Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945
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Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn is professor of history at Syracuse University. She is the author of a number of essays and books, including Black Neighbors (winner of the Berkshire prize) and Race Experts.
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Black Neighbors - Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Black Neighbors
Black
Neighbors
Race and the Limits
of Reform in the
American Settlement
House Movement,
1890-1945
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill and London
© 1993 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lasch-Quinn, Elisabeth.
Black neighbors : race and the limits of reform in the American
settlement house movement, 1890-1945 / by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn.
p. cm.
Revision of thesis (doctoral).
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
isbn 0-8078-2114-4 (cloth : alk. paper).—isbn 0-8078-4423-3
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Social settlements—United States—History. 2. Social work with Afro-Americans—United States—History. 3. United States—Race relations. I. Title.
HV4194.L37 1993
362.5’57’0973—dc20 93-18533
CIP
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
97 96 95 94 93 5 4 3 2 1
THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.
To Ray and my parents
"When [the soul] breathes
through his intellect, it
is genius; when it breathes
through his will, it is virtue;
when it flows through his
affection, it is love."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The Over-Soul
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Mainstream Settlement Movement and Blacks
2. A Social Church
but Not a Mission
3. Southern School-Settlements for Total Education
4. From Mother Power
to Civil Rights
Conclusion: The Promise and Tragedy of the Settlement Movement
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Louise de Koven Bowen
Janie Porter Barrett
Karamu House rehearsal
Karamu House actors behind the scenes
Wharton Centre
Wharton Centre boys, off to clean lot
Wharton Centre ladies’ sewing group 43 Mary White Ovington
Mary White Ovington and W. E. B. Du Bois
Albert J. Kennedy
Founders of the National Federation of Settlements
Calhoun Colored School and Social Settlement
Charlotte R. Thorn
Farmers’ conference at Calhoun
Teachers’ Home at People's Village School
A class in basketry at Penn Normal, Industrial, and Agricultural School
Lugenia Burns Hope
Living room of the YWCA Hostess House at Camp Dix, New Jersey 135
Girls enter Y building at Southwest Belmont YWCA 141
Industrial Club picnic, Kensington YWCA
Employed girls at Southwest Belmont YWCA
Dorothy I. Height
Soho Community House
Acknowledgments
My gratitude goes to all those who inspired, encouraged, and assisted me in this endeavor. Bruce Laurie and Paula Baker did all this and more. Together with Jean Bethke Elshtain, Constance McGovern, and John Bracey, they provided helpful insights for revising the original manuscript of this book. I deeply appreciate the early and persistent interest of Lewis Bateman and the University of North Carolina Press as well as all the subsequent work involved in bringing the book to publication. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and an anonymous reader for the University of North Carolina Press provided invaluable suggestions and encouragement. Ralph Luker, Judith Trolander, and Allen Davis gave heartening responses to parts of this work. In addition, I am deeply indebted to the interest and confidence of my colleagues and students at Syracuse University, with whom it has been my great pleasure to work. I am delighted to have found several true birds of a feather.
I am very thankful for the financial resources at my disposal. The University of Massachusetts and the department of history provided two University fellowships. The Henry J. Kaiser Research Travel Grant of the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs of the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University and the Center for the Study of Philanthropy Research Grant helped defray the costs of research travel. Syracuse University provided funds for additional research through the Appleby-Mosher Fund and the Small Grants Program.
I have fond memories from the numerous trips to and long-distance communications with archives that this project entailed. The staffs at the Urban Archives Center at Temple University, Hampton University Archives, the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, the Black Women Oral History Project at Radcliffe College, the University of Massachusetts Microfilm Room, the Civil Rights Documentation Project at Howard University, the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs of the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University, Southern Oral History Collection, Archives of Industrial Society at the University of Pittsburgh, and others gave vital assistance. Fritz Malval of Hampton, David Klaassen of the Social Welfare History Archives, John Grabowski of Case Western Reserve Historical Society, and Michael Breedlove of the State of Alabama Department of Archives and History at Montgomery showed particular interest in the project.
Friends and relatives have made life during the production of this vast project worthwhile, pleasurable, and possible. Linda Pitelka, Lori Kran, my sister Kate Ramdin, and my grandfather, Henry Steele Commager, offered much early encouragement. And as always, I found I could rely on my brother, Chris Lasch, for help, interest, and friendship.
My parents, Nell and Christopher Lasch, deserve the highest praise and thanks for their unbounded love and support. This book owes its existence to theirs. My father's encouragement and example were, and always will be, wellsprings of inspiration.
Finally, I cannot imagine accomplishing this without the infinite, daily efforts of my husband, Raymond Lasch-Quinn. The vastness of his love and generosity defies words.
Black Neighbors
Introduction
In 1911, prominent Progressive Era reformer Jane Addams remarked that, everywhere in America, a strong race antagonism is asserting itself.
¹ Indeed, the migration of blacks from the rural South to the cities of the Northeast and Midwest that crested during and after World War I and again during World War II triggered racial tensions and cemented residential segregation. The early twentieth century witnessed what historian I. A. Newby called the flowering of racist thought,
a period of virulent racism throughout the nation. The enduring symbol of twentieth-century race relations is the black ghetto, which, soon after conception, deteriorated into an impoverished and permanent slum.² The settlement house movement grew out of an awareness of the severe conditions facing newcomers to the city. While it attempted to address the needs of white immigrants, it largely ignored the parallel situation of African Americans when they began to replace whites in settlement neighborhoods.
The first half of this study seeks to explain the tragic failure of the mainstream settlement house movement to redirect its energies toward its black neighbors. The second half aims to show how other institutions, which neither practitioners nor examiners of settlement work have traditionally considered part of the settlement movement, did conduct a version of settlement work in black communities. This history, however, articulates an expanded definition of settlement work that embraces those efforts among blacks incorporating the settlement movement's dual commitment to provide a vast array of social service, educational, and recreational programs, and to usher in sweeping social change. Expanding the regional scope beyond the northern and midwestern metropolis and the temporal reach beyond the Progressive Era predicates such an encompassing notion. Following the unfolding of the settlement movement in new eras and overlooked regions establishes important links among institutions formerly deemed inherently different. An expanded definition, geographical scope, and periodization of settlement work begins to shed light on the enigmatic role of race in American reform. This introduction will briefly present a review of the essence of the settlement house, a sketch of the main scholarly schools of thought on the settlement movement, an elaboration of the general thesis, structure, and purpose of the current work, and an outline of the specific aims of each chapter.
The settlement house, a community center staffed by volunteers, was a leading philanthropic institution in the United States, modeled after the example of Toynbee Hall in London. It sought to help the poor, usually European immigrants, adjust to the industrial city. Settlement workers actually resided in run-down areas of the city, encountering poverty firsthand and translating their experiences into concrete social reforms. Settlement work thus symbolized a unique marriage of direct delivery of social services and commitment to sweeping social change.
The settlement house also offered a remarkable range of activities that integrated social welfare services, vocational training, liberal education, cultural programs, recreation, and entertainment. The premises themselves served as everything from employment bureau to day-care center, public bath to night school, gymnasium to union hall, and soup kitchen to salon. Immigrants and migrant blacks who found the metropolis confusing and even dangerous often turned for assistance to their own kin networks, churches, families, and societies. While these groups fostered a sense of community, the settlement house attempted to offer the additional asset of bridging the gap between the foreign colony
and the established institutions in the rest of the city. Settlement workers, mostly college-educated middle-class women, sought to make use of their privileged backgrounds to provide access to power and resources otherwise denied to workers or the poor. These early social workers managed to convey useful information and skills that could help their neighbors make their way in and eventually out of the city.³
Jane Addams, who founded the renowned Hull House in Chicago with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, infused the movement with enlightened cultural pluralism. She viewed the settlement house as a catalyst for the eradication of prejudice. In Twenty Years at Hull-House, published in 1910, she gloried in the indications of an internationalism, as sturdy and virile as it is unprecedented, which I have seen in our cosmopolitan neighborhood.
She went on: When a South Italian Catholic is forced by the very exigencies of the situation to make friends with an Austrian Jew representing another nationality and religion, both of which cut into all of his most cherished prejudices, he finds it harder to utilize them a second time and gradually loses them. He thus loses his provincialism.
Addams firmly believed that the retention of cultural differences was compatible with social integration. Coexistence based on equality and mutual respect, she went so far to say, could lay in settlement neighborhoods the local foundation for world peace.⁴
The headworker of South End House in Boston, Robert Woods, wrote that the typical settlement, under American conditions, is one which provides neutral territory traversing all the lines of racial and religious cleavage.
⁵ Still another leader of the movement, Graham Taylor of Chicago Commons, wrote that the essence of settlement work involved the goodwill to understand one another, to interpret misunderstood attitudes and situations, to reconcile and be reconciled to differences of taste and temperament, race and religion, heritage and aspiration, and through service and sacrifice to promote the unity of spirit in the bond of peace.
⁶ Given this commitment to pluralism, peaceful coexistence, and social change, the settlement movement's failure to redirect its efforts from white immigrants to blacks requires careful analysis.
Most scholarly treatments of the settlement movement have taken it for granted that settlement workers directed their efforts toward the millions of immigrants whose advent daily caused a visible change in the urban environment. These studies usually concentrate on the years from 1890 to 1914, a period considered the apex of progressivism and of the settlement movement.⁷ The sheer number of immigrants no doubt accounts for the early dedication of settlement activities to whites, and historians have tended to echo the emphasis of the settlement leaders themselves. However, extending this study of settlements beyond World War I necessitates an exploration of the domestic parallel to the immigrant question
—the situation of black Americans.
A first glance at the record of the early settlement movement's response to blacks raises doubts about the sincerity of the goal of social integration. The majority of settlement houses either excluded blacks, conducted segregated activities, closed down completely, or followed their former white neighbors out of black neighborhoods. In addition, the National Federation of Settlements (NFS), a central organization founded in 1911, largely ignored efforts to conduct settlement work among blacks.⁸
Some historians have argued that most settlement workers merely shared the racism of their day. Thomas Philpott resolves the paradoxical formation of the black slum during the height of progressive reform by exposing the racism of most Chicago reformers. Others, like Howard Jacob Karger and Ruth Crocker, put in relief the impulse of early social workers toward social control,
suggesting that their treatment of blacks mirrored their treatment of immigrants. Settlement workers, in their view, sought to assimilate the poor and workers in order to ensure the perpetuation of their own middle-class values and security.⁹
The racism and social control arguments arose in response to the previous glorification of the liberal, progressive nature of settlement workers. Allen Davis and John Higham, for example, view settlement workers as exceptional and exemplary individuals who were genuine altruists in the heyday of the coercive professional, and enlightened pluralists in a time of racial and ethnic animosity. Without studying settlement work by and among blacks, these scholars assume that the pluralistic embrace of immigrants extended to blacks. Davis asserts that settlement workers must have been among the most racially liberal Americans of their time. Although he lists only a handful of settlements for blacks in contrast to hundreds for immigrants, Davis concludes that the most important and most vocal settlement workers. . . opposed the dominant thought of their time and sought to aid the Negro by helping him achieve equality.
¹⁰
Judith Trolander, who examines the settlement movement since the Progressive Era, calls for a revision of this portrait of settlement workers. She argues that the most vocal leaders like Addams and Lillian Wald of Henry Street Settlement in New York City best fit the description offered by Davis and Higham, while many lesser-known settlement workers were not as open-minded. She notes that many reformers, including settlement house workers, were liberal on a variety of issues, but they had a blind spot on civil rights.
Yet she does not make race a central theme of her analysis until she broaches the period after 1945. She concludes that the lack of an organized civil rights movement caused the blind spot.
¹¹
While students of settlements have yet to embark on a concerted effort to analyze the complex role of race in the movement, several historians have recently uncovered fascinating evidence of less storied settlement work—that conducted among blacks. Historians of African American women, in particular, have produced both encyclopedic tomes and case studies that prove the widespread participation of women in supporting and providing for the black community.¹² Their work fleshes out the story—told by historians of the black church and voluntary associations—of the strong African American tradition of self-help and racial uplift.
Ralph Luker, historian of race and the social gospel, and Dorothy Salem, chronicler of black women's reform, for instance, acknowledge the existence of settlement houses in black communities as well as other community work encompassing both social service and reform.¹³
The current work seeks to allow settlement work to follow its natural contours. When permitted to do so, it embraces many other expressions of community work and reveals the more radical implications that some of that work had in its own time and context. By blurring the customary distinction between settlement and nonsettlement work, this book seeks to reinterpret community work in black neighborhoods as more than uplift,
but as an effort toward drastic social change that would have implications for all Americans. Proponents of these efforts shared the righteous and ambitious ideals of the mainstream movement, despite having to cope with the extra burdens of ostracism, inadequate funding, and demoralization. This work seeks to show how institutions that often worked precisely because of their conservative guise actually embodied a wide vision, one in which the development of African American communities and individuals was a metaphor for the ushering in of a better world for all.
The first half of the study addresses the reactions of the mainstream settlement movement to blacks. This part of the movement is easy to pinpoint, since it formed a national organization, the National Federation of Settlements, as well as local ones such as the United Neighborhood Houses of New York and the Chicago Federation of Settlements. In the 1930s, approximately 200 houses belonged to one of these three major groups.¹⁴ Still others qualified as bona fide settlement houses. This aspect of the movement has received intense scholarly scrutiny, but, because it failed to develop potent leadership on the question of race, many expressions of settlement activity in black communities went unnoticed both by the movement and its chroniclers. Many white leaders drew distinctions between blacks and white immigrants. Although they were often among those Americans most aware of racism, most vocal about the need to address it, and most active in support of civil rights, their views had various flaws. Their particular view of African American culture and character allowed many listeners to persist in believing, along with most native-born and immigrant whites, that blacks could best progress on their own, through separate self-help or racially oriented organizations, but not through the settlement movement. The National Federation of Settlements unwittingly reinforced the idea that the issue of blacks was not of prime concern for the settlement movement when it made a rigid distinction between religious work and settlement work. The determination to rule out any work deemed religious translated into a failure to recognize many efforts among blacks as true settlement houses.
Beginning with Chapter 3, the second part of the book changes direction. Under the guise of the Young Women's Christian Association, the Women's Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, the black women's club and community movement, the National Urban League, and southern industrial schools, a vast number of community centers formed in the first half of the twentieth century. While the first half of the book does suggest some of the types of work undertaken, the second analyzes several key examples in greater depth. Because of the distinctions settlement workers made between their work and that of other organizations, scholars have tended to repeat this bifurcation of settlement work and other community work. Yet an examination of several key examples of institutions and individuals requires a more flexible and inclusive definition of settlement work. From the YWCA black branch or hostess house to the Bethlehem House or the southern school-settlement, these efforts sought to integrate a variety of social services with a dedication to social change. The inability of the mainstream movement to broaden its definition to include all similar efforts severely limited its potential as a mass movement. Since scholars have accepted uncritically the self-image developed by the settlement movement, they have not linked similar movements. An expanded definition brings into focus an entirely new settlement movement. While scholars have studied these other institutions, they have not interpreted them as expressions of the settlement philosophy. Analyzing them as part of that movement reveals aspects of these movements that have remained obscured. The expansion of the definition of settlement work not only points to numerous examples of settlement or settlement-type work, including that conducted among African Americans, but calls for and results from a lengthier periodization and broadened regional scope. Former settlement studies end with World War I and concentrate on major metropolises. Extending the time frame and regional base yields a variety of settlement houses established after or continuing well beyond the so-called waning of the movement; it also reveals a number of unexpected forms of settlement work, including examples from the rural South and small cities throughout the country as well as the usual major urban areas. It is necessary to look beyond the Progressive Era, beyond the cities of the Northeast and Midwest, and beyond the restricting definition of settlement work to uncover evidence of another settlement movement, to grasp its essence, and to examine critically the mainstream settlement movement.
More specifically, to carry out these themes, the first half of the book begins by focusing primarily on the responses of the mainstream settlement movement to African Americans. Chapter i delineates the views of blacks held by mainstream settlement leaders. It argues that settlement leaders, hardly ignorant of the problems facing black Americans, made significant distinctions between immigrants and blacks. Many held a view of African American culture as severely deficient. Because of the brutality of the system of slavery, blacks had lost the very rudiments of culture, the argument went; thus they lacked social organization, family ties, and the basic foundation of inner moral restraint. Most settlement workers sought to interpret the needs of their neighbors for the purpose of changing an inhumane social order. They disagreed with nineteenth-century charity workers who blamed the poor for their supposedly inherited moral frailty and instead faulted the environment. Blacks, however, did not benefit from this reorientation. Since they had allegedly lost all culture during slavery, they needed to educate themselves in the basics of civilization.
This attitude contributed to the settlement movement's failure to take a concerted stand on race and redirect its efforts toward blacks. Instead, most settlement workers encouraged either organizations uniquely devoted to civil rights, or blacks’ own efforts at self-help. Besides a few exceptional individuals, whose fascinating stories require future scholarly attention, they lent their names to separate organizations devoted to improving particular aspects of the black experience. Their inability to grasp the significance of race to their movement is an agonizing shortcoming of the movement as a whole. Yet some settlement workers did aim their efforts at blacks. Chapter 1 presents an overview of these efforts, with key examples of the various approaches and choices, along with an analysis of their limitations.
Chapter 2 pursues the failure of the National Federation of Settlements to enact a consistent policy regarding race relations. Considering their claims of liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and pluralism, the sources of this weakness are complex. In the early twentieth century one of the ideas most emphasized by settlement workers was the differentiation of their work from that of religious missionaries. The distinction between settlement and mission constituted an essential aspect of the movement's very identity and self-definition. This chapter argues that the settlement movement's attempt at cosmopolitanism suffered from a secular, urban, and northern bias that systematically excluded blacks from the movement. Still based largely in the rural South, most African Americans shared a culture in which religion played a central role. Therefore, those whites and blacks who wished to conduct settlement work among blacks, especially in the South, often did so through missions, institutional churches, or other organizations with a strong religious component. Several examples illustrate the diversity and number of such efforts.
The second half of the study moves away from the mainstream settlement movement and concentrates on a few telling examples of little-known forms of settlement work conducted among blacks. Chapter 3 examines the workings of the Hampton- and Tuskegee-inspired rural southern school-settlement. Usually lacking contact with the National Federation of Settlements, these settlements nevertheless tried to combine social services, educational and recreational facilities, and community revitalization and self-sufficiency. The Calhoun Colored School and Social Settlement in Lowndes County, Alabama, the Penn School on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, and the People's Village School in Mt. Meigs, Alabama, relied for funding on supporters of industrial education for blacks. Yet in their rural settings, the black and white women who headed the schools sought to expand their purpose. Their schools served as community centers and represented efforts to instill local pride and to bring about land ownership and other significant reforms. These schools earned recognition as models for New Deal programs of community regeneration.
Chapter 4 delves deeply into three main expressions of settlement activity, which tellingly coalesced in the women's interracial movement of the early twentieth century. Lugenia Burns Hope's Neighborhood Union in Atlanta, the Bethlehem Houses of the women's home missions movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the local black branches and hostess houses of the YWCA all functioned as settlements. These examples show the remarkable accomplishments of black and white women who combined delivery of sorely needed services with agitation for social reform. An ideology of moralist womanhood helped them transpose modest local attempts to improve conditions for their own children and those of their neighbors into a greater movement for social justice through interracial cooperation. Their efforts not only helped sustain their families and communities but also brought about a new era of cooperation between black and white women. In the course of their community activism, their ideology of activist, moralist motherhood transformed into a credo of Christian, humanitarian citizenship.
The conclusion summarizes the role of race in the decline of the settlement movement. It briefly reviews the trajectory of the settlement movement from the Progressive Era to the 1940s, with a brief foreshadowing of developments occurring in the 1960s. Not only did the settlements’ failure to welcome black neighbors universally into their programs contribute to their long-term decline, but their restrictionism left the great promise of the movement unfulfilled. When racial tension erupted in the 1940s, settlements finally recognized that their future relied on their successful grappling with the issue of race. The National Federation of Settlements enacted a policy of integration, but local situations did not lend themselves to a smooth transition. In addition, the ensuing new style of community activism that took root from the fruition of the civil rights movement in the 1960s made the settlement seem outmoded. The Great Society's emphasis on indigenous leadership and staffs combined with black militancy to oust whites from the movement along with the goals of integration and cooperation. A new separatism replaced the old, neither of them assisting blacks in their quest for access to power, resources, and full participation as co-worker[s] in the kingdom of culture.
¹⁵
This small contribution to the understanding of the relationship between race and reform raises a variety of unanswered questions. Future studies might take advantage of the plethora of sources on black settlement activity hitherto generally sidestepped by scholarly analysis. Local archival materials on black branches of the YWCA, school-settlements, Urban League affiliates, institutional churches, religious settlements, missions, and community centers should provide access to more detailed information on the attitudes and behavior of the neighbors of settlement houses. While their role in the transformation of the settlement movement is implicit in the current study, more explicit illustrations would surely enrich and perhaps alter current interpretations. Further transcending of the usual temporal, regional, ethnic, and geographical bounds will yield fresh insights, as will comparative approaches. This study only begins to reevaluate American reform in light of the African American presence and to hint at the omnipresence of race as a crucial factor in all attempts by Americans to change themselves.
One
The Mainstream Settlement Movement and Blacks
A 1943 report on the William Byrd Community House, a social settlement in Richmond, Virginia, noted that the white neighbors
were moving out as blacks moved into the section of the city served by the center. Whites did not want to walk through neighborhoods inhabited by blacks, so they attended settlement house functions in diminishing numbers, many of them convening instead in private houses. Meanwhile, having no recreational facilities at all, the new black residents eyed the center's activities with envy. The report recommended establishing a new settlement house for the white neighbors and relinquishing the William Byrd House to blacks. The author justified turning over the old house to blacks by stressing their deserving behavior: We have been fortunate enough to have a high type Negro moving in.
¹
Surprisingly, this was a typical response of settlement workers to racial tension in settlement neighborhoods in the first half of the twentieth century. Given the settlement movement's ostensible commitment to pluralism and integration, the conditions at the William Byrd Community House are disconcerting. Did the vision of a new cosmopolitan culture based on the coexistence of diverse groups include everyone but blacks? Did settlement workers follow the lead of many white Americans who rated ethnic and national cultures on a scale of advancement and desirability as citizens, placing American blacks at the very bottom of the scale? Or were they ignorant of the dire living conditions faced by blacks in the early twentieth century?
This chapter seeks to begin to unravel the views that many settlement workers had of blacks as well as to delineate some of the ways workers actually responded to their black