Achievements
Too long have we been silent under unjust and unholy charges; we cannot expect to have them removed until we disprove them ourselves."
~Josephine St. Pierre Ruffian
The National Association of Colored Women (NACW)
“Lifting as we climb” was the motto of the National Association of Colored Women and aptly so. This amazing extensive group of independent women worked together to provide themselves, their children, and all African-American women with better lives, more rights, an education and more opportunities. The merging of the Colored Women’s League and Federation of Afro-American Women formed the NACW in 1896. Formed by renowned black female educators, community leaders, and civil rights activists including Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the NACW was a response to a journalist’s “vicious attack on the character of African-American women” (Wormser). “As the first president, Terrell used the association as a means of achieving educational and social reform and bringing an end to racial and sex discrimination.” The NACW’s goal was to improve the lives of poor blacks by job training; fighting for wage equality; supplying child-care; and eliminating lynching, peonage, and segregation (transportation, buildings, et cetera). In addition, members of the NACW raised money for their kindergartens, vocational schools, summer camps, and elderly homes; mobilized voter registration drives for the local African-Americans; and promoted cultural events such as concerts and poetry readings. They “adopted an elitist attitude” and took the responsibility of the “privileged” and help the “socially inferior.” The Association helped women and children who had poor health, lack education, decent clothing, and/or housing. “The work which we hope to accomplish can be done better, we believe, by the mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of our race than by the fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons” (Terrell in her 1st presidential address, 1897).