Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T02:07:56.315Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

WORKING OUT THEIR ECONOMIC PROBLEMS TOGETHER: WORLD WAR I, WORKING WOMEN, AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE YWCA1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2015

Dorothea Browder
Dorothea Browder*
Affiliation:
Western Kentucky University
*
email: dorothea.browder@wku.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines how a group of Black and White YWCA staff members seized the opportunities of World War I to advance a racial justice agenda through Young Women's Christian Association programs for working women. First, they created YWCA program work for thousands of Black working women that paralleled the YWCA's Industrial Program, which followed YWCA segregation policies. Second, they made claims for social justice based on Black women's labor contributions, in contrast to both earlier reformers' focus on elite Black women and other wartime activists' focus on soldiers' service. Finally, in a period best known for White people's violent resistance to Black advances, they fostered a program culture and structures that encouraged White working-class women to view African American coworkers as colleagues and to understand racial justice as part of a broader social justice agenda. Arguing that interracial cooperation among working people was crucial to social progress, they made African American laboring women and White working-class allies both symbolically and literally crucial to wartime and postwar civil rights efforts. Their efforts contribute to our understanding of the changing discourse of “respectability” and the impact of World War I on the Black Freedom Struggle.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 2015 , pp. 243 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This article benefited from a superlative “World War I, Race, and Labor” panel discussion with Steven Reich, Paul Taillon, and Andor Skotnes at the Social Science History Association conference, and from discussions at the international conference Women's Organizations and Female Activists in the Aftermath of the First World War: Moving Across Borders at Hamline University. Thanks also go to the Sophia Smith Collection, particularly Maida Goodwin, archivist extraordinaire; to Nancy Robertson and Mary Frederickson for YWCA wisdom; to Western Kentucky University for generous funding that allowed the completion of this research; and to two anonymous reviewers for this journal.

References

NOTES

2 Report of Miss Mary Jackson to the War Work Council and the City Committee, June 1 to July 4, 1918, 2. Box 515, folder 17, YWCA of the U.S.A. Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. (hereafter YWCA, SSC). (Folder hereafter abbreviated to f.) Resolution to “take an interest” from Report of the Social Service Commission, Nepahwin, 1918, Box 508, f. 7, YWCA, SSC.

3 Report of the Religious Work Commission, Nepahwin, 1918, Box 508, f. 7, YWCA, SSC; Grace Coyle, “Colored Girls in Industry,” November 14, 1918, Box 534, f. 2, YWCA, SSC.

4 Report of the Social Service Commission, Industrial Club Council, Camp Nepahwin 1919, 6–7. 508, f. 7, YWCA, SSC. Attendance from “News Editor's Mail Bag,” Association Monthly XIII (Nov. 1919): 455.

5 Foner, Philip S., History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 7: Labor and World War I, 1914–1918 (New York, 1987), 227–29.Google Scholar

6 McCartin, Joseph A., Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill, 1997).Google Scholar

7 White, Deborah Gray, Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York, 1999), 110–41Google Scholar; Salem, Dorothy, To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform, 1890–1920 (Brooklyn, 1990), 223–30Google Scholar; Jones, Jacqueline, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (New York, 1998), 303, 324–28Google Scholar; Foner, Labor and World War I, 224–26; Lentz-Smith, Adriane, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 43–91, 174–79, 194–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coit, Jonathan, “‘Our Changed Attitude’: Armed Defense and the New Negro in the 1919 Chicago Race Riot,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11 (Apr. 2012): 225–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles; Williams, Chad L., Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill, 2010).Google Scholar

9 Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, MA, 1987): 382–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Dossett, Kate, Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism, and Integration in the United States, 1896–1935 (Gainesville, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 66–106.

11 Other YWCA staff also participated in these efforts; I focus on these four because of their critical role and for brevity.

12 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar; Giddings, Paula, Where and When I Enter: The Impact of Race and Sex on Black Women in America (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; White, Too Heavy A Load; Salem, To Better Our World; Gilmore, Glenda, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1997)Google Scholar; Lasch-Quinn, Elizabeth, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill, 1993)Google Scholar. For a nuanced analysis of contestations over respectability, see Wolcott, VirginiaRemaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill, 2001).Google Scholar

13 Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 2; White, Too Heavy 110–41;“Vanguards”; Coit, “‘Our Changed Attitude’”; See also Salem, To Better Our World 201–53; Brown, Nikki, Private Politics and Public Voices: Black Women's Activism from World War I to the New Deal (Bloomington, 2006), 108–33Google Scholar. On earlier roots of “the masculinist dimensions of black nationalist thought,” see Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 101–7, 112–16, 128–51.

14 Williams, Chad L., “Vanguards of the New Negro: African American Veterans and Post-World War I Racial Militancy,” Journal of African American History 92 (Summer 2007): 347–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill, 2010).Google Scholar

15 Brown, Private Politics, 113.

16 Reich, Steven, “The Great War, Black Workers, and the Rise and Fall of the NAACP in the South,” The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights Since Emancipation, ed. Arnesen, Eric (Urbana, 2007): 147–77Google Scholar, esp. 166–70.

17 Wolcott, Remaking Respectability; Bates, Beth Tompkins, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill, 2000)Google Scholar; Honey, Michael Keith, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, 1999)Google Scholar; and “The Power of Remembering: Black Factory Workers and Union Organizing in the Jim Crow Era” in Time Longer Than a Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850–1950, ed. Payne, Charles M. and Green, Adam (New York, 2003), 302–35Google Scholar; Korstad, Robert Rogers, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill, 2007)Google Scholar; Jones, William R., The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York, 2013).Google Scholar

18 Shockley, Megan Taylor, “We, Too, Are Americans:” African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940–1954 (Urbana, 2004).Google Scholar

19 Brown, Private Politics, 29,112. Kate Dossett notes Black YWCA workers' efforts to promote “black women as valuable workers,” Bridging Race Divides, 81–86. On masculinized postwar militancy, see Williams, “Vanguards” and Torchbearers.

20 Frank, Dana, “White Working Class Women and the Race Question,” International Labor and Working-Class History 54 (Fall 1998): 80–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cole, Peter, Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia (Urbana, 2013)Google Scholar; Letwin, Daniel, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878–1921 (Chapel Hill, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnesen, Eric, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (Urbana, 1991).Google Scholar

21 Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 74–75; Janiewski, Dolores, Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender, and Class in a New South Community (Philadelphia, 1985)Google Scholar; Gabin, Nancy, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca, 1990)Google Scholar; Cobble, Dorothy Sue, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, 1991)Google Scholar; Jones, Beverly W., “Race, Class, and Sex: Black Female Tobacco Workers in Durham, North Carolina, 1920–1940; and the Development of Female Consciousness” in U.S. Women in Struggle, eds. Moses, Claire Goldberg and Hartmann, Heidi (Urbana, 1995): 134–44.Google Scholar

22 Holmes, Josephine Pinyon, “Youth Cannot Wait,” Crisis 28 (July 1924): 128–31Google Scholar. Quoted in Hall, Jacqueline Dowd, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (New York: 1979)Google Scholar, 83.

23 The racial struggles in the YWCA have been well studied, but their relationship to race relations among working people has not. Robertson, Nancy, Christian Sisterhood: Race Relations and the YWCA 1906–1946 (Urbana, 2010), especially 44–70Google Scholar; Jones, Adrienne Lash, “Struggle Among Saints: African American Women and the YWCA, 1870–1920,” in Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City, eds. Mjagkij, Nina and Spratt, Margaret (New York, 1999), 160–187Google Scholar; Weisenfeld, Judith, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York's Black YWCA: 1905–1945 (Cambridge, MA: 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dossett, Bridging Race Divides, 66–106; Giddings, Where and When I Enter, 155–58; Hall, Revolt, 82–86; and Salem, To Better Our World, 130–44, 208–19.

24 Lerner, Gerda, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York, 1973)Google Scholar, 239; Shields, Emma, Negro Women in Industry (Washington, DC: Women's Bureau Bulletin No. 20, 1922).Google Scholar

25 “Our War Budget,” Association Monthly XI (Nov. 1917): 435–37; Sims, Mary S., The Natural History of a Social Institution: The Young Women's Christian Association (New York, 1935), 181–82Google Scholar; Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, 45–70; Salem, To Better Our World, 201–18.

26 Bowles had become the first paid secretary for the YWCA Colored Branch in New York City in 1905. Emma Bailey Speer, “Eva D. Bowles,” Woman's Press, July 1932; Adrienne Lash Jones, “Bowles, Eva Del Vakia” http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00081. American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

27 “Our War Budget”; “Millions for Defense,” Association Monthly XII (Sept. 1918): 311; “The United War Work Campaign: A Report of the Latest Developments, Association Monthly XII (Sept. 1918): 345; “United War Work Campaign” (New York: The Campaign, 1918).

28 Olcott, Jane, The Work of Colored Women (New York: Colored Work Committee of War Work Council, National Board, Young Women's Christian Associations, 1919), 6–9Google Scholar, Box 703, f. 6, YWCA, SSC; Jones, “Struggle Among Saints,” 176–77; Gladys Calkins, “The Negro in the Young Women's Christian Association: A Study of the Development of YWCA Interracial Policies and Practices in Their Historical Setting” (MA thesis, George Washington University, 1960), 53–54; Robertson, Christian Sisterhood 44–129; Weisenfeld, Christian Activism.

29 Dorothea Browder, “‘A Christian Solution of the Labor Situation’: How Working Women Reshaped the YWCA's Religious Mission and Politics,” Journal of Women's History 19, June 2007: 85–110; Frederickson, Mary, “Citizens for Democracy: The Industrial Programs of the YWCA” in Sisterhood and Solidarity: Workers' Education for Women, 1914–1984, eds. Kornbluh, Joyce L. and Frederickson, Mary (Philadelphia, 1984)Google Scholar; Roydhouse, Marion W., “Bridging Chasms: Community and the Southern YWCA” in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, eds. Hewitt, Nancy A. and Lebsock, Susan (Urbana, 1993)Google Scholar; Roberts, Richard, Florence Simms: A Biography (New York, 1923).Google Scholar

30 Active in the Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, Jackson also had worked for Rhode Island's Department of Labor. Negro Yearbook 1925–1926: 421.

31 Olcott, Work of Colored Women, 8–9; Report of Miss Mary E. Jackson to the Department of Method, City Committee and War Work Council, Feb. 21, 1918. Box 515, f. 17, YWC, SSC.

32 Report of Miss Mary Jackson to War Work Council, Mar. 20–Apr. 16, 1918; and other reports in Box 515, f. 17, YWCA, SSC; Olcott, Work of Colored Women.

33 Report of Miss Mary E. Jackson … Feb. 21, 1918; and Report of Mary E. Jackson to the War Work Council, City Committee and Industrial Committee, Nov. 25, 1918, Sept. 5–Oct. 30. Box 515, f. 17, YWC, SSC.

34 Carlton-LaNey, Iris, “Elizabeth Ross Haynes: An African American Reformer of Womanist Consciousness, 1908–1940,” Social Work 42 (Nov 1997): 573–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Olcott, Work of Colored Women, 124; Gerald Mark Hendrickson, “Labor Knowledge and the Building of Modern U.S. Labor Relations, 1918–1929” (Ph.D. diss., University of California Santa Barbara, 2004), 141.

35 Jackson and Bowles joined representatives of numerous reform groups on a study, A New Day for the Colored Woman Worker: A Study of Colored Women in Industry in New York City, March 1919.

36 Olcott, Work of Colored Women, 115–16.

37 Report of Mary Jackson to Industrial Committee, Oct. 1 to Nov. 1, 1920. Box 515, f. 17, YWCA, SSC.

38 Hendrickson, “Labor Knowledge,” 1–18 and 297; and Hendrickson, Mark, “Gender Research as Labor Activism: The Women's Bureau in the New Era,” Journal of Policy Studies 20:4 (2008) 482–15.Google Scholar

39 Dossett, Bridging Race Divides, 81–85.

40 Olcott, Work of Colored Women, appendix.

41 Olcott, Work of Colored Women 47–49, 69–72, and appendix, “Information from War Work Centers Indicating Industries in Which Colored Women are Employed and those in which Y.W.C.A. Club Membership is Represented.”

42 Report of Jackson … Jan. 16, 1919.

43 Olcott, Work of Colored Women, 124; Frederickson, “Citizens,” 81; “The Colored Girl Gets Her Chance,” War Work Bulletin 51, Dec. 6, 1918 (YWCA National Board, New York), 2–3. Box 710, f. 13, YWCA, SSC.

44 Frank, “White Working-Class Women and Race.”

45 Mary E. Jackson, “Colored Girls in the Second Line of Defense,” Association Monthly XII (Oct. 1918): 363–64.

46 Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles, 96, 109–36; newspaper quote from 70; Williams, Torchbearers. Likewise, Black women serving abroad faced insulting treatment. Dossett, Bridging Race Divides, 86–90; Hunton, Addie W. and Johnson, Kathryn M., Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (1920: repr. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1997).Google Scholar

47 Mary Alden Hopkins, “A Square Deal for Colored Women,” Association Monthly XIII (Apr. 1919): 152–55; and Dossett, Bridging Race Divides, 84–85.

48 McCartin, Labor's Great War, 114–18; Jackson, “Colored Girls in the Second Line of Defense,” 363.

49 Reich, “The Great War,” esp. 160–61; McCartin, Labor's Great War, 104–6.

50 Jackson, “Colored Girls in the Second Line of Defense,” 362. “To-day” in original.

51 Jackson to War Work Council, Mar. 20–Apr. 16, 1918.

52 Report of Jackson to the War Work Council … Nov. 25, 1918, 1.

53 Jackson, “Colored Girls in the Second Line of Defense,” 363–64.

54 Wolcott, Remaking Respectability 1–48; Jones, William P., The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South (Chicago, 2005).Google Scholar

55 Report of Jackson Mar. 20–Apr. 15, 1918; Jackson, “Colored Girls in the Second Line of Defense,” 363.

56 Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 14–27.

57 Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 1–48; Hall, Revolt, 84; Cash, Floris Barnett, African American Women and Social Action: The Clubwomen and Volunteerism From Jim Crow to the New Deal, 1896–1936 (Westport, CT, 2001)Google Scholar, 14.

58 Reba Forbes Morse, “Report of the Secretary of the War Work Council Delivered at the Annual Meeting, June 18, 1918” (New York: National Board of the Young Women's Christian Associations, 1918). Box 710, f. 13, YWCA SSC.

59 Mary Alden Hopkins, “Starting War Service Centers,” Association Monthly XII (Sept. 1918): 325–26.

60 Margaret Williamson, “New Jobs for Old,” Association Monthly XI (Nov. 1917): 466–47.

61 Elizabeth Boies, “A Migration Within Our Borders,” Association Monthly XI (Feb. 1917): 23–26; Weisenfeld, Christian Activism, 124–27.

62 “Social Morality Lectures,” War Work Bulletin No. 41, Sept. 27, 1918: 2, Box 710, f. 13, YWCA, SSC.

63 Weisenfeld, Christian Activism, 124–27 and 139; Morse, “Report of the Secretary of the War Work Council … June 18, 1918,” 7–8; 5–6; 10–12; 12.

64 Weisenfeld, Christian Activism, 140–42.

65 “The Colored Girl Gets Her Chance.”

66 Eva Bowles, “The Colored Girl in Our Midst,” Association Monthly XI (Nov. 1918): 491–93.

67 “Industrial Movement Among Colored Women,” Nov. 1918, typescript. Box 534, f. 2, YWCA, SSC. Parts (though not the language about patriotic anti-racism) appear in the Dec. 1918 War Work Bulletin article “The Colored Girl Gets Her Chance.”

68 Bynum, Cornelius L., “The New Negro and Social Democracy during the Harlem Renaissance, 1917–37,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10 (Jan. 2011): 89–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the NAACP and patriotic discourse, see Reich, “The Great War.”

69 Industrial Conference, Oct. 1–6, 1918, Box 501, f. 13. YWCA, SSC. Meeting minutes, Colored Work Committee, Oct. 25, 1918. Box 533, f. 9, YWCA, SSC. Report of Social Service Commission, Nepahwin, 1918; and Report of Religious Work Commission, Nepahwin, 1918.

70 Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 235–37.

71 Report of the Religious Work Commission, Nepahwin, 1918.

72 Report of the Industrial Club Girls' Council, Camp Nepahwin, 1918 (East Central Field Committee). Box 508, f. 7, YWCA, SSC.

73 Westerbrook, Robert M., “Schools for Industrial Democrats: The Social Origins of John Dewey's Philosophy of Education,” American Journal of Education 100 (Aug. 1992): 401–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Browder, “A ‘Christian Solution’”; Frederickson, “Citizens”; “Service Set for Pioneer in Feminism,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 18, 1974; Lucy P. Carner, Unionizing New York City Women Office Workers (MA thesis, Columbia University, 1924); “Dr. Grace Coyle, Educator, Dead,” New York Times, Mar. 10, 1962. “The Church and Social Reconstruction,” Editorial, Association Monthly XIII (Sept. 1919): 355.

74 On the Social Gospel movement's troubled history on race, see Luker, Ralph E., The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1865–1912 (Chapel Hill, 1991), 314–21Google Scholar; quoted on 321.

75 Coyle, “Colored Girls in Industry.”

76 Records of Industrial Conference, Feb. 5, 1921, p. 6. Box 502, f. 1, YWCA, SSC.

77 Report of Mary E. Jackson to the City Committee and the Industrial Committee from Dec. 2nd, 1918 to Jan. 2nd, 1919, Jan. 16, 1919, 1. Box 515, f. 17, YWCA SSC; Colored Work Committee meeting minutes, May 18, 1920, Box 553, f. 10, YWCA, SSC.

78 Colored Work Committee meeting minutes, Sept. 26, 1919 and Oct. 31, 1919. Box 553, f. 10, YWCA, SSC.

79 Report of the Religious Work Commission, Industrial Club Council, Camp Nepahwin 1919 (Philadelphia: East Central Field Committee), 2–3. Box 508, f. 7, YWCA, SSC.

80 Report of Religious Work Commission, Nepahwin 1919, 2–3.

81 Report of Social Service Commission, Nepahwin 1919, 6–7.

82 Annual Report, Altamont Industrial Council, June 28 to July 12, 1919. Box 508, f. 15, YWCA, SSC. Remarkably, neither resolution appeared in the Association Monthly summer camps coverage. “Camp Bubbles,” Association Monthly XIII (Aug. 1919): 342.

83 Calkins, “The Negro in the YWCA,” 55. However, this national conference did not include racial nondiscrimination among the labor demands it issued to the YWCA National Board. “National Conference of Industrial Clubs of the Young Women's Christian Association called by the National Industrial Committee in Washington, DC, Oct. 24 to 28, 1919.” Box 501, f. 14. YWCA, SSC.

84 Colored Work Committee minutes, Sept. 26, 1919; Association Monthly XIV (Jan. 1920): ix.

85 Report of Jackson, Jan. 16, 1919, 1.

86 Proceedings, Sixth National Convention of the Young Women's Association of the U.S.A., Box 271, f. 1, YWCA, SSC. Salem, To Better Our World, 239–52; Hall, Revolt, 85–6; Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, 71–74, 80–91.

87 Local staff nearly quadrupled to 365, and field staff grew from 4 to 13 and headquarters staff from 1 to 30; by 1918 more than 800 clubs had formed. Browder, “‘A Christian Solution’”; Roberts, Florence Simms, 211–14; Financial Statement of the War Work Council, Nov. 1, 1918–June 30, 1919, 11, Box 703, f. 15, YWCA, SSC; Frederickson, “Citizens,” 78–79.

88 Browder, “A ‘Christian Solution’.”

89 Report of Eva D. Bowles to the City Department, Annual 1922. Box 541, f. 2, YWCA, SSC.

90 Report of Annetta M. Dieckmann (East Central Field) to Industrial Department from Apr. 1, 1922–Sept. 1, 1922, and other reports in Box 515, f. 7, YWCA, SSC.

91 Annetta Dieckmann, “The Effect of Common Interests on Race Relations In Certain Northern Cities: A Preliminary Study of Industry” (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1923), quote from 8. She was at Columbia graduate school at the same time as Elizabeth Ross Haynes, who became the first Black woman on the National Board in 1924.

92 Colored Work Committee minutes, Sept. 26, 1919, Oct. 21, 1919, and Oct. 31, 1919. On YWCA industrial conferences, see Browder, “A ‘Christian Solution’” and Frederickson, “Citizens.”

93 Editorial, Association Monthly XIII (Dec. 1919): 466.

94 Williams, “Vanguards,” 356.

95 Conference records, Cheyney Conference of Colored Business and Industrial Girls, 1921–1924. Box 469, f. 5, YWCA, SSC. The Cheyney conference drew from the Midwest as well in 1924. Report of Miss Lucy P. Carner, Industrial Secretary, for May 1 to Oct. 1, 1924. Box 514, f. 7, YWCA, SSC.

96 Conference Findings, 1921 Cheyney Industrial Conference. Box 469, f. 5, YWCA, SSC.

97 Conference records, Cheyney, 1921–1924, Box 469, f. 5, YWCA, SSC.

98 Conference of Business and Industrial Girls, Cheyney, PA, June 23–30, 1923. Box 469, f. 5, YWCA, SSC.

99 Annual Report of Eva D. Bowles to the City Department for Jan.–Dec. 1924, Box 541, f. 2, YWCA, SSC.

100 Findings, 1922 Cheyney Conference of Business and Industrial Girls. Box 469, f. 5, YWCA, SSC.

101 1922 Cheyney Conference findings.

102 Report of Dieckmann, Apr. 1, 1922–Sept. 1, 1922; and other reports in Box 515, f. 7, YWCA, SSC.

103 The Student Assembly also created an interracial structure in 1922, ahead of the Business and Professional group and the YWCA National Board. Calkins, “The Negro in the YWCA,” 67; National Industrial Assembly Proceedings, Seventh National Convention of the Young Women's Christian Associations of the United States of America, Apr. 20–27, 1922: 301, Box 271, f. 7; and Proceedings of the Eighth National Convention of the Young Women's Christian Associations of the United States of America, New York, NY, Apr. 30–May 6, 1924, 116–17, Box 271, f. 13, YWCA, SSC.

104 Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, 94; Proceedings, YWCA Seventh … Convention, 301.

105 Report of the Nepahwin Industrial Conference, August 1922. 503, f. 2, YWCA, SSC; Report of Miss Lucy P. Carner, Industrial Secretary, for May 1 to Oct. 1, 1924, YWCA Box 514, f. 7, SSC.

106 Report of Nepahwin, 1922, 14; Findings of the Nepahwin Industrial Conference 1923, 503, f. 3, YWCA, SSC. [emphasis added]

107 Report of Social Service Commission, Nepahwin, 1919.

108 Lucy P. Carner, Report of Traveling Secretary for Nepahwin Area, Feb. 1925. YWCA Box 514, f. 7, SSC.

109 Findings and Recommendations from the Nepahwin Industrial Conference, 1924. 503, f. 4, YWCA, SSC. Lucy P. Carner, Report of Travelling Secretary of Eastern Region, June–July 1925. YWCA Box 514, f. 7, SSC.

110 Gertrude M. Lees, “The Industrial Assembly: A Letter to the Industrial Membership Concerning Convention Plans,” Womans Press, Feb. 1926: 121; Bertha E. Pabst and Harriet A. Cunningham, “The Business and Professional Assembly: The Call to the Second Assembly of Business and Professional Women at Milwaukee.” Womans Press, Feb. 1926: 132.

111 Boynton, “Fighting Racism at the Chicago YWCA”; Knupfer, Anne Mies, The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women's Activism (Chicago, 2006), 136–40Google Scholar; Lucy Carner, Report of Camp Gray Industrial Conference, Saugatuck, MI, July 1–12, 1929, 1. Box 514, f. 10, YWCA, SSC.

112 Findings for Cheyney, 1924; Findings of the Prospect Industrial Conference, June 20–July 3, 1925, YWCA, SSC. Dorothea Browder, “Race and Occupation at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2000). Eleanor Copenhaver, Report on Visit to Wisconsin Summer School, July 15–16, 1927, Box 515, f. 1, YWCA, SSC.

113 Lewis, “The YWCA's Multiracial Activism.”

114 “Findings of the Prospect Industrial Conference, June 20–July 3, 1925.” SSC YWCA, Box 508, f. 20; Findings of the Midyear Conference of Colored Industrial Girls, New York City, Mar. 14 and 15, 1925, Box 534, f. 2, SSC YWCA; Annetta Dieckmann, “Summary of Discussion of Industrial Work Among Colored Girls,” Oct. 10, 1925; Dieckmann's untitled notes on the formation of the Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers, Oct. 10, 1925; “Notes of Miss Bowles with the National Industrial Staff, Oct. 5, 1928,” all in Box 534, f. 2, YWCA, SSC; Katz, Daniel, All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism (New York, 2011), 111–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chateauvert, Melinda, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana, 1998)Google Scholar, 44; Beth Tompkins Bates, “A New Crowd Challenges the Agenda of the Old Guard in the NAACP, 1933–1941,” American Historical Review April 1997: 340–77, esp. 347–48; Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, 130.

115 Notes from Industrial Conference, Feb. 5, 1921.

116 Steven F. Lawson, “Long Origins of the Short Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968” in Freedom Rights, eds. McGuire and Dittmer: 9–37; Hall, Jacqueline D., “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (Mar. 2005): 1233–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boyle, Kevin, “Labour, the Left and the Long Civil Rights Movement,” Social History 30 (Aug. 2005): 366–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar