A Forgotten Sisterhood : Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South

In the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century a small group of women overcame personal and professional hardships to gain national prominence as educational reformers and social activists. This book takes a biographical look at Lucy Craft Laney, Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie Helen Burroughs and Charlotte Hawkins Brown. The four women knew each other through the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. The other four women founded schools for African-American children, as well as being activists, lecturers, and suffragists, and the book includes interviews with students who came from around the country to attend these groundbreaking, historic schools Emerging from the darkness of the slave era and Reconstruction, black activist women Lucy Craft Laney, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Nannie Helen Burroughs founded schools aimed at liberating African-American youth from disadvantaged futures in the segregated and decidedly unequal South. From the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, these individuals fought discrimination as members of a larger movement of black women who uplifted future generations through a focus on education, social service, and cultural transformation. Born free, but with the shadow of the slave past still implanted in their consciousness, Laney, Bethune, Brown, and Burroughs built off each other’s successes and learned from each other’s struggles as administrators, lecturers, and suffragists. Drawing from the women’s own letters and writings about educational methods and from remembrances of surviving students, Audrey Thomas McCluskey reveals the pivotal significance of this sisterhood’s legacy for later generations and for the institution of education itself. The world they inherited "Moving like a whirlwind" : Lucy Craft Laney, activist educator "The best secondary school in Georgia" : building the Haines Institute culture "Ringing up a school" : Mary McLeod Bethune's impact on Daytona Beach "Show some daylight between you" : Charlotte Hawkins Brown and the schooling experience of Memorial Palmer Institute graduates, 1948-1958 "Telling some mighty truths" : Nannie Helen Burroughs, activist educator and social critic "The masses and the classes" : women's friendships and support networks among school founders Passing into history : commemorations, memorials, and the legacies of Black women school founders Milestones and legacies.