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Black Club Women and Child Welfare: Lessons for Modern Reform Florida State University Law Review Volume 32 Issue 3 Article 3 2005 Black Club Women and Child Welfare: Lessons for Modern Reform Dorothy E. Roberts [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.law.fsu.edu/lr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Dorothy E. Roberts, Black Club Women and Child Welfare: Lessons for Modern Reform, 32 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. (2006) . https://ir.law.fsu.edu/lr/vol32/iss3/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Florida State University Law Review by an authorized editor of Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW BLACK CLUB WOMEN AND CHILD WELFARE: LESSONS FOR MODERN REFORM Dorothy E. Roberts VOLUME 32 SPRING 2005 NUMBER 3 Recommended citation: Dorothy E. Roberts, Black Club Women and Child Welfare: Lessons for Modern Reform, 32 FLA. ST. U. L. REV. 957 (2005). BLACK CLUB WOMEN AND CHILD WELFARE: LESSONS FOR MODERN REFORM DOROTHY E. ROBERTS* I. INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................... 957 II. BLACK CLUB WOMEN’S SOCIAL VIEW OF CHILD WELFARE................................. 958 III. RESPONDING TO THE NEEDS OF CHILDREN......................................................... 963 IV. CONNECTING CHILDREN’S AND WOMEN’S INTERESTS......................................... 967 V. LESSONS FOR MODERN REFORM.......................................................................... 971 I. INTRODUCTION Last year I discovered a chapter in the history of U.S. child wel- fare policy that is overlooked in most accounts of the child welfare system. An editor for Darlene Clark Hine’s Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia asked me to write the entry about child welfare.1 As I began the project, I realized that I had written an en- tire book and several articles about mainstream child welfare agen- cies’ treatment of African-American children,2 but I knew too little about the history of African-American women’s own approach to child welfare issues. In prior research, I learned that Black women were excluded from elite white women’s campaigns in the early twentieth century to res- cue poor children from parental abuse and indigence3 and that Black children were ignored by the institutions these white women founded.4 But how had African-American women responded to the needs of Black children? As I probed this question, I discovered an amazing, though rather obscure, record of organizing by Black * Kirkland and Ellis Professor, Northwestern University School of Law; faculty fel- low, Institute for Policy Research. B.A., Yale University, 1977; J.D., Harvard University, 1980. This Essay is based on the 2004 Mason Ladd Lecture at the Florida State University College of Law. I am grateful to Wilma King for inviting me to write an entry for Darlene Clark Hine’s Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. I also thank Matthew Lyon and Julie Rinehart for excellent research assistance and Andy Lowry for graciously sharing her archival research and insights with me. 1. BLACK WOMEN IN AMERICA: AN HISTORICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA (Darlene Clark Hine et al. eds., 2d ed. 2005). 2. See, e.g., DOROTHY ROBERTS, SHATTERED BONDS: THE COLOR OF CHILD WELFARE (2002) [hereinafter SHATTERED BONDS]; Dorothy E. Roberts, Kinship Care and the Price of State Support for Children, 76 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 1619 (2001). 3. See LINDA GORDON, PITIED BUT NOT ENTITLED: SINGLE MOTHERS AND THE HISTORY OF WELFARE, 1890-1935, at 111-43 (1994). 4. See ANDREW BILLINGSLEY & JEANNE M. GIOVANNONI, CHILDREN OF THE STORM: BLACK CHILDREN AND AMERICAN CHILD WELFARE 34-38, 76-80 (1972). I capitalize Black and not white because people of African descent living in the United States identified themselves as an ethnic group, whereas being “white” constituted a privileged racial status accorded to members of certain ethnic groups. See generally IAN F. HANEY LÓPEZ, WHITE BY LAW: THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE (1996) (exploring the legal origins of white ra- cial identity); NOEL IGNATIEV, HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE (1995) (discussing how Irish immigrants were assimilated as “white” after the Civil War). 957 958 FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 32:957 women for the welfare of children. As a result of exclusion from white organizations, Black women created a movement at the turn of the twentieth century, through their participation in hundreds of clubs and church groups, to provide services to Black children.5 This child service movement incorporated Black women’s own philosophy, which tied child welfare to racial advancement and justice. Sadly, Black club women’s remarkable achievements have been left out of the official history of the women’s movement in the United States, and their vision of child welfare has been omitted from the development of the public child welfare system. Their perspective dif- fered drastically from the punitive approach of the modern child wel- fare system, in which African-American children are now overrepre- sented, and offers important lessons for reform efforts today. Al- though these elite Black women were motivated by paternalistic self- interest along with altruism, they nevertheless implemented a phi- losophy about child welfare that is superior to the dominant ap- proach of current child protective services. This Essay highlights three key aspects of Black club women’s child welfare vision that we should incorporate in contemporary child welfare policy and practice: these women understood the relationship between the well-being of individual children and their group identity and social surroundings; they focused on improving the general welfare of children rather than responding to particular cases of child maltreatment; and they promoted children’s welfare by supporting, rather than punishing, mothers. II. BLACK CLUB WOMEN’S SOCIAL VIEW OF CHILD WELFARE After slavery ended, Black communities had to look to their own internal resources to meet children’s needs. Black children in the early 1900s were more likely to be labeled “delinquent” and sent to prison than to be admitted to the asylums and orphanages estab- lished by whites for destitute children.6 Just as Black children were ignored by white charities, Black women were barred from member- ship in the emerging movement for women’s emancipation led by up- per-class white women.7 In 1895, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, presi- dent of the Women’s Era Club, boldly responded to this exclusion in her opening address to one hundred delegates from ten states who 5. On Black club women’s organizing at the turn of the twentieth century, see gener- ally PAULA GIDDINGS, WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER: THE IMPACT OF BLACK WOMEN ON RACE AND SEX IN AMERICA (1984); DARLENE CLARK HINE, HINE SIGHT: BLACK WOMEN AND THE RE-CONSTRUCTION OF AMERICAN HISTORY (1994); and DOROTHY SALEM, TO BETTER OUR WORLD: BLACK WOMEN IN ORGANIZED REFORM, 1890-1920 (1990). 6. BILLINGSLEY & GIOVANNONI, supra note 4, at 80 (“[A] major child-caring institu- tion for Black and other nonwhite children was the prison.”). 7. See GORDON, supra note 3, at 111-43 (1994). 2005] BLACK CLUB WOMEN 959 attended the first national conference of Black women, held in Bos- ton: “Year after year, Southern [white] women have protested against the admission of colored women into any organization on the ground of the immorality of our women and because our reputation has only been tried by individual work, the charge has never been crushed.”8 She then admonished the audience to join together to “teach an ignorant suspicious world that our aims and interests are identical with those of all aspiring women.”9 Ruffin was referring to the multifaceted campaign, occurring in the decades after Emancipation, led by Black women to improve the status of Black families.10 The women’s clubs and church groups es- sentially established a separate child welfare system for their race. Their activities were focused primarily on creating institutions and programs that rendered assistance to mothers and children in local Black communities, and they held a philosophy about child welfare that radically contested the mainstream views of their time. Black women believed that resisting racial injustice, advancing the race, and reforming society entailed properly educating and caring for the next generation. They emphasized preventive social work that im- proved mothers’ skills and children’s opportunities, an emphasis which was in stark contrast to the white-dominated child welfare system’s reliance on punishing mothers and removing children from their homes—a focus that guides child welfare practice to this day. Black club women recognized the uniqueness of their movement, which derived from their own experiences and not from the precepts of either Black men or white women. In a paragraph headed “Women Deserve the Praise,” Fannie Barrier Williams, an outspoken Chicago writer and reformer, celebrated the exceptional contribution of Black 8. BEVERLY WASHINGTON JONES, QUEST FOR EQUALITY: THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MARY ELIZA CHURCH TERRELL, 1863-1954, at 19 (Darlene Clark Hine et al. eds., 1990) (al- teration in original). Black club women held white women accountable not only for their exclusionary practices but also for raising racist children. Mary Church Terrell, president of the National Association of Colored Women, called upon white women to “train their children to be broad and just enough to judge men and women
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