“When and Where I Enter”: The National Council of Negro Women, Black Women’s Organizing Power, and the Fight to End Hunger

Abstract

This article examines the food politics of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), a prominent Black women’s organization, founded in 1935. I argue that the council used an intimate knowledge of themselves, Black women, and the South to transgress a hostile landscape and protect themselves and Black people. I make this argument by examining the words of their founder Mary McLeod Bethune, their 1960s activism, their hunger campaign, and other historical documents. For NCNW, respectability was not meant to silence their voices, but rather to allow them a thin veil of protection not given to Black women. First, I detail the history of the organization, its emphasis on making Black women a part of the U.S. democracy, and their work to end hunger. Second, I conceptually explore Black women’s inward and outward gaze, which includes some Black women’s strategic use of respectability politics to uphold moral values and their grounded knowledge of the South, its land and its people. Third, I consider how NCNW used their inward and outward gaze to make change and end hunger among Black people in the South. Finally, I conclude with thoughts on how we might understand the current political organizing power of Black women within a model for which NCNW created much of the groundwork.

本文研究著名的成立于1935年的黑人妇女组织“全国黑人妇女理事会”（NCNW）的食品政治学。我认为，NCNW利用对自身、黑人妇女和南方的深入了解，打破了恶劣局面、保护了自身和黑人。本文的观点，基于NCNW创始人玛丽·麦克劳德·白求恩（Mary McLeod Bethune）的讲话、20世纪60年代的活动、饥饿运动和其它历史文献。对NCNW来说，尊重并不意味着沉默，而是给黑人妇女提供一个薄薄的、未曾有过的保护层。首先，我详尽介绍了NCNW的历史、NCNW对黑人妇女加入美国民主的重视、消除饥饿的努力。其次，我概念性地探讨了黑人妇女的内向关注和外向关注，包括黑人妇女策略性地运用尊重政治学来维护道德价值，维护她们对南方、南方土地和人民的基本认知。第三，我考虑了NCNW如何利用内向和外向关注来实现变革、结束南方黑人的饥饿。最后，我总结性地思考了如何在NCNW已经打下很多基础的模式下，去理解黑人妇女目前的政治组织力量。

Este artículo examina las políticas alimentarias del Consejo Nacional de Mujeres Negras (NCNW), una muy importante organización de mujeres negras, fundada en 1935. Sostengo que las consejeras usaron el conocimiento íntimo de sí mismas, y del Sur, para transgredir un paisaje hostil y protegerse a sí mismas y a los negros. Formulo este argumento examinando las palabras de su fundadora Mary McLeod Bethune, su activismo de los años 1960, su campaña contra el hambre y otros documentos históricos. Para el NCNW, la respetabilidad no significa silenciar sus voces, sino más bien cubrirlas con un tenue velo de protección que no se entregaba a las mujeres negras. Primero, detallo la historia de la organización, su énfasis en hacer a las mujeres negras partícipes de la democracia de los EE.UU., y su trabajo para terminar con el hambre. En segundo lugar, exploro conceptualmente las percepciones internas y externas de las mujeres negras, lo cual incluye el uso estratégico que hacen las mujeres negras de las políticas de respetabilidad para preservar los valores morales y su afincado conocimiento del Sur, su tierra y su gente. Tercero, considero cómo usó el NCNW su mirada interior y exterior para promover el cambio y acabar con el hambre entre la gente negra del Sur. Finalmente, concluyo con reflexiones sobre cómo podríamos entender el actual poder de organización política de las mujeres negras dentro de un modelo para el que el NCNW creó una gran parte del trabajo de base.

Key Words:

• Black geographies
• Black women
• food
• gaze
• respectability politics

关键词:

• 黑人地理
• 黑人妇女
• 食品
• 关注
• 尊重政治

Palabras clave:

• alimento
• geografías negras
• mirada
• mujeres negras
• política de respetabilidad

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support. (Lorde 1984, 116)

On Friday 21 April 1972, The National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) convened their first ever National Hunger Convocation. Their goal was to provide a comprehensive update on their current hunger initiatives and plans to address hunger nationwide. The group’s organizers and featured speakers included such powerful Black women as Betty Shabazz, an accomplished nurse and educator whose name is most often mentioned alongside her husband, slain Black Power leader Malcom X. Alongside her was Dorothy Height, a social worker, civil rights activist, and longtime leader of NCNW. Standing with both women on this important day was Shirley Chisolm, the first Black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from New York, and the first woman to run for the Democratic nomination in 1972. Finally, there was Marian Anderson, the chair of the 1972 Hunger Convocation and one of the most celebrated opera singers in U.S. history (Matthewson 1972). The intended purpose of this gathering was to discuss the food and hunger initiatives that NCNW had been spearheading. NCNW’s aim was to eliminate hunger among Black people through funding self-help programs across areas of the rural South, which included the pig bank for Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms initiatives. True to their organizational goals, they also sought to influence policy at the national, state, and local levels (Matthewson 1972).

In this article, I examine NCNW’s hunger campaign and support for other hunger efforts within the broader context of their organizational mission. I argue that NCNW used a multiscalar approach to decide when and “where they enter,”¹ and more important, how they entered spaces that included the violent and rural White supremacist South. NCNW’s activism is nuanced and grounded in the beliefs of their founder, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, who advanced a particular conception of Black womanhood that she believed could contribute to U.S. democracy. The democracy that NCNW sought to transform was one that NCNW women believed themselves to rightfully belong to. Whether or not others saw them as such, they were a group of Black women who believed they represented America, which gave them a divine right to change it. Their efforts to shape Black people did not stop at themselves, and they also developed programming aimed at eliminating hunger among poor Black people. In some ways, like many hunger policies, these programs dictated poor Black people’s behavior. Whether or not these programs are seen as revolutionary, feeding people is also about changing people, and in some cases dictating ideology (Poppendieck 1999; Heynen 2009). I ground NCNW’s actions in their inward and outward gaze, which sometimes includes their use of respectability politics. Their work is political and strategic and should be contextualized within their work as “race women” (B. C. Cooper 2017, 11). I center this article on the complexity of the organization and its founder. Further, I move beyond the scale of the body to focus on NCNW’s local and national policy initiatives, and their ability to see within the crevices of the South. They organized in a way that no other organization had, creating a model that is still replicated today. They often supported local initiatives of more radical activists, while simultaneously developing national hunger policy.

This article was inspired by archival research conducted during the summer of 2017 at the Amistad Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. The intended purpose of the archival research trip was to search for information on Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms. Based on preliminary work, I was aware that NCNW contributed the pig share to Freedom Farms. I was unaware, however, of the council’s own hunger campaign until discovering a brochure in Hamer’s archives and an entire separate box of their activism work. Although much of this article focuses on the brochure and hunger convocation program, it is supplemented by historical information on the organization and speeches of NCNW founder Mary McLeod Bethune. NCNW’s work was extensive, but less is known about this work due to their organizational structure. As is explained further in what follows, they are a stand-alone organization with individual chapters and a council comprised of other organizations in which Black women’s groups are members. In fact, much of their mission and purpose is to be attached to other Black social, philanthropic, and political organizations. Regarding their hunger work, I am broadly and perhaps more interested in NCNW’s organizational mission and how it feeds into understandings of themselves, Black feminist geographies, and hunger policy more broadly.

This article proceeds as follows. First, I give a brief history of NCNW and their food and hunger activism. Second, I detail Black women’s inward and outward gaze within the context of Black food geographies. I also discuss how and why NCNW’s activism is couched in a strategic respectability politics that for them, is not simply about assimilation. Third, I delve more deeply into NCNW’s specific engagement with food and hunger policy, again through the concept of their inward and outward gaze. Finally, I explore what NCNW’s model tells us about Black women claiming space, and their strategic movement through space. NCNW’s efforts were organized and multiscalar where they tied the concerns of rural Black people not only to each other, but to national policy.

National Council of Negro Women’s Hunger Campaign

History of Organization

The basic direction of NCNW is to bring about the kind of fundamental changes in our society which will eliminate the band aid approach and allow black people to walk in social and economic freedom and equality without crutches. (The Legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune 1974, 6)

The NCNW was founded in 1935 by Mary McLeod Bethune, the daughter of slaves and a prominent activist who promoted equal rights. Bethune was deeply engaged in education and policy; she advised three U.S. presidents and was the founder of what is now Bethune Cookman College, a historically Black college in Daytona Beach, Florida. NCNW was organized as an umbrella organization that included twenty independent Black women’s organizations along with ninety stand-alone NCNW chapters (R. C. Mueller 1954; Tuuri 2018). NCNW was intended to be an organization of consensus. In meeting minutes from NCNW’s organizational meeting, Mrs. Hunton, a representative of a Black newspaper said:

We have got enough organization. The rest of the Negro would look to the American Negro for culture. During the last three years. I spent in Europe. I visited many conferences. At one there were 30 nationalities present. Many embarrassing questions were asked me about how our group organized in the United States. Our problem is a world problem: no problem is settled until our problem is settled. We must solidify. The Herald Tribune Council stresses solidarity. This council will give our Negro women a status. There is not a great group behind our women to push them. We need push in representation in Congress and we can do what we elect to do. (Bethune 1935b, 172)

The range of organizations and opinions in NCNW was vast. Mrs. Hunton spoke on behalf of a Black newspaper, but there were also representatives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Black sororities, Black social clubs, and Black philanthropic organizations. All in attendance were not confident that such a vast organizational structure would work, as they saw in the past how ideas and opinions of others were left off the table. They seemed to agree, however, that Black women had been left out of national discussions about women’s issues, where woman was code for White woman. After this organizational meeting, Bethune then sent a letter to the leaders of the nation detailing the willingness of NCNW and Black women more broadly to serve the country. She wrote:

In the ranks of Negro womanhood in America are to be found ability and capacity for leadership, for administrative as well as routine tasks, for the types of service so necessary in a program of national defense. These are citizens whose past records at home and in war service abroad, whose unquestioned loyalty to their country and its ideals, and whose sincere and enthusiastic desire to serve you and the nation indicate how deeply they are concerned that a more realistic American democracy, as visioned by those not blinded by racial prejudices, shall be maintained and perpetuated (Bethune 1935a, 174)

Bethune was offering her services to the country and positioning herself and other Black women as patriots who could serve. Some of the language in the preceding quote is traditional wartime language, but the words also go beyond NCNW simply equating their abilities to those of White women. Bethune saw Black women, their leadership, and their service as being engrained in the democracy of this country. Black women could offer something distinct to the U.S. landscape that was not already there. Bethune’s model of servant leadership positioned NCNW to move in many circles that had traditionally been closed to Black women, but also provide space for more radical organizing to occur, whether NCNW was the one doing the organizing or not.

NCNW had four major purposes: (1) to encourage interpersonal relationships among women and organize women for direct action; (2) to fight for civil rights and equal rights through desegregation; (3) to gather and distribute information of importance and concern to women; and (4) to inform policy (R. C. Mueller 1954). The council’s belief in self-help was at the heart of their mission. Although NCNW was known as a middle-class bourgeois Black women’s organization, it offered behind-the-scenes support to groups considered more radical, like Black separatist and Black nationalist organizations (Tuuri 2018). NCNW’s most prominent program was Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS), in which Black and White women flew down to rural areas of the South for the purpose of organizing Black people to vote and developing strategies for civil and human rights issues (The Legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune 1974). According to Tuuri (2018), who wrote one of the most comprehensive histories of the organization, “NCNW women [also] continued to promote themselves as elite women in hopes that this might help inspire more white southern women to join the larger civil rights cause” (loc 1383). It was partially through WIMS that NCNW became even more aware that the deprivation of basic needs like food was a part of the ways in which the White supremacist structure kept hold of the deep South (Kotz 1969).

Self-Help Campaign Against Hunger

NCNW initiated its self-help campaign against hunger in Sunflower County, Mississippi, Bolivar County, Mississippi, and Macon County, Alabama (The Legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune 1974). Although the group often spearheaded its own programs, it stayed true to its mission of coalition building by working with other civil rights and Black Power activists who were already doing work on the ground in local communities. One signature initiative of the self-help campaign against hunger was to fund pig shares in poor Black communities, enabling people in these communities to raise their own meat for the year. Through this program, NCNW also ensured that communities knew proper meat preservation tactics. It was NCNW who funded Fannie Lou Hamer’s pig share, a crucial part of Hamer’s antipoverty initiative Freedom Farms (McCutcheon 2019). NCNW also supported community gardens and cooperative development in the same communities. Hunger was a central issue for NCNW, and alleviating it was true to their mission. They knew that they would have to tackle it on multiple scales, which included organizing local communities, directly petitioning the federal government through participating in its conversations around hunger, and sponsoring their own national convention.

NCNW was also a part of an interracial coalition of women’s organizations that pledged to fight hunger. In 1969, this coalition sponsored Hunger Workshops in major cities and provided recommendations to the White House that they named “The Facts of Hunger” (Women’s Division 1970, 2). The coalition encouraged empathy with hungry people, and said that “no child should be hungry; hot breakfast and lunch programs can prevent hunger of children now” (Women’s Division 1970, 2). Other recommendations urged the federal government to make the process of applying for aid less complicated so that families with emergency need could obtain food quickly. Finally, the coalition gave directions on how groups could petition the federal government, how allies could efficiently help, and what local coalitions could do (Women’s Division 1970, 2). NCNW’s most public national event was their 1972 National Hunger Convocation in New York City. It was supported by NCNW members and affiliates, but also organizations like the Girl Scouts of America and the American Dental Association. The convocation had a series of panels that focused on day care, education and employment, drug use, federal poverty initiatives, nutrition, and mental health, along with hunger and consumer education. The keynote addresses were given by New York Representative Shirley Chisolm and South Dakota Senator George McGovern, the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. The convocation was clearly aimed at developing concrete strategies and policy solutions garnered from the NCNW’s sustained on-the-ground efforts to address poverty and hunger (NCNW 1972).

When the NCNW convened for the 1972 Hunger Convention, they were representative of Black “race women” of the time. According to Cooper (2017),

race women … were the first Black women intellectuals. As they entered into public racial leadership roles beyond the church in the decades after Reconstruction, they explicitly fashioned for themselves a public duty to serve their people through diligent and careful intellectual work and attention to “proving the intellectual character” of the race. (11)

Cooper stressed that Black women’s political and intellectual work has never been private. NCNW women who were Black public intellectuals were making space for Black women’s voices and bodies on territory that sought to either erase them or make them hypervisible. The Black race women who comprised NCNW and other organizations like them were and continue to be complicated individually and organizationally to unpack, because their movement through space was so covert, yet still highly visible. Moreover, they provide insight into Black women’s geographies and its nuances at multiple scales.

Where I Enter

My reading of NCNW is as a Black cisgender feminist woman. I value privacy and safety in my life, and the way in which I manage my body is a combination of choice, strategy, and survival. I do not consciously use a particular nonthreatening image of myself in any situation, yet recognize that even my subconscious is influenced by dominating forces that aim to dictate who I am and what my body means to those around me. I am a member of a historically Black Greek letter organization (BGLO), and another Black women’s professional and social organization. Although I am not a member of NCNW, I have known about the organization since childhood. It is impossible to be in other historically Black organizations, know your history, and not know NCNW. My organizational affiliations make clear to me the complexity and diversity of Black women’s organizations, and the diversity of people, both living and deceased, in these organizations that include Stacey Abrams, Kamala Harris, Lena Horne, Zora Neale Hurston, Simone Manuel, Hattie McDaniel, Condoleezza Rice, Ester Rolle, Simone Sanders, and Alice Walker. Although many of the women that I listed are in different organizations, the diversity of Black women that has always been in Black women’s organizations means that any of these women could arguably exist at the same time in the same organization. Historically, these organizations were held up as tools for social and political change. At the same time, many considered (and still consider) these organizations to be resting places for the Black elite. Arguably, they are both. A part of this article’s purpose is to parse through how one Black women’s organization, NCNW, historically used rhetorical and spatial tools to create policy that would eliminate hunger.

Keeping a Watchful Eye over the Food Landscape

Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the dominant ways of knowing and looking. While every black woman I talked to was aware of racism, that awareness did not automatically correspond with politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze. When it did, individual black women consciously named the process. (hooks 1997, 128)

Before Google Maps, there were my grandmothers, who knew where every person lived in their South Carolina towns. One grandmother resided in a rural community, where it seemed that knowing people’s whereabouts and location would be difficult. When I travel back to my hometown, however, I marvel that people I have not met know whose granddaughter I am. My family was active in the community, but there was something distinct about the way that my grandmother engaged that represents a model of leadership reminiscent of NCNW and Black women more broadly. Many Black women form deep relational bonds with community members, demonstrating a model of leadership that is replicated across many scales. Their activism is filtered through their multilayered identities as Black women, and their impact is only surprising to those who underestimate their organizing power. Whereas some Black women might work individually, many work in community with one another through informal organizations, church groups, Black sororities, and social and philanthropic groups like NCNW.

In the following section, I theoretically ground NCNW’s political work in Black women’s inward and outward gaze. In the quote that begins this section, bell hooks asserted that “awareness did not automatically correspond with politicization” (hooks 1997, 128) for all Black women. Instead, “many Black women do not ‘see differently,’ precisely because their perceptions of reality are so profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways of knowing” (hooks 1997, 128). As I will tease out moving forward, although NCNW women do in fact see differently, their thinking is still at times wrapped up in the “politics of respectability” (Higginbotham 1993, 26). NCNW women’s gaze is simultaneously inward, toward themselves, and outward looking, toward other Black women and Black people more broadly. They see Black womanhood in places that others seek to erase it, an act of erasure particularly prevalent in the rural southern United States, where Black women have always politically mobilized beyond the urban center. Some Black women simultaneously lay claim to an idealized United States while continuously pressing the country to live up to its idealized vision. The land, and in some cases rurality, becomes a cover for political, radical, and at times dangerous work.

Black Women’s Inward Gaze

I had tried, in different ways over the years to fit. I thought I could discipline my body and later my matters to take up less room. I was fine with that, but I learned that even I had limits when—in my pursuit of the life of the mind—my thinking was deemed too thick. (McMillan Cottom 2019, 7)

Black women’s inward gaze is evident in McMillan Cottom’s Thick, a Black feminist masterpiece, where she bases each chapter on her grounded experiences as a Black woman. McMillan Cottom knows herself and how others see and read her body. She is clear that Thick is not self-deprecating and is constantly aware of and navigates controlling images. She argued that she, like many Black women, understands that she is being surveilled (Browne 2015) at every turn and aware of the many technologies used to do it. McMillan Cottom’s inward gaze is oppositional, absolute, and reflects her confidence that although others might attempt to tell her how she should experience the world, she is resolute in her knowledge of herself and other Black women. Interestingly, McMillan Cottom never suggested a homogenous understanding of Black womanhood, but rather insisted on Black women’s connectivity. We might not all have the same or even similar life experiences, but constantly navigate having to drown out what others tell us about ourselves to make sure that our inner voice is loudest. NCNW women have a collective sense of social activism, grounded in a belief that they know how they are perceived, who they are, and who Black women are.

Black women have the most intimate knowledge of their bodies, which necessitates a constant confrontation of pain, brutality, and oppression that McKittrick contextualized through “territoriality.” In Demonic Grounds, McKittrick (2006) wrote:

[I]n particular, the ties between ownership and blackness rendered the Black body a commodity, a site of embodied property through ideological and economic exchanges. For Black women, this legacy of captivity and ownership illustrates how bodily geography can be. (846–47)

Black women’s bodies were owned, and through the process of territorialization, ownership was embedded onto the landscape as both natural and public. McKittrick (2006) noted “the black female body was viewed as a naturally submissive, sexually available, public, reproductive technology” (848). The Black woman’s body has a utility that extends beyond a human–nonhuman binary, and is used for sexual labor, manual labor, and reproductive labor. As McKittrick reminded us, this claiming and ownership of Black women’s bodies happens publicly. Many individual Black women and groups like NCNW, however, seemed fully aware that such claiming and ownership was happening. In fact, they actively and strategically fought against it. For Black middle- and upper middle-class women in NCNW, the “politics of respectability” (Higginbotham 1993) was a political tactic used in their fight.

Politics of Respectability

In Righteous Discontent, Higginbotham (1993) described the roots of the “politics of respectability,” saying that “in contrast to the domestic ideal for white women of all classes, the larger society deemed it ‘unnatural,’ in fact an ‘evil,’ for black married women ‘to play the lady’” (31). Equating “evil” with Black women “playing the lady” factored into how domestic servitude was configured. Black women were not allowed to consider their families (husband, children) in work hours or work arrangements, but instead their White bosses’ families were seen as more important. Not only did many Black women not possess class privilege, but based on the intersections of both race and class, were not seen as “ladylike” enough to think that they could and should occupy a role as lady of the house.

Black women who ascribed to the politics of respectability applied the Black gaze to themselves and other Black women, holding up a standard of Black womanhood that, in part, privileged Black women’s domesticity. Although this might not seem like a political or feminist act to some, Black women as mentioned earlier were historically classified through a White patriarchal and capitalist system by what their bodies could offer to it, and not who they were to themselves, their own Black families, and Black communities. The act of building and working within one’s family and one’s community is domestic, therefore, but very different from working in White households and upholding White capitalist structures. I am not suggesting that the lines are strict and delineating. Rather, I am suggesting a messiness that we must sit with in contextualizing some Black women’s use of respectability politics. “Respectable” Black women were expected to move beyond domesticity and be political leaders, social activists, and often the backbone of social justice movements. Many, however, occupied a liminal space in that they were still not meant to be seen as the leaders or at the forefront of civil rights and Black Power movements, whether they led and organized these movements. My argument moving forward is that NCNW, at times, strategically leaned into a role as the backbone or support of larger movements; in doing so, they were able to fly under the radar, protect their organizational structures, and more important, protect themselves. The politics of respectability might be an attempt by some political Black women to operate in liminal spaces, purposefully and strategically shifting their visibility through using respectability. In this article, I focus on NCNW’s strategic positioning of themselves in the public to get the real work done. Their tactics were not new in the 1960s or 1970s and are still being used by some Black women’s political groups today. Their most important tactic is their outward gaze that is always change oriented.

Reclaiming the U.S. South: Black Women’s Outward Gaze

Racism is not just a Southern problem, but the political landscape of the south has long mattered in historical, social, political, and economic processes of racialization. So, too, have innovative practices of Black survival and resistance been inseparable from the production of Southern spaces. Studies of the American south thus have the potential to renovate geographic knowledge by centering a Black sense of place in research examining race and region. (Bledsoe, Eaves, and William 2017, 7)

In the preceding quote, Bledsoe, Eaves, and William (2017) noted how “innovative practices of Black survival and resistance [have] been inseparable from the production of southern spaces” (7). If we look at “innovative practices” as individual, we miss the connected ways in which many Black women have moved across time and space, connected in part because even when the individual or self is the motivation, these movements are meant for the greater good. Black women leaders like Ella Baker prioritized grassroots organizing in the civil rights and Black Power movement and were acutely aware of the impact of racial and economic oppression on rural Black people. For Baker, rural Black voices beyond hers were needed for change (C. Mueller 2004). In “Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms and Black Agrarian Geographies,” I wrote about Hamer’s ambitious antipoverty effort, which is tied to her personal experiences with hunger, racial oppression, and sexual violence. The daily operations of the farm reflect her attempt to keep herself, and by extension Black women, safe. Hamer saw the South as violent and oppressive, but it was also home, with land that Black people should rightfully be able to prosper from (McCutcheon 2019).

Connectivity does not imply sameness, and class politics are intricately tied to respectability politics. Class politics, however, does not erase Black women’s experiences with oppression. In many cases, these experiences are not distant memories. Time matters, and for groups like NCNW, the time gap was not large. Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of NCNW, was born in 1875 in Maysville, South Carolina, to parents who were slaves. Bethune was born into poverty and racial violence. She later established the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in 1904 and NCNW in 1935 (Bethune-Cookman University n.d.). NCNW and its hunger program employed aspects of respectability politics. Bethune had access to political and social power, and in many ways, was a true representation of the Black elite. To read her, NCNW, and its work as disconnected from the experiences of poor Black people is a mistake, however. In some cases, they themselves were representative of the Black people who their antipoverty initiatives were aimed at. Their use of respectability politics was classed, and reflective of the belief that the poor needed not just food, but also role models in the middle class. Importantly, NCNW’s work should be put into conversation with Black women’s food geographies.

Black Women’s Food Geographies

Black women have historically used inventive ways to feed their families and Black communities (Williams-Forson 2006; White 2018; Jones 2019; McCutcheon 2019; Reese 2019; Garth and Reese 2020; McCutcheon, Best, and Rajack-Talley 2022). In Black women’s food geographies literature, standpoint and gaze, cooperative methods, and economic development are all important components. All of those authors to varying extents used their grounded experiences to theorize Black women’s food geographies. Gaze affects their ability to see what others have undoubtedly missed. Whether it is White’s (2018) attention to detail in the archives or Garth’s (2020) quick realization of racism masked as “food justice,” it is evident that simultaneously being observed and observing are important to their work. Jones (2019), for example, explored how her body is perceived as a threat in food retail spaces. White (2018) poignantly wrote about Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms as an early model for cooperative development and a bold antipoverty initiative. Although Hamer expressed deep disappointment in the failure of Freedom Farms, McCutcheon (2019) argued that Hamer’s expression of “total economic development” represents a commitment to cooperative development and feeding all poor and impoverished people in the rural Mississippi Delta. Finally, Black women have used food to economically sustain Black communities. In Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, Williams-Forson (2006) set the groundwork for Black women’s food geographies by interrogating the complexities of chicken beyond the racialized stereotype, and how Black women used chicken in some cases to economically develop Black communities.

Although food studies might have ignored Black women’s voices, Black women’s food geographies are standing on a long tradition of Black women scholars who have always done the work of writing about and understanding Black women’s foodways in academic and nonacademic spaces. Moreover, this is the environment that NCNW was organizing and strategizing in. As a Black women’s organization, their gaze allowed them to see what others might miss. NCNW women see Black organizing power in a region that White supremacist violence seeks to overtake. In the tradition of powerful women like Fannie Lou Hamer, they know their ability to work across this region whether others acknowledge it or not. NCNW women also understand their liminal presence. White people see them, but do not see their power; in that there is an ability for them to make meaningful change. They play on this liminal status in many ways, use respectability politics, and work to end hunger. Importantly, the scholars mentioned earlier might not agree that what NCNW is doing is activist or political work and would undoubtedly challenge their use of respectability politics. I argue, however, that NCNW’s work is a part of a tradition that is both internal and outward looking.

Changing Our Bodies and the Land

Territoriality of the Hungry Body

NCNW’s hunger agenda was made possible by occupying a purposefully liminal space. In the first part of the article, I discussed Black women’s intimate knowledge of themselves, a knowledge sometimes counter to what others seek to claim about them. Some Black women are keenly aware of controlling images, and at times might mediate images of themselves and other Black women in hopes that a particular type of Black body would be able to navigate a violent landscape. NCNW actively took on their role as race women, publicly sharing their knowledge and tools in hopes of ending hunger among poor Black people. NCNW’s insistence on transforming themselves revolved around the belief that no one knew Black women better than themselves. They spoke for themselves, and strongly believed themselves to be connected to Black people across the United States and the diaspora.

At Daytona Institute (which eventually became Bethune Cookman College), Mary McLeod Bethune

insisted on training women to be more feminine in order to combat white racism that assumed the black woman’s inherent immorality. At the same time, her emphasis on teaching domestic arts indicates her belief that African American women “must be recognized and accepted first as women in order to promote social change.” (Tuuri 2018, loc 479)

Bethune (1926) believed that there are certain behaviors and styles of dress that Black women should adopt to promote social change. For example, she noted:

The education of the Negro girl must embrace a larger appreciation for good citizenship in the home. Our girls must be taught cleanliness, beauty and thoughtfulness and their application in making home life possible. (85)

Such privileging of “good citizenship” in home spaces is complex and must be viewed within the context of Black womanhood, where Black women working inside of their own homes was seen as an affront to White supremacy and White womanhood. Bethune’s belief of what constitutes good citizenship for Black women is embracing a larger narrative of where and how Black women can exist. For Black race women like NCNW, territoriality of the body through respectability is partially used to control the image of the Black female body, a body marred in stereotypes, and a historical denial of the purported privileges of White womanhood. For some, NCNW’s use of respectability places an interesting shadow over their work to end hunger in Black communities. I do not divorce NCNW’s efforts from earlier narratives about what it means to be Black, a Black woman, and how Black people could progress. I also, however, do not unfairly tie them to these narratives that were written within a particular time and arguably so that they could enter spaces. NCNW’s use of respectability represents their efforts, whether we agree with their strategies, in placing themselves and their bodies in strategic positions to be heard.

Control for NCNW was also about protecting Black women from physical and sexual harm. I argue that in their actions, Bethune and NCNW women used respectability to bring about a cloak of invisibility, not for their voices but as protection for Black women’s bodies. Although actively seeking invisibility might be seen as oppressive, the distinction between body and voice is important. NCNW women were using styles of dress and clothing to mask their bodies and control the “controlling” images of them that Collins (1990) laid out in Black Feminist Thought. These controlling images stem from Black women’s bodies being put on display without their consent, oppressed, and brutalized. For example, Collins (1990) described the controlling image of the “jezebel,” which is simultaneously viewed as hypersexualized and masculine. This image is rooted in how Black women’s bodies were used and consumed during slavery. They functioned as reproductive technology for the plantation system and as sexual pleasure often for White plantation owners. Such sexual pleasure was meant to be for White men only, however, and Black women’s bodies were often brutalized in the process. Collins (1990) discussed the history of controlling images and Black women’s agency in resisting controlling images individually, collectively, and through literature.

Hunger politics and policy is often presented as very individualistic, bringing with it a judgment about why people are hungry, and how through their own actions they can get themselves out of chronic hunger. In Let Them Eat Promises, Kotz (1969) discussed how early U.S. efforts to address hunger through policy deliberately left poor hungry people out of the decision-making process. White state and federal legislators made policies that were inadequate, insulting, and racist toward poor Black people. As history has progressed, hunger policy continues to devalue those most in need of transformative policies. Even supposedly good-hearted policies and programs paint the poor (often Black) bodies as undeserving of safe and healthy food. Moreover, the government has continued to shift the responsibility of feeding those in need to nonprofit and private organizations like churches and soup kitchens. In Sweet Charity, Poppendieck (1999) found that well-meaning volunteers in emergency food programs often think of themselves as different, and at times morally better than those coming in to be served. Volunteers within the alternative food movement also see themselves as bringing healthy food to poor communities of color, thus setting themselves apart from the very people that they seek to serve. Although control might not be the first word that people think of in hunger politics, it has always been at the center of how we view poor people’s choices around food.

For NCNW, territoriality of the body was also about NCNW’s management of Black bodies and ideology through hunger politics. NCNW leaders were often middle- and upper middle-class Black people, and they were using their power (education, prestige, money, and connections) to make change on the local, state, and national levels. They were connected by race to the Black people they worked on behalf of, but through discourse like Bethune’s, espoused views on respectability. In hunger discourse and hunger politics, however, control of the Black body is not limited to organizations like NCNW. Groups like the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) make direct connections between the female body and racial uplift. In distinct ways, both place the responsibility of racial uplift directly on Black women’s morality and behavior (Heynen 2009; McCutcheon 2013). Heynen (2009) interrogated the BPP’s use of “pussy power,” which required party women to do much of the work for the party’s food program but stay behind the scenes in terms of its leadership. Moreover, Black women’s bodies, through sex, should be of service to Black men, as their sexuality is seen as a source of control. The NOI encourages Black women to be moral and respectful and believe that their bodies should be used to build and uphold a Black nation through upholding the Black family and procreating with Black men (McCutcheon 2013). For both organizations, control of Black women’s bodies and Black woman’s sexual freedom was tied to Black radical politics. Black women were seen as vital to building and growing a Black radical nation that was free from White supremacy. Within Black radical visions, there was a particular space that Black women were supposed to occupy, and radical did not equate to bodily and sexual freedom for Black women who were a part of these movements. Members of both groups believed that Black women both inside of and outside of the party needed to occupy roles as strong, intelligent, and radical providers to build a Black nation (Heynen 2009; McCutcheon 2013).

Respectability politics are a prominent part of NCNW founder Bethune’s discourse. NCNW is founded on beliefs of ideal Black womanhood that applied to themselves, and to Black people at large. They emulate Bethune’s presentation of Black women, and believe that others, particularly poor Black people, should, too, if they are to progress. In my estimation, NCNW is also using respectability to minimize “risk.” Mansfield (2012) conceptualized the pregnant woman’s body as a biopolitical space, the intermediary between the fetus and environmental contaminants. Instead of public health guidelines being geared toward minimizing or eliminating environmental pollutants in certain types of fish or fishways, these guidelines are instead geared toward what pregnant woman should or should not eat, making the pregnant body the ultimate responsibility. For NCNW, “risk” is hunger, and NCNW women are clearly aware that hunger for Black people is influenced by racism, White supremacy, and patriarchy. Respectability politics helps NCNW to minimize the burden of this risk to themselves and other Black people. Their attention to Black respectability in the context of the U.S. democracy is complex. On one hand, they are positioning Black women to be a part of national policy and full participants in the dream of the U.S. democracy. On the other hand, they are saying that to do so, Black women must show up in a particular way to be guaranteed full citizenship. Their narrative of domesticity and self-help essentially makes Black people the “intermediary,” who must then use respectability as a part of a method to appeal for policy change, while intermixing other activism to shield them and their families against larger ills.

Territoriality of the Local and National Landscape

NCNW was an organization of organization. In this section, I show how locally, it both supported radical antipoverty initiatives of other organizations and organized its own initiatives through local chapters. First, NCNW was able to direct and distribute resources to individuals and groups who best knew their communities. Often, their support assisted programming and activism that presented a direct threat to White supremacy. NCNW provided money for rural Southern pig banks across Alabama and Mississippi, including Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms Cooperative. Hamer was a Black Power and civil rights activist, not afraid to speak her mind, and the White supremacist power structure both locally and nationally viewed Hamer as a radical agitator. Hamer not only made White people uncomfortable, but she also made many Black middle- and upper middle-class groups and leaders uncomfortable because of her style of speech and sometimes open rejection of respectability politics. At Freedom Farms Cooperative, Hamer’s goal was to create a sustainable agricultural system that would serve the Black poor of Mississippi (White 2018; McCutcheon 2019; Blain 2021). That NCNW prominently supported Hamer is evidence that their more radical acts, although subversive, seemed to happen at the local scale. In fact, their use of territorialism at the local level is not unique to the organization. Although the civil rights and Black Power movement are often pitted against each other, some note the overlap among groups and actions in both movements (Joseph 2006). Simply put, there is a false binary, and the support of NCNW of more radical local actions surrounding hunger complicates this stark delineation.

NCNW local chapter projects were in line with goals of self-help and community uplift among Black women, centering economic sustainability through traditional concepts like consumer economics and trainings that included canning and other food preservation methods. Such revolutionary methods continue to sustain Black food sources during a time when an affordable, healthy, local, and safe food source is not available to many Black communities. Richards-Greeves (2020) wrote about food preservation methods in a rural Black South Carolina town as one of its many acts of resistance and “preparation for a literal and figurative fight” (56). NCNW also started local school lunch programs along with the YWCA, the National Council of Women and Church Women United that were focused on children nationwide who could not pay. In a publication titled The Legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune, NCNW women argued, “free lunch must be made available to every child who cannot afford to pay.” Additionally, during their WIMS program detailed earlier, they found that although feeding people was vital in Mississippi, adequate housing for the state’s residents was of utmost importance and worked as a liaison between the local community and federal government to provide housing for poor residents in Mississippi. They had a sustainable approach toward addressing hunger and food security and did not believe that feeding people alone would cure hunger. Rather housing, job security, and economic development more broadly were needed to provide a sustainable solution to ending hunger (The Legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune 1974).

On the local scale, NCNW’s emphasis on self-help started at a young age. Many of their programs were aimed at youth and youth delinquency. Even as they stressed ending hunger among young Black children nationwide, they also recruited Black girls from impoverished homes and middle-class homes to help tackle youth delinquency. They said:

Once the girls are found it is not just a simple matter of recruitment and screening. The picture of broken homes, solo parents, many children, crowded substandard homes, school dropouts, is all too common. (The Legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune 1974, 15)

In their pamphlets, they focused mostly on conditions, yet some of these conditions seemingly attributed behavioral patterns to poor Black people. They believe these behavioral patterns must change to make institutional change sustainable. My reading of their self-help programs is that they are trying to address conditions in local areas. In places like Mississippi, abject hunger and poverty are paramount.

Nationally, NCNW petitioned the federal government through traditional policy means in line with their need to change U.S. democracy. They did not forget about their radical local politics, but instead used the actions of Hamer and other local activists as evidence to bolster policy recommendations made on a national scale. Bethune advised three U.S. presidents and had political connections that were unparalleled for Black women during this time. Bethune’s access to U.S. presidents was not just because she wanted prestige; she sought to establish Black women as patriots of this country. In the founding documents of NCNW, Bethune wrote a letter to the Secretary of War Henry Stimson, where she said:

We are anxious for you to know that we want to be and insist upon being considered a part of our American democracy, not something apart from it. We know from experience that our interests are too often neglected, ignored, or scuttled unless we have effective representation in the formative stages of these projects and proposals. (Bethune 1942, 174)

Subsequent letters to other top-ranking federal officials indicate a deep investment in U.S. democracy and cementing Black women as leaders of this democracy and fit to carry out its democratic ideals. In a 1947 letter speech titled “Americans All: Which Way, America???”, Bethune asked:

[I]s it to be the Democracy of the lynching mob and flaunted law? Of intimidation and threat and fear? Or it to be the Democracy of law and order, of the 14th Amendment really enforce, of the sanctity of the individual, of the protection of person and home against brute strength and fear? (Bethune 1947, 186)

She envisioned a land of equality and believed that the United States has the founding principles to uphold democracy if it would simply enforce what it already knows. Bethune’s stance is interesting, because she was the daughter of slaves and although not born into slavery, the legacy of slavery was in her immediate past. She strongly believed, however, in the possibility of U.S. democracy. Much of the work that she was doing with NCNW was meant to increase the status of Black women, but also make the United States into what she believed it to be capable of. So, her positioning of NCNW’s work around hunger or any other issue related to equality or justice is not in contradiction to or in opposition to the country’s goals, but rather a call to action for the country and its leaders to live up to its principles for all its citizens.

The 1972 Hunger Convocation was meant to be a public show of NCNW’s work and power as an organization. The group had difficulty finding a hotel that would host a large group of Black women, but Marion Anderson, one of the chairs of the 1972 Hunger Convocation, was a close friend of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and used this affiliation with Roosevelt to help secure the hotel. The 1972 Hunger Convocation reflects the NCNW’s national strategy. They were not appealing to a federal government that they were separate from. They were appealing to a nation that they were clearly a part of, and it was in this nation’s best interest to feed all children. In the opening program “statement of purpose,” it states:

Hungry children are a particular concern of black women. Far too often it has been their children who have struggled against the odds of underdeveloped brain cells and bodies caused by malnutrition. Chronic hunger takes its toll in many ways—educationally, psychologically, and socially. It spawns violence in people who cannot hear the message of America’s participatory system because the roar of an empty stomach is deafening. (NCNW Program Statement of Purpose)

NCNW acknowledges the unique circumstances facing Black people and Black women that are a result of systematic oppression. It is “our” responsibility as a nation to fix this problem, however. Their understanding of themselves as a part of the U.S. democracy is vital. Whether or not others see Black women as a part of or central to the U.S. democracy, Black women understand their vital importance. NCNW’s efforts to transform hunger policy reflect their vision of themselves, and their positioning of themselves within U.S. democracy. In many ways, it seems they aim to realize a dream for a country that the country does not (or perhaps does not want to) realize for themselves. They are not seeking to build a utopian United States, but rather a respectable country that would administer a hunger policy that is Black woman focused and antipoverty based.

Respectable Black Feminists: Moving with Calculated, Precise, and Hidden Ease

In an oft-cited work, Lorde (1984) asks about the appropriateness of using the “master’s tools,” saying that for those of us who have always operated on the margins, we have to use our “differences and make them strengths” (194). For me, one of the underlying tensions in this article is whether NCNW is using the “master’s tools” to transgress the White supremacist South. As Lorde aptly noted, using the oppressors’ tools will never transform the system. These words remain with me as I consider NCNW’s efforts to transform hunger policy and how respectability became one of their many tools to do so. Their fight to eliminate hunger through local, state, and national activism cannot be ignored, but we must still consider why they used these tools and how they used these tools. More important, did NCNW reinforce some of the same “ills” and divisions about the deserving and undeserving poor?

It is difficult to determine motive from NCNW’s historical documents, and Black women’s agency is important to me. Although NCNW’s founder and first president might have intentionally deployed respectability politics, I cannot assume that all NCNW women made a purposeful effort to ascribe to values of White womanhood to make substantive change in hunger policy. One could argue that NCNW women, in all their complexities, represent the diversity of Black people and Black women. I rely heavily on Mary McLeod Bethune’s words, however, which privileged a particular type of Black person and Black woman. I do not let NCNW off the hook for their use of respectability politics to address hunger. The very people that NCNW distinguished themselves from were the poor Black people who they were seeking to serve. At times, poor Black people reflected NCNW women’s former and sometimes present selves. This is, in fact, one of the major problems with respectability. It casts certain Black people as good against the backs of others as bad. In the United States, particularly with hunger policy, poor people and specifically poor Black people have always been seen as a part of the problem. Black people who are not poor are conveniently used as a counterpoint within a White supremacist structure to further disparage poor Black people. Thus, NCNW’s efforts, although in part political, in some ways reinforce the belief that Black people are poor of their own accord and with hard work can get themselves out of poverty.

More than anything, NCNW created a model that continues to replicate itself politically and geographically. As Tuuri (2018) noted, even during the civil rights and Black Power movements, more radical organizations would credit NCNW’s help to create space for their activism through their institutional affiliation. One of the most prominent and recent examples is when Georgia, in the southern United States, “turned blue” in the 2020 election. Many were shocked and credited former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and founder of the Fair Fight Initiative Stacey Abrams with being somewhat of a miracle worker. Abrams’s work, however, was not a miracle for multiple reasons. First, her work was the result of a well-thought-out vision, careful planning, and strategic leadership. Second, Abrams did not work alone, and is a part of a coalition of mostly Black women. Third, Abrams, in part, followed an organizational model that was largely started by NCNW and continues to be replicated by Black women’s organizations and Black “race women” like Abrams. This model invokes strategic privacy, relies on alliances with trusted often Black women allies, and predicts White underestimation. In this model, Black women’s organizations like Black sororities and other social organizations work alongside Black women’s organizations with explicitly radical agendas. This model sees Black power beyond the urban, to less populated rural areas. When Georgia “turned blue,” many credited the city of Atlanta, but it was rural counties like Liberty County that had unprecedented turnout among Black voters (Paschal 2021). Abrams and her fellow Black women organizers knew this, because they understood the history of Black women organizers and organizations. Moreover, they understood the United States in the same all-encompassing way that NCNW did. This notion of Black women saving U.S. democracy has within it an assumption that they are saving something that they do not see themselves as a part of. This might be true, but Black women were saving themselves, their families, and their communities and hoping to make a democracy that works for them.

Conclusion

In this article, I sought to demonstrate how NCNW, a historic Black women’s organization, worked to eliminate hunger through local community activism and appeals to the federal government for changes in U.S. hunger policy. I argue that knowing themselves and the South was central to their mission. Their efforts were a political act, an effort to reclaim and protect the body and the land. I do not aim to provide a simple yes or no answer as to whether actions, such as the use of respectability, should be used to further activist causes. Black women’s experiences and identities are nuanced, as are their methods for making change. I do believe, however, that for Black race women like those in NCNW, it is imperative that their use of respectability not further harm the poor Black people that they seek to work on behalf of, even if they see themselves reflected in them.

Avenues for future research on this topic are plentiful. Although much of the NCNW’s early work around hunger centers on their National Hunger Convocation, there is still more archival material on the organization on their food and antipoverty initiatives that I hope to delve into. Perhaps most important, NCNW is an organization that continues to exist today, although its popularity and reach are not as widespread. I am interested in seeing if and how the organization positions itself as race women on issues that are of concern to Black people, when many of the organizations under its umbrella (mainly Black sororities) are arguably more well-known than NCNW. Moreover, how does NCNW in the present continue to address access to food, hunger, food insecurity, and inadequate food, issues that are still prevalent in Black communities nationwide? In a recent newsletter publication, Julianne Malveaux, a labor economist and past president of historically Black all-women’s Bennet College, discussed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food crisis. Malveaux’s (2020) suggestions to NCNW’s audience (largely Black women and Black people) fall in line with NCNW ideology. She suggested to Black women:

If you are affected by rising food prices, remember that Black women know how to make a dollar stretch, and if you are affected by increasing costs, use some of that “mother wit” that our foremothers had. Do recipe substitutions, shop the sales, and clip the coupons.

In the next few sentences and at the national scale, she then made clear that everyone should try to affect policy by writing their local representatives and paying close attention to whether their local representative is on the House Agricultural Committee. NCNW’s history of utilizing self-help and self-reliance alongside advocating for policy change remains relevant. NCNW is one of many Black woman’s organizations that are attempting to make change. These organizations, however, are often charged with being elitist and out of touch with the concerns of working-class Black people. Like NCNW, many of these organizations operate on multiple scales, hiding the more threatening part of their activism while making appeals to the government for policy changes. Does it take away from their mission that they at times strategically wield respectability to do so? Or does it mean that they are politically astute, know themselves, and know how others view them? Both questions remain important.

Note

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Priscilla McCutcheon

PRISCILLA McCUTCHEON is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include Black geographies, agriculture, food, and faith in the U.S. South.

Notes

1 This is derived from Anna Julia Cooper’s (1892) famous phrase “when and where I enter” (loc 251), in Voices from the South, where she discusses the importance of Black women deciding how they work on behalf of themselves and their race. Cooper also discusses the importance of Black women doing this work as leaders and without the threat of violence.