organizations, as well as the activists within the Abolitionist Movement, were important to this development, the defining elements were a series of decisions made by the US government after 1865. Rather than ascribe racial politics to a deterministic process, one in which a particular event or material condition is primarily responsible for the perpetuation of racial inequality, it is better to be more realistic and think of the many different things that would have contributed to the rise of a new Southern White authority after the War.
Already at the War’s end, Black codes were used to maintain the legal subordination of Black people in the South, and the organization of the Ku Klux Klan and other militia groups threatened violence toward anyone with public aspirations toward more equal social relationships. Lynching began to occur as an institutional outgrowth of these processes of consolidating Whiteness around violent suppression of the idea of equality. The Freedmen’s Bureau and Union Army were also important factors in this description of what was possible. But, also, Black people migrated west and north, and had fought and provided care for the Union Army, promoting in their activism the potential for a longer journey to live elsewhere in the country. The effects of the War on the population and the land were obvious. Millions can’t be killed, slave labor replaced wholesale with wage labor, and the countryside burned, without there being difficulties with maintaining economic processes that could sustain stable living conditions for most in the South. The North was also deeply affected.
In this context, how effective would local initiatives have been, if they had existed, in addressing the idea of racial social equality after the War? How effective are the ideas of implicit bias and diversity training today, without a better understanding than we have of how race difference is described within institutions, in our lives? This is not to ignore the political and social consequences of the failure in the period after the War to unite White and Black women in the cause of racial equality, but it would be almost 60 years after the War when White women could first vote in large numbers in the US, and almost a century after the War before Black women could similarly vote.
It was not a failure of will or factionalism between women and Black people that resulted in these partial and imperfect democratic political processes in the US after the Civil War. We shouldn’t blame the victims of the processes of racial and gender inequality for inaction and ineffectiveness, but instead look to the problem of the successful reconsolidation of authority in supporting the ideas of racial and gender hierarchy. By the 1880s, the possibility of Black men voting was likewise fading in practice, as a racial and gendered politics of inequality became a description of social relations throughout the South and North.
Frances Harper in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s
From the time of the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, Frances Harper was involved in the Association for the Advancement of Women, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Universal Peace Union, the American Women Suffrage Association, the International Council of Women, the National Council of Women, and the Women’s Congress. She was also a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) (Gordon, 1997, p. 49; Parker, 2010, pp. 128–38; Terborg-Penn, 1998, pp. 47, 85). With the exception of the NACW, the other associations were dominated and almost exclusively controlled by White women, and Frances Harper was usually the only Black woman in a position of leadership (Jones, 2007, p. 171; Painter, 1996, p. 231; Parker, 2010, p. 137).
Bettye Collier-Thomas points out that the only other African American leader in the nineteenth century, besides Frances Harper, who was able to work extensively with White Americans within a major national organization, was Frederick Douglass, in his work with William Lloyd Garrison in the American Anti-Slavery Society prior to the Civil War (Gordon, 1997, p. 56; Jones, 2007, p. 198) After the War, Frances Harper was the main Black national organizational figure within the Suffragist and Temperance movements. She was able to define a personal social equality with the major White women figures of her day, in terms of participation, presentations, and organizational skills. She was one of the most successful essayists, poets, and novelists of her generation, and the White women had to respect both her acumen and her public presence, if not her person. But her participation also required that White women had to address the issue of racial equality within these women’s organizations and conferences (Parker, 2010, p. 128; Terborg-Penn, 1998, p. 109). From 1883 to 1900, Frances Harper was in the executive leadership of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (Gordon, 1997, p. 57; Jones, 2007, p. 201), which was the most powerful and far-reaching women’s organization in the country (Tetrault, 2014, p. 87). By the 1890s, it had become more apparent to African American women that these national associations and organizations led predominantly by White women were not effective vehicles for advocating for the rights of African Americans. This is not to ignore the very significant work that Frances Harper achieved by working within these organizations, but she was fighting a losing battle because of the deterioration in the rights of Blacks in what is rightly called the nadir of the free African American experience in this country (Bruce, 1989, p. 3; Collier-Thomas, 1997, pp. 49–65, 86; Parker, 2010, pp. 133–8; Terborg-Penn, 1998).
Lynchings had become an almost daily occurrence throughout the US by the 1890s, and Blacks had no rights that Whites needed to respect. A lynching should be thought of as an extra-legal killing to establish a local description of racial authority. It is a consolidation of the idea of Whiteness as the possibility of a violence that is exceptional and necessary to preserve or secure advantages over the possibility of there being rights held by others, against the claims of those who were defined as White. According to Harper, that the local state governments had gradually capitulated to this authority, and were unable to successfully resist the usurpation of their institutional processes by this idea of racial difference after the potential was created for more expansive democratic reforms by the effects of the War, is the great national tragedy (Foster, 1990, pp. 217–19).
This collective acceptance of violence as required against those who sought to define Black equality was different from the authority that had defined the violence of enslavement. The codes and laws of Jim Crow that established legal punishments to enforce Black inequality were not slavery by another name. These laws were enacted on a free people, for a generation born after 1865 that had never known slavery as a condition. It is important to call the terrible conditions that lynching and Jim Crow laws created for Black people by their name, rather than reduce the struggle for equality that occurred to that which had ended two decades before. It was impossible to impose slavery again on Black people after the Civil War. This fact continues to be important as a description of racial politics, and the idea of racial inequality after Emancipation should not be reduced to a claim about slavery. Rather, what happened – and Frances Harper was at the forefront of this fight in the 1880s until her death – was that Black inequality was defined through the use of punitive and comprehensive social controls. Even if for a time Black men did vote, run for office, and establish businesses that catered to both Black and White customers, by the end of the century the political rights promised by the Amendments were gradually made largely symbolic.
In this political situation, the new generation of Black women leaders, and increasingly Frances Harper as well, did not see the utility of working within these larger White associations, instead forming their own organizations such as the NACW (Parker, 2010, p. 130; Terborg-Penn, 1998, p. 79). By the 1890s, Frances Harper had to contend with a new politics within the Black community. This new position argued that accumulating wealth while accepting the terms given by the continuing racial segregation, codified for example in Plessy v. Ferguson, would lead to a form of social equality in the absence of political equality. Harper’s poetry and essays from the last two decades of her life reflect her criticism of these narrow aims for Black community development (Gordon, 1997, p. 60; Parker, 2010, pp. 133–4).
We come now to an understanding of the reason for the historical erasure of Frances Harper from her place, as one of its most important citizens, in the annals of American society. The need to minimize the importance of Black women in the major women’s rights organizations, starting from the 1880s, led to the removal or marginalization of the record of the contributions of Frances Harper from organizational history
