In his magisterial work, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, historian C. Vann Woodward wrote that, in the South, Progressive-era reforms generally benefitted white men. He also implied that in the North, the era did not usher in sweeping changes for African Americans. Restrictive social customs dictated a secondary place for them in society. For nearly two decades after Woodward’s study, scholars repeated the author’s conclusion on the failure of progressivism to attack fundamental problems in the black community (1).

Historians of progressivism fixed their attention essentially upon a middle-class urban movement that, at best, made blacks only marginal participants in the struggle for social change. In 1968, August Meier wrote in his Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915, that “Negroes were practically omitted from the Progressive Era’s program of reform.” In a perceptive work a few years later, John Temple Kirby pointed scholarship in a slightly different direction when he suggested that “in a way” black people did not profit from the many changes that took place during the period. Kirby’s qualification did not go unnoticed by some scholars, especially those interested in women’s history and in looking at history from “the bottom up” (2).

Woodward and other historians who directed their attention toward blacks and the progressive movement gave paramount emphasis to political matters and race relations. It is hard to overlook the declining citizenship status of the race during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Indeed the infamous 1896 Plessy Supreme Court decision gave legal sanction to segregation; lynching also continued at an ugly pace; and both national and regional leadership seemed willing to adopt the “scientific” view of race that relegated blacks to an inferior status on the scale of humanity. Ironic as it may now seem, political “purification” in the progressive South came to mean the elimination of blacks from the electoral process, for total abrogation of the fifteenth amendment (3).

Even some northern reformers who aggressively addressed social issues in their region only reluctantly tackled problems related to the African-American community. The noted journalist Ray Stannard Baker, for example, who wrote the classic Following the Color Line, acquainted Americans with some of the pressing matters of the black community, but ultimately concluded that only time would remedy the problems of race in America. The distancing of Baker and other progressives from racial issues shaped the conclusions of Woodward and other scholars about blacks and progressivism (4).

In the 1970s historians began to recognize that black Americans themselves had engaged in a variety of reform endeavors that often had little if anything to do with racial protest or political progressivism, although those issues may have inadvertently overlapped. When John Temple Kirby qualified his assessment of progressivism with the phrase “in a way,” he was aware of black reform efforts that, more frequently than not, paraded under the heading of self-reliance. These efforts were infused with notions of social justice and the principles of Social Christianity (or Social Gospel) that characterized many of the programs of white progressives (5).

Many reasons prompted scholars to refocus their attention or to change their emphasis in assessing progressivism and matters of race. Social and intellectual currents that followed in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education; the availability of new historical sources; greater concentration on class, race, and gender issues; and the broader participation of blacks and women in the historical profession all had significant impact upon writers. When scholars now speak of progressivism, they not only allude to the ideal of black self-reliance, but suggest a concern that transcends individual striving for profit and self-growth, or the acquisition of power or influence for personal gain. In its broad sense, they view progressivism as the effective use of collective organization, energy, and resources directed toward a community’s growth, advancement, or uplift.

Much like white reformers, black progressives wanted to achieve a greater sense of community and order, the preservation of moral values, and the perfection of social institutions. John Dittmer undoubtedly had this in mind when he wrote in Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920, that white supremacy did not destroy a reform spirit within the black community, and that African Americans created and strengthened institutions behind the veil of segregation (6).

Black reformers came principally from a middle-class background, but constructing an accurate profile of a “typical” black progressive is as difficult as trying to define a white one. “Conservatives” such as Booker T. Washington and “radicals” such as W. E. B. DuBois both fit the characterization of “progressive” if one moves away from narrow political and ideological considerations. If Washington, for example, shied away from the protest-oriented Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which represented the spirit of progressivism, his emphasis on farmers’ institutes to improve black rural life and his abiding concern for black health care reflected a progressive disposition toward human and social problems (7).

The Black Church

The leadership of the black church, the most powerful social institution within the African-American community, took on greater life and activity during this era. The prevailing view of the black church as theologically orthodox obscured some of the changes that took place during this period. It helped to shape, and was shaped by, contemporary currents of Social Christianity that characterized the Progressive Era. In reality, the black church, even many rural southern ones, had demonstrated a broader social consciousness before the turn of the twentieth century than some historians realize. The crucial point, however, is that during the Progressive Era an increasing number of churches accepted the tenets of the Social Gospel and extended their mission beyond the walls of their sanctuaries, into the streets of the city and into the countryside (8).

Among the black clergy, Reverdy Ransom stood out as the most celebrated clergy member of the Progressive Era. A powerful preacher and social activist, Ransom studied at Wilberforce, Ohio, where he came under the influence of teachers who saw the church as an instrument for altering American society and the black community. For them the church had to remain the social center of black life, a means of social control, and, potentially, a medium for black enfranchisement and political participation. Ransom’s professors taught that service to others was a Christian obligation, and they stressed that salvation rested upon social responsibility and good works. Ransom learned to exalt systematic inquiry, research, institutional organization, and the role of government in the resolution of societal problems. If one could craft a stereotype, Ransom was a classic Social Gospel progressive of the age (9).

Ransom rose to become a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in the 1920s, but his most enduring work took place during the first two decades of the twentieth century. As a minister in Cleveland, he created programs for the development of young children, established a men’s club in his church to carry out community activities, and appointed a Board of Deaconesses, to the chagrin of more conservative males. A literary society sponsored debates and lectures on local and national issues. When the minister moved to Bethel Church in Chicago, he joined forces with black and white reformers including activist Ida Wells-Barnett who had gone to Chicago from Memphis, the noted lawyer Clarence Darrow, and Jane Addams of Hull House. Ransom’s church started an industrial school for children, a kindergarten, and programs to provide for the needs of people who lived in the church’s district. Wells-Barnett recalled that Ransom had an abiding concern for the sick, the poor, and the needy (10).

Ransom transferred the tenets of the Social Gospel into his best remembered endeavor: the Institutional Church and Social Settlement (ICSS). His belief in the need for this kind of social service, writes Ralph Luker, sprang from an experience in Pennsylvania where he walked among the poor in alleys and climbed dark stairways of unhealthy tenements. Ransom believed that the black church needed to provide more than worship service and spiritual food for black migrants who had already begun to move into the city. Thus, he founded ICSS more than a decade before the formation of the National Urban League.

Although technically under the auspices of the AME Church, Ransom’s creation had a mission broader than the parent organization. He presided over a structure that offered a variety of activities, including an employment bureau, print shop, kindergarten and nursery, and an athletic gymnasium that held 1,200 people. Ransom’s ICSS not only served the needs of Chicago’s poor, but helped pave the way for the establishment of institutional churches and settlements in other localities. Through his leadership, Ransom advanced Social Gospel activity within the black community by mentoring persons such as R. R. Wright, who became a bishop in the AME Church, and George Haynes, a sociologist who was a founder of the National Urban League in 1911 (11).

The Role of Women Reformers

When scholars look closely for the bedrock of progressivism in the black community, they must turn their attention to African-American women. While some of them—Ida Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Mary Waring, and Lugenia Burns Hope—are well known to scholars because of their protest activity or their national club work, some lesser known reformers in small communities are just beginning to emerge with recent scholarship in women’s history. The work of historians such as Cynthia Neverdon-Morton and Elizabeth Hayes Turner have enabled us to reconceptualize the role of women, especially in southern life. Whether in churches, clubs, or neighborhood unions, women provided vital energy, leadership, and knowledge that fueled reform during the Progressive Age. Examples abound, but the work of black women as agents for change is especially evident in their push for support of common schools in the South during the Progressive Era (12).

Scholars of southern history have written much about the positive impact of northern philanthropy upon black education. Funds from foundations certainly played an important role in improving and sustaining learning in the South, where most blacks lived during the Progressive Era. Unfortunately, support from the major philanthropic organizations—the Rockefeller Foundation, the General Education Board, the Jeanes Fund, and the Rosenwald Foundation—often enabled white southerners to escape responsibility for adequate funding of black schools. As Louis Harlan and Henry Bullock have shown, a wide gulf existed between black and white education during the Progressive Era. Scholars, however, often overlook the enormous contribution blacks themselves made to sustaining the life of the public school and the progressive philosophy that African Americans brought to those efforts (13).

James Anderson has written the most perceptive study of the black community’s commitment to educational reform in the American South. Black women joined black men in carrying out various fund-raising campaigns to secure community schools across the region. In examining the activities of the Rosenwald Fund—one of the most active foundations that supported the building of black schools during the period—Anderson documents the remarkable efforts of poor southern blacks to raise money to finance buildings for their children. The Rosenwald agent for the state of Alabama related a meaningful story of an Autauga county, Alabama community where poor black tenant farmers struggled to eke out a precarious existence from the soil, where money was at a real “premium.” On a hot summer day, the community gathered for a rally to collect funds to pay its share of a new Rosenwald school. Agent M. H. Griffin recalled that an elderly black woman had written him to say that “I have only one copper cent, and it goes for the children of Autaugaville.” Apocryphal or not, the story symbolizes the black community’s concern with education and the belief in the kind of social change it could bring. Some black men mortgaged their farms and their lands to build schools, while determined black mothers sponsored fish fries, raffles, musical programs, and other activities to raise money for education (14).

If women demonstrated a profound interest in public schools as a means of positively affecting the life chances of their children, they also initiated or sponsored a plethora of other activities. Their energy and commitment defined the very notion of agency, the instrument through which change arose. In city after city, they pressed for playgrounds, recreational centers, hospitals, better sanitation and housing, more youth facilities, and nurseries. From Boston to Tuskegee, writes Anne Firor Scott, black women tackled community problems and created institutions to solve or ameliorate them. Middle-class black women characteristically worked through the club movement, the church, or auxiliaries to men’s groups such as the Prince Hall Masons. In Tulsa, Oklahoma for example, Mollie Parker Franklin, mother of the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin, started a nursery with the help of other club women; and in Atlanta Lugenia Burns Hope found support for her Neighborhood Union from women associated with the club movement and universities in the city. In Cleveland, Jane Hunter did not depend on government or men’s groups in establishing her home for unwed mothers (15).

Conclusion

During the later part of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, organized black men and women not only tackled Jim Crow in a variety of direct and covert ways, but also worked to improve social conditions and institutions in their communities. Much like other progressives, they sought a better life free of debilitating ills and political proscriptions. They bequeathed to the country a legacy of self-help that remains with us as America still desperately struggles for a solution to its most difficult social problem.

Shortly after the beginning of the Progressive Era, W. E. B. DuBois, black scholar and reformer, wrote that the great problem of the twentieth century was that of race. We face the new century encumbered with the same burden. In the years ahead, perhaps a new progressivism, fueled by a more dynamic democratic ethos of both blacks and whites, will help achieve meaningful reforms that will exalt the possibilities of the human spirit and enable the United States to rise above cultural provincialism, racial bigotry, and the narrowness of gender discrimination.

Endnotes

1. C. Vann Woodward, “Progressivism—For Whites Only,” in Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 369-95. My essay tilts slightly toward a consideration of the American South, where the overwhelming majority of blacks lived during the Progressive Era.

2. August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 165; and Jack Temple Kirby, Darkness at the Dawning: Race and Reform in the Progressive South (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972), 155.

3. Dewey W. Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), xvii, 112-20; and William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 63-70.

4. Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era (1908; Reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1964).

5. Kirby, Darkness at the Dawning, 155; and for the many-sided issue of social justice in the South, see Grantham, Southern Progressivism, especially 230-45.

6. John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 50.

7. The best biography of Booker T. Washington during the Progressive Era is Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); and of W. E. B. DuBois, David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York: H. Holt, 1993), 218-24, especially the section on DuBois’s Atlanta University studies, which he hoped would help pave the way for social change.

8. A vast historiography now exists on the black church. An informed work that best traces the activity of the church from the Progressive Era to the early 1930s is Benjamin E. Mays and Joseph W. Nicholson, The Negro’s Church (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933). Many black churches across the country did not keep adequate records of their many activities, and it is possible that Mays and Nicholson underestimated the extent to which African-American religious institutions became involved in community programs. An insightful commentary on women, one particular black religious denomination, and Progressive-era reform is Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 171-79.

9. The most useful full-length study of Ransom is Calvin S. Morris, Reverdy C. Ransom: Black Advocate of the Social Gospel (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990).

10. Ibid., 105-06; and Randall K. Burkett and Richard Newman, Black Apostles: Afro-American Clergy Confront the Twentieth Century (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978), 196.

11. Ralph E. Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 173-76; and Peter J. Paris, The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 95-98.

12. The best general work of its kind on black women in the region is Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1989). A superb and provocative state study that discusses black women in some detail is Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 228-60.

13. On the condition of black public schools generally during this period, see Henry Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South from 1619 to the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). See also, Louis Harlan, Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901-1915 (New York: Atheneum, 1969); and Grantham, Southern Progressivism, 240-47.

14. James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 159, 161.

15. The black women’s club movement is traced in Lindsay Davis, Lifting as They Climb: The National Association of Colored Women (Washington, DC: National Association of Colored Women, 1933). See also, Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 147-48; John Hope Franklin and John Whittington Franklin, eds., My Life and An Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 211-13; and Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 57-90. For a helpful note on the role of women in creating a settlement in one southern city, and for the subsequent activity of one progressive black woman, see Elisabeth Israels Perry, “‘The Very Best Influence’: Josephine Holloway and Girl Scouting in Nashville’s African-American Community,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 53 (Summer 1993): 73-85. A useful full-length study of blacks and the settlement movement that focuses heavily upon women is Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

Bibliography

Baker, Ray Stannard. Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era. New York: Harper and Row, 1908.

Dittmer, John. Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Kirby, Jack Temple. Darkness at the Dawning: Race and Reform in the Progressive South. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972.

Lasch-Quinn, Elisabeth. Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. New York: H. Holt, 1993.

Luker, Ralph E. The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Morris, Calvin. Reverdy Ransom: Black Advocate of the Social Gospel. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990.

Neverdon-Morton, Cynthia. Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989.

Rouse, Jacqueline Anne. Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

Turner, Elizabeth Hayes. Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Woodward, C. Vann. “Progressivism—For Whites Only.” In Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951.

Jimmie Franklin is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University and a past president of the Southern Historical Association.