The National Council of Negro Women's Black Pride (in American Liberalism)

Most historical studies exploring the global activism of African Americans in the twentieth century have focused on the role of radicals in forging solidarity movements. My paper instead looks at a different type of activist—the black, moderate women of the National Council of Negro Women, the largest black women’s organization in the 1960s and 1970s. These women worked within the framework of American liberalism to establish poverty projects for women of African descent around the world. From 1975 to 1979, the United States Agency for International Development granted the Council over $800,000 first to create a concurrent symposium at the 1975 International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City and then to establish development projects throughout Africa. Although the Council had been an official observer of the UN, it did not express its public solidarity with liberation movements in the 1960s. Instead, it waited until the 1970s, working within its new initiatives sponsored by the United States government, to strengthen its international activism. Drawing upon critical race theory, especially intersectionality, this study utilizes transcripts of taped Council meetings, national conference records, private correspondence, newspaper articles in the black press, and oral histories with Council women and other civil rights activists to show how the Council sought to alleviate poverty in small, private, and extra-governmental means, instead of working to challenge American political (liberal) and economic (capitalist) systems. Its methods reinforced, instead of challenged, American diplomacy, thus providing an alternative model of African American international activism at the height of Black Power.