“The good, the bad, and the indifferent”

This chapter examines Black activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s advice to Black and white temperance reformers on how to organize together at the end of Reconstruction and the dawn of the Jim Crow era. In her career in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Harper experienced and carefully documented narrowing grounds for coalition. Harper presented political participation in the temperance movement, in part, as an opportunity for white women to reform themselves and white men. She urged white women to interrogate how white gender and racial ideals implicated them in rising white supremacy.