Black Women’s Christian Activism
Seeking Social Justice in a Northern Suburb
Publication Year: 2016
Published by: NYU Press
Acknowledgments
When I relocated to Summit, New Jersey, many years ago for what was to be an eighteen-month corporate transfer, I could not imagine the place this New York City suburb and its history would assume in my life. As my tenure came to be counted in years rather than months and the incongruity between the physical and imagined geography of the suburb became increasingly apparent, ...
Introduction
In 1897 twenty-seven-year-old Violet Johnson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Summit, New Jersey, a place in the process of transforming from a country village into a New York City suburb. Within a year, the domestic servant had organized a Baptist church. ...
1. “Please Allow Me Space”: Race and Faith in the Suburbs
When twenty-seven-year-old Violet Johnson arrived in Summit, New Jersey, in 1897 it was an area in transition, undergoing a redefinition of space and place. In some respects, the same could be said of Johnson herself. Among the first generation of freeborn African Americans, Johnson had witnessed many transformations and re-creations. ...
2. “A Great Work for God and Humanity”: African American Christian Women and Organized Social Reform
Violet Johnson no doubt mused on the disparate models of Christian womanhood as she led the 1902 organizational meeting of Fountain Baptist Church’s Woman’s Missionary Society in Temperance Hall, the expansive two-story building owned by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) of Summit and a portion of which the church rented. ...
3. “The Home Away from Home”: Suffrage, War, and Civic Righteousness
By the time Florence Randolph called the second annual session of the New Jersey State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs (NJSFCWC) to order in suburban Plainfield in July 1917, the war to make the world safe for democracy was in its third month and the East St. Louis, Illinois, riot only a few weeks past. ...
4. “Unholy and Unchristian Attitude”: Interracial Dialogue in Segregated Spaces, 1920–1937
The suffrage campaign had mobilized women, but when it came to race matters white and black New Jersey women faced real trouble. The commonality they had found in temperance and suffrage began to crack at its apogee. White New Jersey simply would not address racial discrimination as it grew in the 1920s. Jim Crow had gained more than a foothold in the North. ...
5. “Putting Real American Ideals in American Life”: Church Women and Electoral Politics
By the time Tennessee ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920, African American women in New Jersey were already “an important factor in politics.”1 They carried their religious convictions into the political arena, convinced that “Negro women have the opportunity now as never before to stand out prominently in putting real American ideals in American life.”2 ...
6. “Carthage Must Be Destroyed”: Health, Housing, and the New Deal
“If because of injustice and poverty we should leave the rooms where we slept all night without fresh air because of no windows and should pass through dingy, dirty halls to get a little sunshine and fresh air in the street, may our fortunate fellowmen not stand ready to deport us into further misery,” Reverend Florence Randolph prayed in December 1932.1 ...
Conclusion: “You Just as Well Die with the Ague as with the Fever”
In November 1941 Reverend Florence Randolph, along with Bishop P. A. Wallace and his wife, boarded a train in Newark en route to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion conference in Virginia. The trio purchased first class interstate tickets so that, as the ticket agent assured them, they would not have to change seats upon crossing the Mason-Dixon Line. ...
E-ISBN-13: 9781479880324
E-ISBN-10: 1479880329
Print-ISBN-13: 9780814745465
Page Count: 240
Publication Year: 2016
OCLC Number: 935245366
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Black Women’s Christian Activism