Civic education in informal settings: Black voluntary associations as schools for democracy, 1898-1959

ABSTRACT

Historians of social studies and race have focused overwhelmingly on formal educational settings, textbooks, and curriculum, thereby overlooking the informal educational spaces valued by African Americans. This study examines civic education in informal settings by considering the educational programs of Black voluntary organizations. Hundreds of civic voluntary associations were formed after the Civil War, and they gave African Americans a counterpublic space to undertake racial uplift, promote education, and learn how to be a citizen. In this article, I focus on the activities of one organization, the Improved, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, or Black Elks, to reveal how African American communities valued education for democratic participation and taught civics to youth and adults through their educational programming. I argue that the civic education supported and taught by voluntary associations was perceived by African American communities as just as important as the lessons taught in school. This study holds implications for contemporary social studies researchers by revealing the fluidity of learning sites among home, school, and communities for African Americans.

KEYWORDS:

• African American history
• civic voluntary associations
• curriculum history
• history of social studies
• informal education

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Tim Patterson for his suggestions on this manuscript. Any errors or omissions remain mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this article, I refer to the organization alternately as the Elks, Black Elks, or IBPOEW. The other major Black fraternal societies of the twentieth century were the Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, and Prince Hall Masons.

2. I put White in parentheses, because Fraser wrote about women, but she meant White, middle-class women in her interpretation. On the separate sphere’s trope and Black women, see Shaw (1996).

3. Space does not permit a full explication of historical research methodology. For those who are interested in more information, I recommend Schrag (2021).

4. This research is informed both by my White working-class background (because civic voluntary associations were abundant in my hometown) and because of my being a parent in a multi-racial nuclear family (in which I am steeped in issues regarding race and identity every day). I identify as a feminist researcher dedicated to racial equity and social justice through my teaching, research, and personal life. Despite these connections to the topic and my commitment to social justice, as a White woman I write from the perspective of someone outside of the racial group I am studying and thus approach the primary and secondary material with intentional reflexivity on my assumptions. When I have written about race, I have tried to be very blunt both in naming my care for the topic and in identifying the limitations inherent in my analysis due to my identity.

5. Sources on the Daughters are scarcer than those for the Brother Elks. There are a few self-published histories, and an investigation through biographical holdings yields little. That is, there is sparse documentation on the Daughter Elks in the papers of leading Black women, such as Mary McLeod Bethune. This absence of documentation is related to the fact that the Elks and other fraternals are viewed by historians as frivolous associations, so while membership in the NACW and NAACP are noted in biographical holdings, fraternal and auxiliary memberships are often overlooked.

6. Germane to this study, Moss also reveals that the Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, which was founded around 1827 in New England, published educational activities undertaken by free African Americans, which included literary societies, lyceums, and reading clubs (p. 30).

7. In this statistic are reflected the cumulative effects of preventing enslaved African Americans from learning to read, the grotesque underfunding of Black schools, the shortening of the length of the school year for African Americans, and preventing educational opportunities to a population (see Anderson, 1988).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a Temple University Presidential Humanities and Arts Award and a Spencer Foundation Small Grant (#10015487).