"The Women of Florida are Wide Awake": The National Association of Colored Women's Clubs in Florida, 1897-1930

Authors

• Cynthia Patterson

Abstract

The March-April 1915 issue of the National Association Notes--the publication of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC)--included a five-line update submitted from the Florida Association that proudly proclaimed, "The women of Florida are all wide awake." The note explained that the Daytona and Jacksonville clubs had been blessed recently by a visit from the national President of the NACW: Margaret Murray Washington, wife of Tuskegee Institute President, Booker T. Washington. Clearly, Washington's visit energized the Florida federated clubs. Although the NACW had been in existence since the merger in 1896 of two earlier groups-the Colored Women's League and the Federation of Afro-American Women-the growth of federated clubs in Florida had been slow. That is not to say that no women's clubs existed in Florida before that time: in fact, black women's groups flourished in Florida in the first decade of the twentieth century, as elsewhere across the nation, but most groups remained active primarily at the local level, rather than at the state or national level.

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Recommended Citation

Patterson, Cynthia (2019) ""The Women of Florida are Wide Awake": The National Association of Colored Women's Clubs in Florida, 1897-1930," Florida Historical Quarterly: Vol. 98: No. 1, Article 4.
Available at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/vol98/iss1/4