African American Women’s Clubs’ Activism in Chicago: the Remaining Strength of Extended Kinship Solidarity

Within the African-American community, sustaining family ties has particular importance and this has always been the case despite the successive migration waves that occurred in the wake of slavery. Similarly, within the clubs’ movement that African-American women created and which enjoyed a heyday from the 1890s through the 1920s, the purpose was to maintain and expand social ties within the community, ties of kinship and also between social classes, in an urban context unknown to most of them. The present essay mainly focuses on mothers’ clubs in Chicago where Black women reformers sought—and still seek—to save the disadvantaged mothers from their social isolation. Patricia Hill Collins asserts that the activities of these “other mothers”, who are a part of the larger scope of the kinship networks in the black community, paved the way for their political activism. These maternal practices set a standard of solidarity and of collective survival. By focusing first on the history of the club movement, and secondly on my fieldwork at Sankofa Safe Child Initiative in the West Side of Chicago, the essay assesses the legacy of these women and the importance of family in the African American community that has prevailed despite many hardships