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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2025
The historiography of African American education has stressed the work of education professionals, tensions over curricula, and the desegregation of schools. Informal learning settings, while recognized as important educative spaces, have remained tangential to the broader narrative of the struggle for education. Thus, the influence of Black civic voluntary organizations is largely underexplored. In this essay I posit that instead of being on the margins, Black associations supplemented, guided, supported, and funded the education of African Americans through overlapping organizational networks that comprised autonomous counterpublic spaces. In these spaces, a wide variety of voluntary groups worked collaboratively to improve local public schools, to develop curricula centered on Black culture, and to provide educational opportunities for youth and adults. Recognizing that the history of African American education cannot be fully told without investigating informal spaces, this essay offers a roadmap for the investigation of Black civic voluntary organizations.
1 William M. Nelson, as quoted in Charles H. Brooks, The Official History and Manual of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in America (Philadelphia: Odd Fellows’ Journal Print, 1902), 228. The (White) Independent Order of Odd Fellows, founded in 1810, was so named because it was composed of men who could not join the Masons and other craftsmen’s guilds. Thus, they were “odd fellows.” See Daniel Weinbren, The Oddfellows, 1810-2010: 200 Years of Making Friends and Helping People (Lancaster, UK: Carnegie Publishers, 2010).
2 Theda Skocpol, Ariane Liazos, and Marshall Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 35. The first (Black) Grand United Order of Odd Fellows was founded in 1843 after being sponsored by a lodge in Liverpool, UK. Brooks, Official History and Manual of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in America, 13-14.
3 Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, revised and expanded edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 2022), xxi. Kelley’s observation, while made about radical African American groups, holds true for Black civic organizations more broadly. Putnam posits that during the Gilded Age, the “most prominent example of organizational proliferation … were fraternal groups” that were typically segregated by race and gender. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 388. Skocpol, Liazos, and Ganz point out that the Black fraternal societies were gender-integrated in What a Mighty Power We Can Be, 73.
4 See, for example, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “Hidden in Plain Sight: African American Secret Societies and Black Freemasonry,” Journal of African American Studies 16 (March 2011), 622-37, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). In this article I use civic voluntary associations as the term is defined by Skocpol, Liazos, and Ganz—“nonprofit, non-governmental associations enrolling individuals on a voluntary basis”—and my focus is on large-scale federated groups because of their national reach and the availability of documentary evidence. Following the authors’ lead, I do not include churches and political parties, as they are well studied in the literature. What a Mighty Power We Can Be, 22.
5 Dunbar, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” 624.
6 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 497. In learning the “theory of association,” members of these organizations were learning how to be citizens in a democracy through their participation.
7 Booker T. Washington, The Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery, vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1909), 169.
8 Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Biography of a Nation of Joiners,” American Historical Review 50, no. 1 (Oct. 1944), 24. Schlesinger’s idea is extended in Skocpol, Liazos, and Ganz, who call Black fraternal groups “schools for democracy.” What a Mighty Power We Can Be, 61.
9 Lawrence A. Cremin in American Education, vol. 2, The National Experience, 1783-1876 (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 483.
10 V. P. Franklin, “In Pursuit of Freedom: The Educational Activities of Black Social Organizations in Philadelphia, 1900-1930,” in New Perspectives on Black Educational History, ed. V. P. Franklin and James D. Anderson (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co, 1978), 113-28, 114. See also V. P. Franklin, The Education of Black Philadelphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900-1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979).
11 Dionne Danns, Michelle A. Purdy, and Christopher M. Span, Using Past as Prologue: Contemporary Perspectives on African American Educational History (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2015), 9 and Dionne Danns and Michelle A. Purdy, “Historical Perspectives on African American Education, Civil Rights, and Black Power,” Journal of African American History 100, no. 4 (2015), 574.
12 Christine Woyshner, The National PTA, Race, and Civic Engagement, 1897-1970 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009).
13 Vanessa Siddle Walker, The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools (New York: The New Press, 2018), 3.
14 Michael Hines, A Worthy Piece of Work: The Untold Story of Madeline Morgan and the Fight for Black History in Schools (Boston: Beacon Press, 2022), xvii.
15 Christine Woyshner, “Black Civic Organizations and the Quest for Education: The Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, 1898-1954,” Journal of African American History 108, no. 3 (Fall 2023), 576-99.
16 As quoted in Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: The Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 59.
17 Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 54-55.
18 Imani Perry, May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 6. See also W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903), and Communities “Behind the Veil” (podcast), American Public Media, http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/remembering/veil.html.
19 Black Public Sphere Collective, ed., The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1, 8.
20 John L. Brooke, “On the Edges of the Public Sphere,” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (Jan. 2005), 93-98; Joanna Brooks, “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic,” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (Jan. 2005), 73. See also Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), and Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text no. 25/26 (1990), 56-80. I have put White in parentheses because at the time of Fraser’s writing, she used the term women, but she was writing about White, middle-class women as a default category.
21 Matthew W. Hughey and Gregory S. Parks, “Black Fraternal Organizations: Systems, Secrecy, and Solace,” Journal of African American Studies 16, no. 4 (2012), 595-603; 597.
22 Nina Mjagkij, Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations (New York: Garland Press, 2001), vii.
23 Mjagkij, Organizing Black America. By “local,” I mean that they were not connected to a state or national office. Mjagkij includes approximately 630 organizations in her Encyclopedia, although some were international associations.
24 W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans: Report of a Social Study Made by Atlanta University under the Patronage of the Trustees of the John F. Slater Fund, Together with the Proceedings of the 14th Conference for the Study of Negro Problems (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1909), 35-36.
25 For example, Monroe N. Work, Negro Year Book: An Annual Encyclopedia of the Negro, 1931-1932 (Tuskegee, AL: Negro Year Book Publishing Co., 1931). See also Linda O. McMurry, Recorder of the Black Experience: A Biography of Monroe Nathan Work (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984).
26 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), 810-54.
27 Matthew W. Hughey and Gregory S. Parks, eds., Black Greek-Letter Organizations 2.0: New Directions in the Study of African American Fraternities and Sororities (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 599.
28 For example, Hughey and Parks, Black Greek-Letter Organizations 2.0, and Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).
29 On the pageantry in fraternal societies, see Carter G. Woodson, “Insurance Business among Negroes,” Journal of Negro History 14, no. 2 (April 1929), 202-26; Joe W. Trotter, “African American Fraternal Associations in American History: An Introduction,” Social Science History 28, no. 3 (Fall 2004), 355-66; Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
30 T. J. Woofter, “The Negroes of Athens, Georgia,” Bulletin of the University of Georgia 14, no. 4 (Dec. 1913), 35.
31 Howard W. Odum, “Social and Mental Traits of the Negro” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1910), 99.
32 Scholars interested in learning more about Black fraternals and their women’s auxiliaries should begin by reading Skocpol, Liazos, and Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be, and Mjagkij, Organizing Black America.
33 Walker, Lost Education of Horace Tate, 127, 162.
34 Skocpol, Liazos, and Ganz, What A Mighty Power We Can Be, 14.
35 The official publication of the IBPOEW, the Washington Eagle, available at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, is a treasure trove that documents the leaders and activities of the organization, as well as its extensive efforts in education.
36 Charles H. Wesley, History of the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, 1898-1954 (Washington, DC: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1955); Charles E. Dickerson, “The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World: A Comparative Study of Euro-American and Afro-American Secret Societies” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1981); Woyshner, “Black Civic Organizations and the Quest for Education”; Daughters of the Improved, Benevolent, Protective Order of Elks of the World, Golden Jubilee Souvenir Year Book (Norfolk, VA: Golden Jubilee Celebration Committee, 1952), 7.
37 Elsa Barkley Brown, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke,” Signs 14, no. 3 (Spring 1989), 610-33.
38 Gertrude Woodruff Marlowe, A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the Quest for Black Empowerment (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 2003). Such an expansion is the equivalent of growing from $145,000 to $9 million today.
39 Marybeth Gasman, Patricia Louison, and Mark Barnes, “Giving and Getting: Philanthropic Activity among Black Greek-Letter Organizations,” in Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Gregory S. Parks (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 187-209.
40 Tamara L. Brown, Gregory S. Parks, and Clarenda M. Phillips, eds., African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005).
41 Gasman, Louison, Barnes, “Giving and Getting.”
42 Brown, Parks, and Phillips, “Introduction: Black Greek-Letter Organizations Scholarship,” in African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacies and the Vision, 2nd ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 1-8; Walter M. Kimbrough, Black Greek 101: The Culture, Customs, and Challenges of Black Fraternities and Sororities (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003); Ricky Jones, Black Haze: Violence and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004).
43 Whaley, Disciplining Women, and Hughey and Parks, Black Greek-Letter Organizations 2.0. See also, Marybeth Gasman, “Sisters in Service,” Women and Philanthropy in Education, ed., Andrea Walton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 194-214; and Paula Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement (New York: Morrow, 1988).
44 See the list of suggested areas to research in Brown, Parks, and Phillips, introduction to African American Fraternities and Sororities, 1-8; and see Maurice J. Hobson et al., With Faith in God and Heart and Mind: A History of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024).
45 Skocpol, Liazos, and Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be, 79. See also Mrs. S. Joe Brown, History of the Order of the Eastern Star among Colored People (Des Moines, IA: Bystander Press, 1925).
46 For example, see Christine Woyshner, “Civic Education in Informal Settings: Black Voluntary Associations as Schools for Democracy, 1898-1959,” Theory and Research in Social Education (Fall 2023), 458-79.
47 Gerda Lerner, “Early Community Work of Black Club Women,” Journal of Negro History 59, no. 2 (April 1974), 158-67; 158.
48 For example, Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992; Gerda Lerner, “Early Community Work of Black Club Women”; Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890-1930 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); and Anne Meis Knupfer, The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
49 Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation,” in The World’s Congress of Representative Women, vol. 2, ed. May Wright Sewall (Chicago and New York: Rand, McNally and Co., 1894), 696.
50 Lily H. Hammond, In Black and White: An Interpretation of Southern Life (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1914), 80.
51 Anne Firor Scott, “Most Invisible of All: Black Women’s Voluntary Associations,” Journal of Southern History 56, no. 1 (Feb. 1990), 17.
52 Lindsey Elizabeth Jones, “‘The Most Unprotected of All Human Beings’: Black Girls, State Violence, and the Limits of Protection in Jim Crow Virginia,” Souls 20, no. 1 (2018), 15. See also Scott, “Most Invisible of All,” 3-22.
53 Richard M. Breaux, “‘Maintaining a Home for Girls’: The Iowa Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs at the University of Iowa, 1919-1950,” Journal of African American History (Spring 2002), 236-55.
54 Tondra L. Loder-Jackson, Schoolhouse Activists: African American Educators and the Long Birmingham Civil Rights Movement (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 28-29.
55 Skocpol, Liazos, and Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be, 79. See also Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, “Self-Help Programs as Educative Activities of Black Women in the South, 1895-1925: Focus on Four Key Areas,” Journal of Negro Education 51, no. 3 (Summer 1982), 207-21, and Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” in Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950, ed. Charles M. Payne and Adam Green (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 68-110. I would add that the juvenile departments of any number of organizations—the Black PTA, the NAACP, women’s auxiliaries—operated as sites of teaching and learning in Black communities. These groups are vastly understudied in the history of education scholarship.
56 Andrea Y. Simpson, “Going It Alone: Black Women Activists and Black Organizational Quiescence,” in African American Perspectives on Political Science, ed. Wilbur C. Rich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 155. See also Kijua Sanders-McMurtry and Nia Woods Haydel, “Linking Friendship and Service: Education and Philanthropy among the Black Elite, 1946-1960,” in The Educational Work of Women’s Organizations, 1890-1960, ed. Anne Meis Knupfer and Christine Woyshner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 179-92.
57 Sharon Harley, “Beyond the Classroom: The Organizational Lives of Black Female Educators in the District of Columbia, 1890-1930,” Journal of Negro Education 51, no. 3 (Summer 1982), 254-65.
58 Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
59 See, for example, Rebecca Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
60 Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and Do, 137; Thelma D. Perry, History of the American Teachers Association (Washington, DC: National Education Association, 1975); Carol F. Karpinski, “A Visible Company of Professionals”: African Americans and the National Education Association during the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2008). See also Wayne J. Urban, Gender, Race, and the National Education Association: Professionalism and Its Limitations (New York: Routledge, 2000), and Walker, Lost Education of Horace Tate.
61 Woyshner, The National PTA, Race, and Civic Engagement.
62 Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy, 17.
63 Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy, 63. Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, The Early Black History Movement, Carter G. Woodson, and Lorenzo Johnston Greene (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Jacqueline Goggin, Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993).
64 Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy, 183. Because of space limitations, it is not possible to explore Black associationalism as expressed through the journals of educational and other associations. These publications allowed for discussions of discrimination, efforts toward equality, and race pride and history. Historians interested in pursuing these spaces could begin with the Black Teacher Archive at Harvard Graduate School of Education: https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/black-teacher-archive.
65 Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Walker, The Education of Horace Tate; Woyshner, The National PTA, Race, and Civic Engagement.
66 It should be noted that although the NAACP and other civil rights organizations had mixed-race memberships, they are generally considered African American organizations. See Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Daniel Perlstein, “Minds Stayed on Freedom: Politics and Pedagogy in the African American Freedom Struggle,” in Black Protest Thought and Education, ed. William H. Watkins (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 33-66; Charles E. Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get you Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014); August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Arbor House, 1985); and Faith S. Holsaert et al., Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
67 Jon N. Hale, The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
68 Zoë Burkholder, An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 86. See also Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: The New Press, 2009); Langston Hughes, Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP (New York: Norton, 1962); and Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). On the history of the NAACP, see Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967).
69 V. P. Franklin, The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021); Walker, Lost Education of Horace Tate; Vincent D. Willis, Audacious Agitation: The Uncompromising Commitment of Black Youth to Equal Education after Brown (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021); Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). See also James Collins, “Taking the Lead: Dorothy Williams, NAACP Youth Councils, and Civil Rights Protests in Pittsburgh, 1961-1964,” Journal of African American History 88, no. 2 (Spring 2003), 126-37; Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against Segregated Education; and Sullivan, Lift Every Voice.
70 Touré F. Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 15.
71 Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 837-38.
72 Lawrence E. Nicholson, “The Urban League and the Vocational Guidance and Adjustment of Negro Youth,” Journal of Negro Education 21, no. 4 (Fall 1952), 452.
73 Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity, 35.
74 Burkholder, An African American Dilemma, 6.
75 Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 4.
76 Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 821-22.
77 Southern Regional Office, General Office File, 1919-1979, National Urban League Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
78 Peniel E. Joseph, “Historians and the Black Power Movement,” OAH Magazine of History 22, no. 3 (July 2008), 8. See also V. P. Franklin, “New Black Power Studies: National, International, and Transnational Perspectives,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 4 (Fall 2007), 463-66.
79 Joseph, “Historians and the Black Power Movement,” 9.
80 Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 118, 125-26.
81 Joy Ann Williamson, “Community Control with a Black Nationalist Twist: The Black Panther Party’s Educational Programs,” Counterpoints 237 (2005), 138.
82 “October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program,” as cited in Williamson, “Community Control with a Black Nationalist Twist,” 141.
83 Burkholder, An African American Dilemma, 66.
84 Williamson, “Community Control,” and Joy Ann Williamson, Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
85 Russell Rickford, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 4. On the educational efforts of civil rights and Black power organizations, see also Charles M. Payne and Carol Sills Strickland, Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African-American Tradition (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008).
86 Hahn, Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, 149, 151.
87 See Jon N. Hale, A New Kind of Youth: Historically Black High Schools and Southern Student Activism, 1920-1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022).
88 Dunbar, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” 622.