry Highland Garnet, she separated after a year of marriage, thereafter devoting herself to feminist causes. In the late 1880s, Garnet founded the Equal Suffrage Club, which she kept going until her death in 1911. At the end of her teaching career, she joined other women of her grade in the school system to fight for “equal pay for equal work.”
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Garnet’s younger sister, Susan McKinney, was equally energetic and ambitious. Admitted to the New York Medical College for Women, a homeopathic school founded by a wealthy white abolitionist woman, Clarence Sophia Lozier, McKinney graduated as class valedictorian in 1870. She established a medical practice, treating both blacks and whites, and specializing in childhood diseases such as marasmus (a wasting away of the body). McKinney did so well, the
New York Sun
reported, that she had “a handsome bank account and lives well [in the] fashionable quarter of the hill.” Given that homeopathy was much more liberal than traditional branches of medicine, McKinney was welcomed by its professional associations and became a member of state and county homeopathic societies. Unlike her sister, she successfully combined marriage and feminism. In her sketch, Maritcha insisted that McKinney’s “message to the world is that no normal woman should neglect to seek opportunity for self-betterment,” while emphasizing that McKinney was also an “all around woman,” trained in
both
the routine of business and as manager of a home.
¹⁵

Written by someone other than Maritcha, the sketch of Victoria Earle Matthews in
Homespun Heroines
is fascinating for its omission of biographical facts that author, subject, and readers perhaps felt were best left unsaid: that Matthews was born out of wedlock to a Georgia slaveholder and one of his female slaves; that her mother escaped north during the Civil War, returning after emancipation to claim her children. What the sketch does tell us, however, is that by 1873 the family had settled in New York, where Matthews attended grammar school before family finances obliged her to go to work. Engaged as a servant in a white household, she was given free access to her employers’ library, beginning a lifelong career of self-improvement. Matthews is
best known for her settlement activities among poverty-stricken blacks in the New York area, similar to Jane Addams’s work with immigrant families in Chicago. Matthews taught the women under her care how to keep house and established a center to train black girls in domestic work. The culmination of her career came in 1897 when she founded the White Rose Mission to rescue black women recently arrived from the South from the lures of urban life, especially seduction and prostitution.
¹⁶

Matthews was the driving force behind the 1892 creation of the Woman’s Loyal Union and instrumental in founding the magazine
Woman’s Era
a couple of years later. Although many issues have been lost, it’s still possible to trace through it the development of black women’s clubs emerging in cities across the country. According to the
Woman’s Era
, Matthews was president of the Woman’s Loyal Union the first year it was established, and Garnet and Maritcha were first and second vice president, respectively. “The object of the Woman’s Loyal Union,” the mission statement insisted, “shall be the diffusion of accurate and extensive information relative to the civil and social status of the Afro American, that they may be directed to an intelligent assertion of their rights, and to a determination to unite in the employment of every lawful means to secure and to retain the unmolested exercise of the same.”
¹⁷

Accounts of the union’s activities in the
Woman’s Era
make clear that Maritcha and her colleagues understood the importance, first, of gathering accurate information, and, second, of distributing it to both blacks and whites. They followed the example set by Wells, who pursued the true facts about the lynchings of black men with grim determination and then disseminated them to a wide readership. In that spirit, the Woman’s Loyal Union devised a questionnaire to send to black ministers, schoolteachers, and other public-minded leaders to investigate charges of black immorality in the South, “elicit the true statistics of our people,” and correct existing misperceptions. The women also wrote leaflets on such topics as “Parents and Guardians” and the “Sanctity of Home” to circulate among the masses, hoping that a wider print distribution would “do more effectual good than spoken words to the few.” Aware of the importance of a good education in acquiring knowledge,
they boldly ventured into the wider public arena to lobby for passage of the Blair bill, intended to provide federal aid to public schools.
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Yet club life was not all work. Each issue of the
Woman’s Era
featured a gossip column titled “Social Notes.” I’m a little embarrassed to say that that’s where I found repeated mention of the women in my family, the newly widowed Elizabeth White, a member of the Woman’s Loyal Union, and her three daughters, Ellie, Cornelia, and Katherine, who were now courting, marrying, and having babies. These gossip items included: Elizabeth as a patroness of the upcoming Bachelor’s Ball, in the company of the “most prominent ladies of the inner circle of society’s exclusive and smart set”; Elizabeth at the ball, “in every way a patrician in a regal costume of gray, her bright black eyes and lovely silver-colored tresses making her look like a daughter of the Revolution”; Elizabeth and her youngest daughter, Katie, summering at Asbury Park; Katie courted by the newly widowed Charles Lansing and the announcement of their wedding day; Ellie’s new baby girl; Cornelia’s recovery from the death of a stillborn baby.
¹⁹

Amusing as all this was, I wanted Elizabeth and her daughters to be more than society girls and matrons. I wished they were more like Maritcha. So I was relieved to read that Elizabeth was considered one of the “large number of women of means and a larger number of women with brains, who give the support of their intelligent sympathy and money to the work laid out for them by their energetic leader.” The energetic leader was of course Victoria Matthews, and their task was the creation of additional chapters of the Woman’s Loyal Union in the greater New York area.

Yet another article in the
Woman’s Era
informed me that Elizabeth was also a member of the King’s Daughters, and president of its “Willing Workers Circle.”
²⁰
Ignorant of this organization, I decided to investigate.

Up until now, the picture I’ve painted of Brooklyn’s black elite is one of a tight-knit social circle within the black community that, except for
the men’s business dealings, interacted little with whites. That’s not the case. As in the days before the Civil War, the black elite had contacts of all kinds with whites, some predictable, some not.

Tracking Elizabeth’s involvement with the Willing Workers Circle led me to a relatively unknown history of black and white clubwomen at century’s end, that of the Order of the King’s Daughters.

The conventional history of black clubwomen goes something like this. In the late nineteenth century, white women founded clubs across the country that they brought together in a federation. At the same time, black women established their own clubs—the Woman’s Loyal Union, the Colored Woman’s League in Washington, D.C., the Woman’s Era in Boston, and many others. Eager to participate in the white women’s club movement, black women, however, faced intense racial prejudice; Fannie Barrier Williams was prohibited from joining a white club in Chicago, as was Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin in Boston. Convinced that strength lay in numbers, in 1896 black women formed their own umbrella organization, the National Council of Colored Women.
²¹

The King’s Daughters was an organization founded by white women. In 1886, ten New York women joined forces under the leadership of Margaret Bottome to create the order. Explicitly religious in orientation, this “sisterhood of service” operated to stimulate Christian activity among “rich women.” Their badge was a little silver Maltese cross; their motto, “Look up and not down, / Look forward and not back, / Look out and not in, / And lend a hand.” Their watchword was “In His Name” and their text “Not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” The order grew quickly, becoming national and then international. Made up of circles of ten women (in emulation of the original New York group), it soon contained hundreds of them, many with fanciful names like “Whatsoever,” “In as Much,” “Here a Little—There a Little.”
²²
Elizabeth’s circle was named the Willing Workers.

The circles were not integrated, but integration of a kind did take place in which gender trumped race. Let’s follow the story through
the pages of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
In the late 1880s, at the urging of Margaret Bottome herself, the white women’s Lower Light Circle, followed by the Thoughtful Circle, adopted the Zion Home for the Aged in Brooklyn as its Christian charity. The home was a black community institution, housing approximately twenty impoverished old people. Dismayed by the building’s state of disrepair, the white women set about cleaning it. “Putting aprons on and gathering together brooms and swabs and scrubbing brushes,” the
Eagle
reported, “they made an attack on the place and astonished even themselves at the good work they did.” They also raised funds, holding fairs and strawberry festivals, with the goal of purchasing a new building.
²³

Who were these white women? What were their motivations? The
Eagle
doesn’t tell us. Their names do not appear on the rolls of activists of the period, so I’m left to speculate that they were simply “rich women” of Brooklyn. Perhaps their actions were condescending, perhaps their events just an excuse to show off their social status, perhaps their benevolence a form of social control. But the fact remains that they did improve conditions at the home and, quite amazingly, happily collaborated with Brooklyn’s black women. As president of the Willing Workers Circle, Elizabeth joined white women on the Board of Managers, eventually rising to the position of second vice president. Susan McKinney was the home’s doctor, and her sister Anna Rich was also involved.

The history of the Zion Home for the Aged might remind you of the old Colored Orphan’s Asylum. But the earlier institution never put black women on its Board of Managers as members, much less as officers. Moreover, this interracial coalition of women prevailed. In August 1892, the home, renamed the Brooklyn Home for Aged Colored People, moved to a new location on Atlantic Avenue. In June 1899, the cornerstone for an entirely new building was laid on Douglass Street, at the corner of Kingston Avenue.
²⁴

Despite the dismal state of race relations at the nadir, interracial cooperation could still happen.

A few days before Christmas, 1884, the New Orleans World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition opened to great fanfare. One in a series of expositions held in select northern and southern cities following the Civil War, it was the biggest to date. Covering 247 acres, it contained well over twenty exhibition buildings in addition to several smaller structures. The main building was said to be the largest edifice in the United States at the time. Every state was represented as were several foreign countries, notably Mexico and Brazil. Approximately 6 million visitors came during the nine months that the exposition was open. It took four full days to cross the grounds.

Black Americans were invited to submit items for display, but were told that they could not be part of the state exhibitions. Instead, they were segregated in a Colored People’s Department, which housed contributions by Native Americans and Eskimos as well. People of color simply did not fit into the grand vision of the exposition’s creators, the National Cotton Planters’ Association, which had decided to hold the exposition on the centennial anniversary of the first shipment of cotton from America, and to locate it in New Orleans, the South’s principal city at the time. The organizers’ stated goal was “the upbuilding of the vast southern section of the United States, the development of the great agricultural and mineral wealth of this neglected and apathetic region, the uniting of the two sections of the country divorced by civil war, and the final triumph of the entire United States in the peaceful struggle for the commerce of Central and South America.”
²⁵
Translation: they hoped to promote southern agricultural and manufacturing resources, entice investment by northern capitalists, effect sectional reconciliation, and open up new markets in nations to the south.