This session focuses on how women in North Carolina contributed to the realm of politics and broader social reform throughout the state. Such reforms and actions take a wide variety of formats and reflect the broad impact of women on North Carolina society.

Women on a Mission: The WABPS

--by Tom Belton

The Woman’s Association for the Betterment of Public Schoolhouses (WABPS) was one of those organizations. Educational reforms and the construction of new school buildings had already been made a priority under the leadership of Charles Brantley Aycock, who served as governor from 1901 to 1905. WABPS members worked to provide new schools with a physical environment that would support and assist learning.

Improving the formal learning environment
 

The WABPS's mission statement, recorded in a 1908 pamphlet produced by the Office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. Click on the image to view more pages from the pamphlet.

The WABPS was established by students from the State Normal and Industrial School for Women (formerly for "Girls" and now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro). These students had been inspired by a speech they heard on March 20, 1902. In that speech, Charles D. McIver, the founder and first president of the Greensboro normal school, challenged his students to work to improve their communities. Membership in the organization soon became open to nonstudents. Six months after McIver’s speech, student volunteers had recruited more than two thousand members, and within four years, seventy of North Carolina’s ninety-seven counties had local chapters. Work in the improvement of schoolhouse environments and education was considered a "natural" role for women of this time. "Their place" was traditionally to maintain homes and serve as models of piety and as counselors to children. The WABPS, however, had several radical features that were unusual for the time.

First of all, the WABPS was completely controlled by women. While men could join and were expected to do the physical work needed to improve schools, they could not vote or exercise any control in the group. In addition, men had to pay membership dues to join, while women were not required to do so. The money paid by the men who joined local groups in fact supported many of the school improvements carried out by local groups, although these groups also hosted events such as plays and dinners to raise money.

Changing roles and directions for women

Men and women had no problem working together, though, to improve the state’s public schools. Men constructed privies, landscaped grounds, painted buildings, carried away trash and debris, and built play areas. Women hung maps and pictures, painted walls, organized displays, installed window shades, and worked to improve the health of children. The goal was to insure that schoolhouses were an attractive part of the neighborhood and community.

Once the school buildings were improved, the group trusted that the local citizens would continue to support schoolhouse improvements and education in general through votes for larger tax appropriations. Although women could not yet vote in elections, their influence and the influence of the WABPS were evident in communities that did approve increased taxes to improve education.

An unexpected benefit of the WABPS was that it presented an opportunity for women to assume leadership roles and gain both speaking and organizational skills unavailable to them through most organizations, which were controlled by men. Their experience would give them confidence to speak out publicly for other needed reforms and to work collectively in the future.

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Nineteenth Amendment in North Carolina
--by Beth Crist

Margaret Richardson may have been the first North Carolinian to publicly demonstrate an interest in woman’s suffrage when she attended a National Suffrage Association convention in Washington, D.C., in 1884. The movement in the state began in 1894 when Helen Morris Lewis organized the North Carolina Equal Suffrage Association. In 1897 Senator J. L. Hyatt, a Yancey County Republican, introduced a woman’s suffrage bill in the General Assembly. The all-male legislature, in a response indicative of public sentiment, referred the bill to the Committee of Insane Asylums, where it died.
 

Woman suffrage poster

After this early defeat, the woman’s suffrage movement in the state saw little activity until 1913, when the Equal Suffrage League of North Carolina first met. This time the movement was well publicized and better organized. By the end of 1914, sixteen league chapters, which counted men among their members, had formed in towns around the state. The league used low-key tactics such as letter-writing campaigns, brochures, and petitions. Suffragists from the State Normal and Industrial College in Greensboro, on the other hand, staged public protests including parades and speeches. Louise Brevard Alexander, an outspoken suffragist at the college, urged women to “Raise fewer dahlias and a lot more hell. The place is here. The time is now. The opportunity is yours. It is not the time for women to be alone. They must work together.” Despite their enthusiasm and activism, suffragists in North Carolina realized that across-the-board woman’s suffrage was still out of reach. Instead, they lobbied for a bill allowing women to vote in municipal and presidential elections. But in 1917 the General Assembly rejected their bid.

Despite their enthusiasm and activism, suffragists in North Carolina realized that across-the-board woman’s suffrage was still out of reach. Instead, they lobbied for a bill allowing women to vote in municipal and presidential elections. But in 1917 the General Assembly rejected their bid.

Woman’s suffrage gained strength in the state and nation immediately following World War I. Women had earned respect because they had assumed roles traditionally reserved for men during the war. These new responsibilities gave many women the confidence to fight for their rights, and membership in suffrage leagues grew as a result.

North Carolina suffragists, ca. 1920, led by Gertrude Weil (far left).
 
 
 
 
 
 

When Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote, suffragists in North Carolina rallied for their cause. With slogans such as “Think ratification, talk ratification, work for ratification, make North Carolina the perfect thirty-six,” they lobbied the state legislature. Antisuffragists, however, were beginning to lobby as well. They set up headquarters just a few doors down from the Suffrage League in Raleigh and proclaimed, “Politics are bad for women and women are bad for politics.”

The legislature called a special session, set to convene on August 13, 1920, to vote on the Nineteenth Amendment. The Tennessee legislature had also called for a vote. On August 11, in a clear indication of their position, 63 of the 120 members of the House of Representatives sent a petition to their counterparts in Tennessee urging them to reject the amendment.

For four days a joint session of the house and state debated the amendment before a gallery packed with suffragists (wearing white flowers) and antisuffragists (wearing pink flowers). On August 17 the senate voted, twenty-five to twenty-three, to postpone the vote until the regular legislative session the following year. “It was quite a sensation to be a young southern woman just slapped in the face by her state,” commented Nell Battle Lewis, reporter for The News and Observer in Raleigh. The next day, Tennessee became the final state needed to ratify the amendment. In a meaningless gesture, the North Carolina General Assembly finally ratified the amendment in 1971.

For more information on women’s suffrage in North Carolina, go to http://metalab.unc.edu/uncpress/ncbooks/suffrage/index.html.

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Ella May Wiggins, Labor Activist
--by Beth Crist

In her short twenty-nine-year life, Ella May Wiggins, a native of Sevierville, Tennessee, became a symbol of hope, activism, and the labor cause. Born September 17, 1900, she grew up in a poor family, always moving between logging camps. Her mother died when she was eighteen; her father, the following year. She married John Wiggins soon after and had a baby within a year. Her husband suggested they move to a town with a textile mill so that they would have a regular income. Their move to Cowpens, South Carolina, marked the beginning of Wiggins’s difficult mill career and her first knowledge of the need for workplace reform.

The Wiggins family soon moved to another mill town, where Ella May Wiggins had seven more children, four of whom died in early childhood. During pregnancies, she continued to work in a textile mill, often on twelve-hour shifts. Around 1926 the family moved to Gaston County, North Carolina, when John Wiggins abandoned them. She rented a shack in an African American neighborhood outside Bessemer City known as Stumptown, where her neighbors looked after her children as she worked as a spinner at American Mill No. 2. She worked twelve-hour days, six days a week, earning about nine dollars a week.

It was during this time that Southern textile mill wages and working conditions were declining and worker dissatisfaction was increasing. In an effort to increase profits, mill managements throughout the region began increasing worker hours without raising wages, a practice known as a “stretch-out.” Aware of these conditions, the Communist-run National Textile Workers Union (NTWU) sent Fred E. Beal, a skilled union organizer, to Charlotte. He was able to organize a small union in the Loray mill in Gastonia. In April 1929 the Loray workers began a strike, prompting workers at five other nearby mills to walk off their jobs. Soon there were about a thousand striking workers. Violence began between the strikers and city police and the police chief was killed on June 7. Sixteen unionists were charged with the killing; six were later found guilty on conspiracy to murder.

Unions and Communism were closely linked during the late 1920s, and sentiments ran high against both throughout North Carolina. In addition, local government officials and mill owners were reluctant to give up any power to a union. Despite these odds and their inherent dangers, Ella May Wiggins was an ardent unionist who had a reputation for not backing down from a fight. She learned organizational and strike tactics, became a union bookkeeper, and traveled to Washington, D.C., to testify about labor practices in the South. Her own story made her most powerful testimony: “I’m the mother of nine. Four died with the whooping cough, all at once. I was working nights, I asked the super to put me on days, so’s I could tend ‘em when they had their bad spells. But he wouldn’t. I don’t know why.…So I had to quit, and then there wasn’t no money for medicine, and they just died.” After she spoke, she sang powerful ballads. Her best-known song, “A Mill Mother’s Lament,” was sung to the tune of a 1913 ballad:

We leave our homes in the morning
We kiss our children goodbye
While we slave for the bosses
Our children scream and cry…

But understand all, workers
Our union they do fear,
Let’s stand together, workers,
And have a union here.

Because of her association with the NTWU and with African Americans, Wiggins was in danger from those against her causes. Receiving threats and having the water in her spring poisoned, however, did not stop Wiggins’s activism. On September 14, 1929, she and other union members drove in a truck to Gastonia for a union meeting. As they arrived in town, an armed mob made them turn back. They had driven about five miles toward home when a car blocked their passage. Armed men jumped out and began shooting. Wiggins was shot in the chest and killed. Wiggins’s words about her strong convictions, “They’ll have to kill me to make me give up the union,” proved prophetic.

Five men were indicted for Wiggins’s murder but were acquitted after less than thirty minutes of deliberation in a trial in Charlotte in March 1930. The NTWU and North Carolina mill workers, however, made sure her death was not in vain. They hailed Wiggins as a martyr for the labor reform cause and began to pressure management even harder for better working conditions, with some eventual success: the work week was eventually reduced to fifty-five hours and work and mill village conditions were improved.

Go to http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/ref/nchistory/jun2004/ for more on Ella Mae Wiggins.

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Grand Lady—that’s what Ella Baker’s grandfather called her when she was a child. Years later Baker speculated that her grandfather had given her that nickname because she enjoyed conversing with adults. No doubt he would have been doubly proud that Baker gained fame as both a dynamic speaker and the “Grand Lady of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Ella Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on December 13, 1903, to Blake Baker and Anna Georgianna Ross Baker. Because of strong families ties in Littleton, North Carolina, the Baker family moved there in 1911 and became members of the town’s close-knit African American community. When she was fifteen years old, Baker left Littleton to finish high school at Shaw University, a strict Baptist school for African Americans in Raleigh. She stayed on and received her college degree in 1927. 

In addition to being well liked, Baker was a hard-working, excellent student who was class valedictorian in both high school and college. She hoped to become a medical missionary or a social worker, but lack of money prevented her from pursuing an advanced degree. One profession Baker was determined not to enter was teaching, which educated African American woman were expected to take up. To escape that fate, she moved to New York City soon after graduation.

Baker arrived in New York near the end of the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of African American literary, artistic, and musical culture in Harlem during the years after World War I. The Great Depression soon ended the prosperity and gaiety of the 1920s for both blacks and whites and signaled a period of social unrest. Baker entered a different world from the one she had grown up in, and she found herself immersed in politics and social activism.

In 1940 Baker went to work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization formed in 1909 to fight segregation and discrimination. A year later she became a field secretary for the NAACP and traveled extensively promoting the organization. A firm believer that things got accomplished best at the grass roots level, Baker worked to increase the organization’s membership substantially during World War II.

In 1943 as director of the NAACP’s branches, Baker supervised the field secretaries and coordinated the mission of the national office with the local branches. A tireless worker, she gradually came to believe that the NAACP lacked the vision needed to follow through with its charge. Consequently, she resigned her position in May 1946.

Baker’s departure, however, did not end her relationship with the civil rights organization. In 1952 she became director of the New York City branch of the NAACP. During her tenure she addressed many concerns but focused her attention on two crucial issues for New York City’s African American population: education and police brutality.

The concentration of ethnic groups within specific areas of the city resulted in segregated schools. Predominantly black schools typically received less money than white schools and were assigned less capable teachers. Baker organized rallies demanding school reform. She also led demonstrations protesting the New York City Police Department’s treatment of African Americans, who were frequent targets of brutality. But looming Civil Rights struggles in the South soon took Baker to Atlanta.

Baker went to Atlanta in 1957 to help found and organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). That fledgling organization hoped to build on the success of recent boycotts and demonstrations against racial segregation. Two years earlier NAACP member Rosa Parks had refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Her arrest spurred a successful boycott of the bus company, which ended segregated bus seating in Montgomery. This triumph was the catalyst for the Supreme Court decision declaring segregation on public buses unconstitutional. 

Appointed interim director, Baker led the SCLC as it assumed a major role in the Civil Rights movement. Then in 1960 a groundbreaking event galvanized thousands of African American college students into action and led Baker in another direction.

On February 1, 1960, four African American college students staged a sit-in at the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro to protest racial segregation. Within days student sit-ins were taking place all across the South. The immediate surge of demonstrations surprised Civil Rights leaders. Ella Baker, recognizing the potential of the student movement, secured $800 from the SCLC for a meeting of student leaders at Shaw University. That meeting gave birth to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). During the decade of its turbulent existence, the group played a significant role in the Civil Rights movement and provided the training ground for numerous future Civil Rights leaders.

Several books have been written about Baker. This most recent book was published by UNC Press in 2003.

For the rest of her life Baker remained active in the movement. She continued to take on new endeavors, such as prison and court reform. In 1980 a documentary film on Baker’s life titled Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker was released. Fundi is a Swahili word meaning “one who masters a craft with the help of the community and passes it on to others.”  Ella Baker died on her birthday in New York City on December 13, 1986. Scores of people attended her funeral to honor a leader in the fight for racial equality. Throughout her life Baker had proved herself to be, in her grandfather’s words, a “grand lady.”

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Food for thought... What methods have women employed to affect social reform? Which methods have been the most successful? Have women used methods different from those employed by men? Women have made significant inroads into politics in recent decades. Do they have more to accomplish? How can women increase their numbers in elected offices at all levels? Do you foresee a female president in the near future? A vice president? Has this session sparked other questions for you? Share your opinions on these or related issues by posting your points to ponder and responses on the Bulletin Board.

Assignment #4

Complete one of the following assignments:

Option 1:
Women's rights in America have progressed since the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. Have they come far enough, though? What do you think is the most pressing women's rights issue today in this country? How could social activism effectively be used to make progress on the issue? (Feel free to address this from an international standpoint, if it better fits the subject you teach. Focus on one country, or one issue across different parts of the world.) State your case on the workshop’s Bulletin Board.

Option 2: (Choose this option if you are seeking technology credits for this course.)
Test your on-line investigative skills by researching the following four items using only the Internet. After each answer, list the steps you took to find your response. (If any questions stump you, record and submit your search strategy.)

1. Find a Web site with a lesson plan, biography, article, or book advertisement about women (or a particular woman) in politics or social reform appropriate for your curriculum. What is its address?
2. Find and list three Million Mom March chapters in North Carolina.
3. The North Carolina Press Association named Elizabeth Dole North Carolinian of the Year in the same year that the Women Executives in State Government granted Dole its Lifetime Achievement Award. What was the year?
4. List several highlights of Gladys Tillett’s successes as a social activist and politician.

Option 3: (Choose this option if you are seeking reading credits for this course.)
Primary sources, like the letter and newspaper excerpts, song lyrics, pamphlet, and posters in this session, can be fascinating items that make history come alive and make reading engaging. Using women's history-related primary sources found in this workshop and/or elsewhere, develop a lesson plan that:

• teaches your students the difference between primary and secondary sources and
• demonstrates the personal feel of history that reading a diary entry, letter, oral history transcript, document, and/or period newspaper account can invoke

Have questions or comments about this session or assignment? Post them on the workshop's Bulletin Board.