Women and the Freedom Struggle in the Twentieth Century

Paula Giddings argued that black women have created the conditions to free everyone. ¹ Black women and their families at the turn of the twentieth century lived in worlds so circumscribed that their only source of support, when times were hard, were those generated by the black community itself. Black women relied on themselves to take care of their own. The Jim Crow state offered only repressive measures to Southern black communities. There were no old-age pensions, public welfare, unemployment insurance, workmen's compensation, or health care available. The black community, often under black women's leadership, created organizations and institutions to protect, provide for, and empower its people. By making visible black women's activist efforts at the local as well as the national and international levels, we witness their struggles to find community, power, and self-definition; in the process we learn about the freedom strategies created by black women that benefit us all.