3.8 - Lifting as We Climb: Uplift Ideologies and Black Women's Rights and Leadership
Competing Strategies for Racial Uplift
In the years following abolition, African American leaders didn't agree on a single path forward, they debated fundamentally different strategies for advancing Black lives in America. Some leaders, most notably Booker T. Washington, argued that industrial education and vocational training were the most realistic route to economic advancement and independence.
Washington's approach put him at odds with W.E.B. Du Bois in one of the most famous intellectual debates in African American history. In his 1895 "Atlanta Exposition Address," Washington suggested that African Americans should remain in the South and prioritize industrial education over political rights, essentially arguing for gradual economic progress before demanding full civil rights. Du Bois pushed back against this, advocating instead for a liberal arts education and a direct civil rights agenda, arguing that political rights and higher education shouldn't be delayed or deferred.
Washington, who was born enslaved and had led Tuskegee Institute in Alabama since 1881, gave the speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in September 1895. He told Black Southerners to "cast down your bucket where you are," meaning stay in the South and build economic security through farming, skilled trades, and business. He told white Southerners that the races could be "as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." White audiences praised the speech because it seemed to accept segregation and set aside demands for voting rights, and critics later called it the Atlanta Compromise.
Du Bois answered Washington in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), arguing that Washington was asking Black people to give up political power, civil rights, and higher education, and that economic progress couldn't last without them. Du Bois called for developing the "Talented Tenth," the most educated tenth of Black Americans, through liberal arts colleges so they could lead the race. In 1905 he helped start the Niagara Movement to demand full civil rights, and in 1909 he helped found the NAACP.
Women's Education, Suffrage, and Leadership
Alongside this debate, educators and activists were also pushing hard for women's education and suffrage, specifically to ensure Black women's fuller inclusion in American society. Nannie Helen Burroughs stands out as a key figure here. An educator, suffragist, church leader, and the daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Burroughs helped establish the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and went on to found a school for women and girls in Washington, D.C. in 1909.
The National Association of Colored Women (NACW) formed in Washington, D.C., in 1896, when two national federations of Black women's clubs merged. Mary Church Terrell, an Oberlin College graduate and activist, became its first president. Its motto, "Lifting as We Climb," summed up its idea of uplift: as educated, middle-class Black women advanced, they would reach back and help poorer Black women and the whole race rise with them, through kindergartens, homes for the elderly, job training, and campaigns against lynching and segregation.
Anna Julia Cooper was another pivotal voice in this movement. Cooper, the daughter of an enslaved woman and the man who enslaved her, became a leading champion for Black women's rights and education. Her writing detailed the specific inequities Black women faced and argued that American historical narratives were fundamentally incomplete without African American voices, and Black women's voices in particular, included in them.
Black women's leadership extended well beyond writing and public advocacy too. Black women were central to rebuilding African American communities in the generations following slavery, entering the workforce to support their families and organizing labor unions to fight for fair treatment. Black women leaders, including many churchwomen, also built clubs and denominational organizations specifically designed to counter prevailing race and gender stereotypes, actively demonstrating the dignity, capability, beauty, and strength of Black women through their own organized action.
One early example of Black women organizing for fair treatment at work came in Atlanta in 1881, when Black washerwomen formed a group called the Washing Society and went on strike for higher pay. The strike grew to about 3,000 workers, showing that domestic workers, whom many people assumed couldn't organize, could act together to demand fair wages.
Black women also played a central role in the broader Women's Suffrage movement of the early twentieth century, advocating specifically for the rights of Black women within a movement that didn't always prioritize their concerns alongside those of white women.
Black women supported suffrage through their clubs, churches, and newspapers, but white suffrage leaders often pushed them aside to win support from white Southerners. At the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C., organizers told Black marchers to walk at the back. Ida B. Wells-Barnett refused and joined the Illinois delegation along the route, and that same year she founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, one of the first suffrage clubs for Black women. Even after the Nineteenth Amendment (1920) banned denying the vote on account of sex, most Black women in the South were still kept from voting by the same poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence used against Black men.
Culture and Pride as a Form of Uplift
Uplift wasn't only about education, politics, or economics, it also showed up through culture and art. African American literature, poetry, and music during this era encouraged Black communities to take real pride in their heritage and cultural achievements. Writer and diplomat James Weldon Johnson, working with his brother J. Rosamond Johnson, created the song "Lift Every Voice and Sing," a piece that would go on to become known as the Black National Anthem, a lasting cultural anthem born directly out of this era's push for pride and self-determination.
James Weldon Johnson wrote the words as a poem for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birthday at the Black school in Jacksonville, Florida, where he was principal, and J. Rosamond Johnson set it to music. About 500 Black schoolchildren first sang it on February 12, 1900. The song spread through Black schools and churches, and the NAACP later adopted it as the "Negro National Anthem." Its lyrics look back on the suffering of slavery while expressing hope and faith in the future.
Required Sources
Excerpts from A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South by Anna Julia Cooper, 1892 ("Our Raison d'Être" and "Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race")
Reading Cooper's own words directly shows how she connected Black women's advancement to the broader progress of the entire race, arguing that Black women's education and leadership weren't a secondary concern, but a vital, central element of racial uplift as a whole. Given her personal background as the daughter of an enslaved woman and her enslaver, her writing carries the weight of someone speaking from direct, lived experience of the inequities she describes.
Cooper (1858 to 1964) was born enslaved in Raleigh, North Carolina, graduated from Oberlin College, and taught for decades at the M Street High School in Washington, D.C.; in 1925 she earned a doctorate from the University of Paris. In "Our Raison d'Être," the book's opening, she argues that debates about the "Negro problem" have left out the Black woman, whose voice has gone unheard. In "Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race," she argues that the race's progress depends on the position of its women, so educating Black women is the key to uplifting everyone. She puts it this way: "when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood... then and there the whole Negro race enters with me."
In the clash and clatter of our American Conflict, it has been said that the South remains Silent. Like the Sphinx she inspires vociferous disputation, but herself takes little part in the noisy controversy. One muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a vague and uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the Negro. And of that muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black Woman,
An infant crying in the night, An infant crying for the light; And with no language, but a cry.
The colored man's inheritance and apportionment is still the sombre crux, the perplexing cul de sac of the nation, the dumb skeleton in the closet provoking ceaseless harangues, indeed, but little understood and seldom consulted. Attorneys for the plaintiff and attorneys for the defendant, with bungling gaucherie have analyzed and dissected, theorized and synthesized with sublime ignorance or pathetic misapprehension of counsel from the black client. One important witness has not yet been heard from. The summing up of the evidence deposed, and the charge to the jury have been made, but no word from the Black Woman.
It is because I believe the American people to be conscientiously committed to a fair trial and ungarbled evidence, and because I feel it essential to a perfect understanding and an equitable verdict that truth from each standpoint be presented at the bar, that this little Voice, has been added to the already full chorus. The "other side" has not been represented by one who "lives there." And not many can more sensibly realize and more accurately tell the weight and the fret of the "long dull pain" than the open-eyed but hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America.
Anna Julia Cooper, "Our Raison d'Être," A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South (1892), pp. I to III. Source: Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina
Now after our appeal to history comparing nations destitute of this force and so destitute also of the principle of progress, with other nations among whom the influence of woman is prominent coupled with a brisk, progressive, satisfying civilization, if in addition we find this strong presumptive evidence corroborated by reason and experience, we may conclude that these two equally varying concomitants are linked as cause and effect; in other words, that the position of woman in society determines the vital elements of its regeneration and progress.
[...]
Now the fundamental agency under God in the regeneration, the re-training of the race, as well as the ground work and starting point of its progress upward, must be the black woman.
With all the wrongs and neglects of her past, with all the weakness, the debasement, the moral thralldom of her present, the black woman of to-day stands mute and wondering at the Herculean task devolving around her. But the cycles wait for her. No other hand can move the lever. She must be loosed from her bands and set to work.
[...]
Only the BLACK WOMAN can say "when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me." Is it not evident then that as individual workers for this race we must address ourselves with no half-hearted zeal to this feature of our mission. The need is felt and must be recognized by all. There is a call for workers, for missionaries, for men and women with the double consecration of a fundamental love of humanity and a desire for its melioration through the Gospel; but superadded to this we demand an intelligent and sympathetic comprehension of the interests and special needs of the Negro.
Anna Julia Cooper, "Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race," A Voice from the South (1892), pp. 21, 28, and 31. Source: Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina
"The Atlanta Exposition Address" by Booker T. Washington, 1895
This speech is the clearest firsthand articulation of Washington's uplift strategy, prioritizing industrial education and economic advancement in the South over immediate political rights. Reading it directly lets you see exactly how Washington framed his argument to a mixed audience, and it sets up the direct contrast with Du Bois's competing vision described above.
Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Board of Directors, and Citizens:
One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success. I but convey to you, Mr. President and Directors, the sentiment of the masses of my race when I say that in no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been more fittingly and generously recognized than by the managers of this magnificent exposition at every stage of its progress. It is a recognition which will do more to cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom.
Not only this, but the opportunity here afforded will awaken among us a new era of industrial progress. Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the State Legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.
A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen the signal: "Water, water; we die of thirst!" The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back: "Cast down your bucket where you are." A second time the signal, "Water, water; send us water," ran up from the distressed vessel and was answered: "Cast down your bucket where you are." And a third and fourth signal for water was answered: "Cast down your bucket where you are." The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River.
To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: "Cast down your bucket where you are," cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agriculture, in mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, that when it comes to business pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man's chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance.
Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race: "Cast down your bucket where you are." Cast it down among the 8,000,000 Negroes whose habits you know, whose loyalty and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as you have been in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen.
As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past in nursing your children, watching by the sick bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen. Effort or means so invested will pay a thousand percent interest. These efforts will be twice blessed: "blessing him that gives and him that takes."
There is no escape through law of man or God from the inevitable:
"The laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with oppressed; And close as sin and suffering joined We march to fate abreast."
Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upwards, or they will pull against you the load downwards. We shall constitute one third and much more of the ignorance and crime of the South or one third its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.
Gentlemen of the Exposition: As we present to you our humble effort at an exhibition of our progress, you must not expect overmuch. Starting thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources), remember that the path that has led from these to the inventions and production of agricultural implements, buggies, steam engines, newspapers, books, statuary, carving, paintings, the management of drug stores and banks has not been trodden without contact with thorns and thistles. While we take pride in what we exhibit as a result of our independent efforts, we do not for a moment forget that our part in this exhibition would fall far short of your expectations but for the constant help that has come to our educational life not only from the Southern States, but especially from Northern philanthropists who have made their gifts a constant stream of blessing and encouragement.
The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle, rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is right and important that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.
In conclusion, may I repeat that nothing in thirty years has given us more hope and encouragement, and drawn us so near to you of the white race, as this opportunity offered by the Exposition; and here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results of the struggles of your race and mine, both starting practically empty-handed three decades ago, I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race; only let this be constantly in mind: that while from representations in these buildings of the products of field, of forest, of mine, of factory, letters, and art, much good will come, yet far above and beyond material benefit will be that higher good that, let us pray God, will come in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, and in a determination, even in the remotest corner, to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law and a spirit that will tolerate nothing but the highest equity in the enforcement of law. This, this, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and new earth.
Booker T. Washington, "The Atlanta Exposition Address" (1895), full text as delivered September 18, 1895. Source: Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project, University of Maryland (text from The Atlanta Constitution, September 19, 1895, and Washington's corrected transcript in the Library of Congress)
"How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping" by Nannie Helen Burroughs, 1900
This piece captures Burroughs's own argument for why Black women's contributions to racial uplift were being held back, and by extension, why women's education and leadership needed to be treated as essential to the broader uplift movement, not as a side concern. It connects directly to her concrete achievements: helping establish the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and, later, founding her own school for women and girls in 1909.
Burroughs gave this speech at the National Baptist Convention's 1900 meeting in Richmond, Virginia. She argued that Baptist women wanted to do more missionary and community work but were held back because they had no organization of their own within the church. The speech led directly to the founding of the Woman's Convention, Auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention, which became one of the largest Black women's organizations in the country, with Burroughs as its corresponding secretary for decades. It's a clear example of churchwomen building their own denominational organizations.
We come not to usurp thrones nor to sow discord, but to so organize and systematize the work that each church may help through a Woman's Missionary Society and not be made the poorer thereby. It is for the utilization of talent and the stimulation to Christian activity in our Baptist churches that prompt us to service. We realize that to allow these gems to lie unpolished longer means a loss to the denomination. For a number of years there has been a righteous discontent, a burning zeal to go forward in his name among the Baptist women of our churches and it will be the dynamic force in the religious campaign at the opening of the 20th century. It will be the spark that shall light the altar fire in heathen lands. We realize, too, that the work is too great and the laborers too few for us to stand idly by while like Trojans the brethren at the head of the work under the convention toil unceasingly.
We come now to their rescue. We unfurl our banner upon which is inscribed this motto, "The world for Christ. Woman, arise, He calleth for thee!" Will you as a pastor and friend of missions help by not hindering these women when they come among you to speak and to enlist the women of your church? It has ever been from the time of Miriam, that most remarkable woman, the sister of Moses, that most remarkable man, down to the courageous women that in very recent years have carried the Gospel into Thibet and Africa and proclaimed and taught the truth where no man has been allowed to enter. Surely, women somehow have had a very important part in the work of saving this redeemed earth.
Every religious organization in the world is trying by a special effort to raise a stated sum for the great religious campaign which will mark the opening of the 20th century. This money will be necessary to push forward the work which they must undertake. The Christian world is no longer contented at conquering by piecemeal. They have at last decided to make one grand, triumphant entry into heathen lands, and with one stroke slay the common enemy. The implement to be used is money for the support of men and the purchase of land to build houses of worship. We have decided to help in this campaign, and have apportioned the amounts as follows:
10 woman's conventions to give $25.00 each. 20 woman's associations and district conventions to give $5.00. 1,000 missionary societies to give $2.00 each. 2,000 women to give $1.00. 300 children's bands to give 50 cents each. 15,000 pastors to pray for a great uplift in woman's work at home and abroad.
Praying the Great Head of the Church to bless all the departments of our national work, we are yours for the highest development of Christian womanhood. (Miss) N. H. Burroughs, Corresponding Secretary.
Nannie Helen Burroughs, "How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping" (1900). Source: Journal of the Twentieth Annual Session of the National Baptist Convention (1900), pp. 196 to 197, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives (identified as this speech by the Archives of Women's Political Communication, Iowa State University)
"Lift Every Voice and Sing" by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, 1900
This song represents the cultural dimension of racial uplift described above, using music and lyrics to instill pride and hope rather than argument or policy. Its lasting legacy as the Black National Anthem shows how effectively this particular strategy for uplift, cultivating pride through art and shared cultural expression, resonated across generations, well beyond the specific era it was written in.
"Lift Every Voice and Sing," words by James Weldon Johnson, music by J. Rosamond Johnson (first sung February 12, 1900, in Jacksonville, Florida; published 1900 by Jos. W. Stern & Co., New York)
James Weldon Johnson wrote the words for a Lincoln's Birthday program at the Stanton School in Jacksonville, where he was principal, and his brother set them to music; a choir of 500 schoolchildren sang it first. The song moves from hope, through the memory of slavery's suffering, to a prayer for the future. The NAACP adopted it as an official song in 1919, and it became known as the Black National Anthem. The CED includes it as uplift through art: building pride and hope through music instead of politics or protest.
James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, Lift Every Voice and Sing: National Hymn for the Colored People of America (1900). Source: Library of Congress, sheet music