Tribute Politics and the Deceased in the Black Women’s Club Movement

This paper examines black club women’s use of eulogies, tributes, reminiscences, and other forms of memorials to shore up their campaign from racial uplift and gender equality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In mobilizing memorials dedicated to the deceased, Black club women in the National Association of Colored Women disrupted gendered and racialized discourses in the public sphere that silenced Black women’s voices and reinforced negative stereotypes about the Black community. Closer examination of the NACW’s organizational records reveal club women’s use of literary societies, conferences, print media, speeches, and historical sketches to simultaneously ruminate on the deceased while challenging the status quo. Members of the NACW crafted legacies of pioneering Black activists who had passed on and inserted those activists into the public’s memory as waged battles against Jim Crow and racial violence. Club members also canonized early black women pioneers of the struggle for racial and gender equality. This paper revisits their interventions through their eulogies to countless Black activists and how those interventions advanced the Black community’s struggle for racial and women’s rights.