Centering Northern Black Women in the Civil Rights Narrative
This post is part of our online roundtable on Hettie V. Williams’s The Georgia of the North.
As the body of historical scholarship on Black women across the Americas grows, the broad collection of scholars working in the intersectional field of Black women’s studies continue to show us that there is still much work to do. Hettie V. Williams’s The Georgia of the North: Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey demonstrates this in its poignant and impressive discussion of Black women intellectuals in New Jersey during the interwar years. Williams’s book is a thoughtful and nuanced collection of vignettes organized to illustrate the centrality of New Jersey in the development of the long civil rights movement, and the key roles Black women played in the progress of the movement in the state and nationally. Drawing on a sweeping array of sources–from personal letters and church records to newspaper articles, government documents, photographs, and oral history interviews–Williams outlines several important links between the Great Migration, the politics of the interwar period, and the expansion of a Black professional class in the northeastern United States.
Throughout the book, Williams advances several important interventions. First, she disrupts the traditional framing of the civil rights movement that places the southern states at the center of its intellectual and political conceptualization and development. Williams also expands the conventional timeline of civil rights histories through a focus on the interwar years—during which the Great Migration shifted the political philosophies and activist strategies of many African Americans. As she notes, her work “supports the emerging view that northern states led the way in the struggle for national Black equality in a long movement that extends beyond the traditional timeline” (3). Complementing this approach, Williams suggests that readers may only gain a full understanding of the broader Black freedom struggle of the 20th century through a more critical analysis of the activist and intellectual traditions developed in New Jersey during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.
Most importantly, she demonstrates that Black women’s intellectual contributions in New Jersey are instructive for understanding the contours that shaped local and national civil rights activism. Added to this, Williams argues for a more expansive definition of the term intellectual by emphasizing communities of Black women working in tandem to achieve sociopolitical and economic freedom.
In this sense, Williams rightly points out that many of the notable figures discussed in the book emerged out of Black women’s communities and, in turn, influenced local and national politics as they worked to grapple with intersectional oppression. Of particular interest here is Williams’s intentional inclusion of working-class women in this larger discussion, which gives much needed depth to broader studies about Black women intellectuals in the long civil rights movement.
The Georgia of the North is organized into six concise chapters. The first two offer historical context—demonstrating that New Jersey was one of the most common settling places for southern Black migrants and that it offered many African Americans opportunities for socioeconomic and political growth in each phase of the Great Migration. Most distinctive about these chapters is that they serve Williams well in her effort to outline the continuity of Black liberation efforts from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth. Careful not to make overly generalized assertions about the long Black freedom movement she explores, Williams frequently calls the reader’s attention to the nineteenth century traditions, institutions, and communities established in New Jersey that laid an apt foundation for African Americans resisting racism in the subsequent century. Central in these first two chapters is a focus on some of the major Black religious institutions, from which many African American women’s political strategies and intellectual practices emerged. Williams also uses her discussion of Black religious and spiritual organizations to underscore her assertion that Black women intellectuals represent a broad range of sociopolitical actors. More than this, the first two chapters give readers a sense of where the lives and work of Black professionals often converged with those of the Black working class. Notable in these foundational chapters is Williams’s suggestion that the Black professional class became more secular in its focus as the interwar years unfolded.
Chapters three through six of The Georgia of the North offer vivid accounts of the book’s central historical figures and bolsters Williams’s assertion about “Black women’s intersectional approach to empowerment” (60). In each chapter, she works to position women like Marion Thompson Wright, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, and Florence Spearing Randolph within a broader context of Black women’s organizations, institutions, and initiatives. Chapter three does much of this work in its exploration of Montclair New Jersey’s Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). Here, Williams notes that Black women’s leadership of the Montclair YWCA offers vital perspectives into their strategies for navigating local civil rights campaigns while also engaging larger national questions. She builds on this in the subsequent chapters, which cement her assertion that local organizations like the Montclair YWCA often served as auxiliaries to national women’s networks such as the National Association for Colored Women (NACW), the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Clubs (NANBPWC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Central in the development of this book, however, is the contention that Black women’s experiences with intersectional oppression during the interwar years categorically shaped their intellectual growth and their activism within the civil rights movement.
Williams’s discussion of scholar and educator Marion Thompson Wright is particularly instructive. Her final chapter utilizes Wright’s difficult public and professional journey as a microcosm for understanding the experiences of Black women in the professional class more broadly. Williams suggests that the challenges Wright faced in pursuit of her own education (and indeed the emotional toll she incurred in doing so) were the very underpinning of her life’s work to advance the professional study of Black life and undermine school segregation in New Jersey. Likewise, Williams does an excellent job of highlighting the delicate socioeconomic balance women like Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Sarah Spencer Washington struck as they fought for educational, economic, and political equality in New Jersey and nationwide.
The Georgia of the North is a strong call to deepen our understanding of African American history through a more intentional focus on women. As Williams points out, “Many of the women discussed in this analysis have not been sufficiently studied despite the countless scholarly works on women and the Black Freedom struggle more generally” (141).
One of the book’s many strengths is that it offers readers a nuanced perspective on the multilayered approaches taken by Black American activists and intellectuals throughout the twentieth century. Williams achieves this by focusing on the intersectional challenges faced by African American women and the ways in which those challenges were echoed in the resistance strategies of the larger national movement for equality. Another strength of the monograph is its challenge to the idea of a racially progressive northern United States. Through her analysis of New Jersey’s contradictory racial policies—and most certainly its divergent practices with respect to African Americans living in different parts of the state—Williams demonstrates precisely why civil rights activism in northern states must be studied more closely.
The driving thrust of this work is its insistence that Black women’s lived experiences as intellectuals, activists, community organizers, and New Jersey residents informed the direction and progress of the larger civil rights movement. The Georgia of the North is an important addition to the fields of U.S. history, New Jersey History, African American History, Black Intellectual History, and Black Women’s History. No doubt, this short volume paves the way for academic studies that give full attention to Black women alongside their male contemporaries.
Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.