"Phyllis Wheatley Women's Clubs and Homes."

Named after the inspirational slave poet Phyllis Wheatley,engaged in a wide range of

Photos shows, seated (left to right): Mrs.Powell,unknown,Mrs.Saunders,Penolia McAden,Standing (left to right):unknown,Bette S.Anderson,Amelia Grace Anderson,Mary B.Talbert,Frances Nash,unknown,unknown,Theresa G.Anderson,Beatrice Chase and Mrs. Chase.
Photo is in front of the Michigan Street Baptist Church in Bufffalo New York.

charitable,social,and political activities on behalf of African-American women.They provided lodging for women,settlement house work,homes for the elderly,and job referral services,and they also sponsored educational and recreational programs for youth.The first clubs were independent organizations that arose spontaneously in several cities in the late nineteenth century,after 1912 many segregated black branches of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) also adopted the name of Phyllis Wheatley.By the turn of the twentieth century African-American had established a plethora of clubs and organizations that engaged in a wide range of self-help,benevolent,social,relgious,literary,and cultural activities.In addition to the specific projects that these clubs supported and the pressing social needs that they attempted to fill,black women's clubs served to defend African-American womanhood in an increasingly hostile social environment.Contemporary racial ideologies portrayed African-American women as devoid of morality,sexually wanton,and incapable of upholding marital and family responsibilities.Through their club activities African-American women sought to appropriate for vthemselves the Victorian image of proper womanhood as bearers of culture, morality, and social uplift.Club women,largely members of the African-American elite,sought the elevation of all black women and worked tirelessly on behalf of those less fortunate.Phyllis Wheatley clubs were a vital part of this much larger club movement. The first Phyllis Wheatley clubs emerged in the late decade of the nineteenth century.Representatives from the Phyllis Wheatley Club of Nashville,Tennessee,attended  the 1895 Atlanta Congress of Colored Women.The following year Phyllis Wheatley clubs from Chicago,New Orleans, and Jacksonville,Florida,were listed in attendance at the first meeting of the National Association of Colored Woman (NACW).In 1897 Detroit clubwomen established the first-known Phyllis Wheatley Home  for Elderly Women.Other clubs also supported homes for the elderly, such as those focused on serving the needs of young African-American women. In Chicago a Phyllis Wheatley Club was formed in 1896.In early activities included the establishment of a nursery school, by 1906 concern had shift to the provision of lodging and employment for the thousands of young African-American women migrating to Chicago who were not served by white-run settlement houses or social services agencies.The club began fund-raising for a home to protect young women "from the human vultures ever ready to destroy young womanhood." Chicago's clubwomen sought to rescue and protect young women from urban vices, foster racial uplift,and provide training in domesticity.Within a year they purchased a building and opened the first Phyllis Wheatley Home for Young Women in the nation.In 1915 a new and larger home was purchased,capable of housing forty-four girls at one time.The success of the home was due,in part, to the support of several of Chicago's leading African-American women's clubs.The motto of the home was "Help our Own,"and members took great pride in the fact that it was financed and managed entirely by African-American women.In 1926 a far larger building building was purchased and the directors claimed that 1,286 young women were helped annually.The Phyllis Wheatley Club in Buffalo,New York,founded by a social worker from Chicago,followed a similar model. Buffalo women were similarly concerned with the negative racial stereotypes that dominated press coverage of the African American community.Between 1899 and 1930 the club engaged in a wide variety of social political,and benevolent reform work.In its early years members donated large quantities of food and clothing to the needy and joined with other wonmen's clubs to provide a monthly "pension"for Underground Railroad leader Harriet Tubman,who was then living in a nursing home.In 1905 the club established a settlement house that sponsored mothers' clubs and offered counseling and job referrals for women.The club later established a home for the elderly.In 1910 the club invited the newly formed NAACP to establish a branch in Buffalo and campaigned for an end to police toleration of vice in the American-American community.In the 1920s the club donated books by leading African-American authors,inclubing Phyllis Wheatley,to the local library.After 1900 Phyllis wheatley Clubs and homes followed two models: some, such as in Chicago and Buffalo, remained independent,local organizations,often affiliated with the NACW.Others,comprised the official "colored branches" of the YWCA.In Philadelphia had founded the first colored Women's Christian Association.Soon black women in other cities established similar groups.The American YWCA,did not recognize these African-American associations until after 1906,when a new national board first encouraged the affiliation of separate "colored"branches.In 1911,the St. Louis Phyllis Wheatley Club became an affiliate of the city's YWCA, which was the world's largest branch and offered a full range of services,but had extended no welcome to the growing African-American population.That year a group of 150 prominent African-American women appealed directly to the YWCA'S national board,which pressured the St. Louis branch to designate the Phyllis Wheatley Club as its black affiliate. The white leadership of the St.Louis YWCA did so reluctantly and only after voting to reserve to themselves the right of supervision.Despite white oversight,the national board Mary Belcher, a dedicated African-American YWCA worker, to direct the new Phyllis Wheatley branch.Soon the branch developed the largest membership of any African-American affiliate and offered a full range of services for women, including a lodging house.In Cleveland African-American women started a fight for  an African-American YWCA in 1906,they were not successful until 1912.Cleveland's African-American elite.raised with hopes of "was wary of establishing segregated institutions.It look a generation of "newcomers" from the South,lead by Jane Edna Hunter,a young nurse,who had experienced personally the plight of young African-American women unable to find decent lodging,to champion a separate institution. As racial tensions mounted with the increased migration of African-Americans to Cleveland,the city's African-American elite gradually came to accepting the pressing need for a segregated institution. Meanwhile,Edna proved adept at winning financial backing in the white community.Whites however,would support a home for  African-American women only if a group of white women was selected to oversee its operations.Edna acquiesced,and a majority white board was elected.In 1912 the Phyllis Wheatley Association of Cleveland was established,and by 1917 it offered the largest  facility for African-American women in the country,composed of an eleven-story building and several separate centers. The association provided lodging job placement,and classes in cooking,sewing, nutrition,hygiene,and scientific home-making while sponsoring a wide range of social and recreational activities for neighborhood residents.Edna successfully resisted formal YWCA branch affiliation for the next thirty-six years of her leadership,thereby preserving a greater degree of autonomy for both herself and the organization.While Whites technically retained control of the African-American associations in St.Louis  and Cleveland,African-American staffed and managed them. African-American women tolerated white supervision and in exchange gained access to white funds and, in the case of the St.Louis association,to the resources of a powerful national organization.World War I expanded and enlarged the work of African-American YWCAs and Phyllis Wheatley home. The war created a large-scale demanded for African-American female domestic workers while fueling African-American migration northward.The national board of the YWCA received $ million from the government for work with women,and one-tenth of the amount was earmarked for African-American women's work.During the war,the number of "colored: YWCA affiliates increased from sixteen to forty-nine, and at least seventeen of these took the name of Phyllis Wheatley. In Washington, D.C., for example,the Colored Women's Christian Association,founded in 1905, had struggled for years to provide services for migrants. After the war, the national YWCA provide $ 20,000 for the establishment of an official Phyllis Wheatley branch. New Phyllis Wheatley clubs and homes continued to emerge during the 1920s and 1930s.These clubs received support and advice from the NACW, they were locally funded and governed by independent boards of directors,thereby avoiding white control. In 1946 the national YWCA adopted and interracial charter and began desegregation effort.Today the legacy of these pioneering Phyllis Wheatley clubs and homes endures.Several branches of the YWCA continue to bear the name of Phyllis Wheatley.The Phyllis Wheatley settlements founded in Cleveland and Minneapolis continue to serve as African-American community centers while over two dozens African-American women's clubs associated with the NACW still bear the name of Phyllis Wheatley.