Preparing the Way: African American Club Women and Social Christianity in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago

This dissertation tells the story of African American club women’s Christian activism in Chicago in the decades surrounding the turn of the century (1890-1919). Black club women organized, served, and marched to materialize what they understood as the gospel promise of social salvation in the lives of Black Chicagoans who experienced racial discrimination, segregation, and violence, as well as economic oppression and political marginalization. African American club women labored to apply their vision of Black social Christianity for the uplift of the “least” among them (Matthew 25:40) in Black Chicago, namely children, women, and the elderly. For many women in these decades, “missionary work” provided a rationale and framework for their social and racial reform activism. In the context of their clubs, they developed and led Black social gospel projects, drawing their theological motivations for social and racial reform activism from their churches in Chicago and reformulating those theological ideas to address issues that concerned them as Black women and mothers. In pursuing this gospel-inspired activism they developed a distinctive lived theology of the Black social gospel, which I have described in terms of a “theology of collective kinship,” which centered and reframed theological notions of “family” and “collective responsibility” among Black Chicagoans. They pursued a platform for social and racial reform that targeted civil rights issues and forged a pragmatic strategy for racial advancement that prioritized interracial cooperation. At its best, the distinct Black social gospel practiced by African American club women in Chicago was a resource for Black residents in the city in their struggles against the forces of white supremacy, economic oppression, and political disenfranchisement