Journal of Women's History

I thoroughly enjoyed reading these books, both of which are incredibly well-written, well-researched, and packed full of information about the various and disparate roles Black women played in the social justice movements in the United States during two different time periods. I write this review against the backdrop of the various Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country, so it is especially important today to highlight the stories and people of those earlier protest movements. Previous histories of the movement too often relegate Black women to cursory roles—if they mention the roles of Black women at all. Both Strategic Sisterhood and Jim Crow Capital center their narratives around working- and middle-class women and the work they undertook in the Black Freedom Struggles.

Rebecca Tuuri’s first chapter of Strategic Sisterhood sets the stage for her central story about the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW): they are an organization that began in 1935 with an older form of Black politics but eventually evolved alongside the rest of the civil rights movement. In the first paragraph, Tuuri juxtaposes two seemingly different events—the start of the sit-in protests in the South and the celebration of the silver anniversary of the NCNW. Tuuri writes that while “students in Greensboro, North Carolina, had shown their support for the movement by putting their bodies on the line, the council had taken a different approach” (12). What was the NCNW’s approach? They “hosted a High Tea for Youth” and a “gala, which featured a ‘Fall-Winter Fashions’ show,” among other events. This event did not go without criticism, and many people believed that the “council’s interest in social events seemed out of touch with the dangerous, direct-action projects of groups like CORE and SNCC” (12).

Throughout the twentieth century, Dorothy Height transformed the NCNW from a “lobbying of affiliated clubs to an entity representing [B]lack women of all [End Page 140] classes, complexions, and creeds” (208). The NCNW even forged alliances with Black men, with Height speaking at the Million Man March on October 16, 1995. As Tuuri examines in Chapter 8, “Mississippi, Who Has Been the Taillight, Can Now Be the Headlight,” the NCNW did, indeed, continue to evolve. At the July 1980 United Nations World Conference on Women in Copenhagen, for example, Height—believing that she could “play a major role in sensitizing Western feminists to the needs of women of color around the world”—helped draft a resolution on racial equality to promote equality for women across the globe. This statement said, in part, that “dealing with sexism alone would not be enough. Racism had to be included” (177). To foster relationships with Black women around the world, the NCNW used some of the monies they had won from a $60,000 grant from the Africa Bureau of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to help fund the trips of twenty women in ten African countries. From 1975 to 1980, USAID spent over $800,000 to “implement a special conference for women of African descent, pay for the creation of NCNW’s International Division, and help the council implement self-help projects for women of African descent” (178). Thus, not only was the NCNW helping poor women in the South and throughout the United States, but they were also successful at bringing resources to and leveraging political power on behalf of thousands of African women.

What makes Strategic Sisterhood different from other books on Black women in the civil rights movement is that this book, as Tuuri notes in her introduction, includes the stories of “middle-class nationally connected moderates as well as youthful and community-based radicals” (2). Tuuri breaks...