Black Women Organize

Colored Industrial Institute, Pine Bluff
Photo courtesy of the Arkansas History Commission

The practice of segregation barred black women from participation in club organized by white women, so black women chartered their own organizations.

In 1896 they founded their own National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACW). The first NACW federated club in the state was established in Little Rock in 1897. Charlotte Andrews Stevens, the first black teacher hired in the city public schools, was a charter member. Black women founded literary clubs in Little Rock, Newport, Brinkley, and Searcy, among other places. While some clubs were strictly literary in nature - like the Lotus Club and the Bay View Reading Club in Little Rock - clubs founded by middle class black women frequently had a charitable component, speaking to the plight of the impoverished black community surrounding them.

Black women in Pine Bluff created the Mothers League in 1893, and black women in Fort Smith founded the Ladies' Relief and Missionary Corps in 1898. Clubs in Little Rock, Hot Springs, and Fort Smith all supported homes for elderly black women.

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