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

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 others successes and learned from each others struggles as administrators, lecturers, and suffragists. Drawing from the womens own letters and writings about educational methods and from remembrances of surviving students, Audrey Thomas McCluskey reveals the pivotal significance of this sisterhoods legacy for later generations and for the institution of education itself.Audrey Thomas McCluskey is professor emerita in the Department of African-American & African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She served alternately as director of the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center and director of the Black Film Center/ Archive. Her publications on black women educators include several journal articles, book chapters, and the coedited book, Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World.

In this chronicle of a 'sisterhood of purposeful women,' McCluskey, a professor at Indiana University, examines the lives of . . . four African American activist women who gained notoriety for their dedication to educating African American youth and their mission to sustain schools among the harsh conditions of the Jim Crow era. Confronted with issues of class, race, and gender 'in an era of harsh racial repression, as well as a social order that constricted and confined women,' Lucy Craft Lanel3Ï