Detroit Study Club

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About

At the turn of the twentieth century, African American women in the Midwestern state of Michigan formed the Detroit Study Club (originally named the Browning Club), an urban association dedicated to individual intellectual achievement and black community social betterment. The Detroit Study Club emerged in the 1890s concurrent with numerous other black women’s clubs across the country. In 2018, the group celebrated one-hundred-and-twenty continuous years of activity. The original creators of the Detroit Study Club, women of the small black middle and upper class in the city, emphasized education. They established the club to increase their knowledge about literature and social issues. Committed to the mores and aesthetics of a Victorian American culture typically upheld by a white feminine elite, club members read white European authors from the era. While their work began with studies of the literary arts, they later extended that work into community welfare endeavors.

History

The Detroit Study Club was founded on March 2, 1898, when Gabrielle Pelham and five of her friends -- Fannie Anderson, Sarah Warsaw, J. Pauline Smith, Mrs. Wil Anderson, and Mrs. Tomlison -- met at Pelham’s home to discuss literature. Pauline Smith served as the club’s first president. The women gathered regularly to expand their knowledge of cultural and social issues. Members initially called their group the Browning Study Club because they focused their attention on the writing of popular nineteenth-century British poet and playwright, Robert Browning (husband of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning). For their motto, the club adopted a line of Browning’s verse: “Let man contend to the uttermost for his life’s set prize.” After five years, group members expanded their scope and began to study other authors, art, religion, and history. In 1904, the women renamed their organization the Detroit Study Club but vowed to devote one annual meeting to Robert Browning’s life and work. Club members followed Parliamentary procedure according to Emma Fox’s rules of the 1920's.

Aims and Activities

In the arena of community outreach, club members’ chief concerns were the education of black children and the support of elderly black women. The establishment of the Phillis Wheatley Home for Aged Colored Ladies in Detroit was the Study Club’s most concrete and enduring expression of this commitment. In 1897, Fannie Richards, a Study Club member and influential public school teacher, co-founded the Phillis Wheatley Home along with Mary McCoy (spouse of Ypsilanti inventor Elijah McCoy). Fannie Richards then served as the first president of the Wheatley Home. Detroit Study Club members helped to make the Wheatley home a secure space of comfort and love for their elders. Club meeting minutes reveal that for at least the first half of the twentieth century, members held an annual Christmas party for Wheatley Home residents and donated five dollars each year for gifts.

Detroit Study Club members also invested in another home far from Michigan. In a valiant effort to save Cedar Hill--home of the abolitionist, writer, and activist, Frederick Douglass--the National Association of Colored Women launched a fundraising campaign in 1917. NACW succeeded in the effort to purchase and restore the home by drawing upon the effort of clubs across the country. The women of the Detroit Study Club embraced the cause by selling commemorative spoons in order to fund the purchase and maintenance of the property. The campaign to save Cedar Hill and transform it into a memorial stemmed from black club women’s commitment to preserving the physical markers of African American cultural heritage and thereby honor the legacies of the black past. The involvement of the Detroit Study Club in this national effort demonstrated the group’s close ties to a broad network of club women. Cedar Hill, located in Anacostia, is now a National Historic Landmark operated by the National Park Service.

Prominent Figures

• Gabrielle (Lewis) Pelham, founder of the Detroit Study Club, was born in Adrian, Michigan. She was the first woman to receive a bachelor’s degree in music at Adrian College and the first person of color to hold a formal position in Michigan State’s Music Teacher Association.

• Lillian Johnson was a writer, civil rights and women’s rights activist who served as the eighth president of the Detroit Study Club in the early 1900s (1918-1920). Johnson created many of the organization’s written materials, including event programs, invitations, and speeches.

• Fannie Richards was a member of the Detroit Study Club and Detroit’s first African American teacher. She led efforts to desegregate Detroit public schools and contributed to American elementary education when she urged administrators to develop a trial kindergarten program as early as 1872, making Detroit one of the first U.S. cities to hold kindergarten classes. Richards was the co-founder and first president of the Phillis Wheatley Home for Aged Colored Ladies in Detroit.

• Margaret (McCall) Thomas Ward established and maintained the archives for the Detroit Study Club at the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library. She was the first chair of the club’s historical committee. Ward was the daughter of Margaret McCall, who, along with her husband, James McCall, published two black newspapers: The Emancipator in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1910s, and in 1933, the Detroit Tribune, a weekly.

• The Honorable Geraldine Bledsoe Ford, the first African American woman in the United States to be elected to a judgeship, was a member of the Detroit Study Club, as was her mother, Mrs. Harold Bledsoe, wife of the first African American to serve as a state attorney general in Michigan.

• The Honorable Chief Judge Denise Page Hood is a member of the Detroit Study Club. She was appointed to a federal judgeship on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan by President Bill Clinton in 1994. In 2016, Judge Hood became the chief judge for that district court and the fourth African American to hold a chief judgeship in a federal court.

Public Recognition

On May 10, 1999, President Bill Clinton congratulated the Detroit Study Club for their 100th anniversary in a letter. In April of 2016, the Historical Society of Michigan recognized the Detroit Study Club’s centennial longevity with the Milestone Award and a plaque noting the organization’s contributions to the state’s vitality and growth.

Historical Context

The Black Women's Club Movement

The Detroit Study Club was one among many groups that made up the Black Women’s Club Movement. Following the Civil War and the rise and fall of federal Reconstruction, black elites adopted a theory and practice of uplift in order to promote racial unity and present a positive image of the black community to a wider and exclusionary white society. Uplift politics involved protest against racist features of society, such as segregation and violence towards blacks. Additionally, uplift proponents exposed and denounced the cultural dimensions of white supremacy such as minstrel shows and caricatures. Racial uplift politics correlated closely with the gendered concept of respectability politics theorized by historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Practitioners of respectability politics, mainly African American women of the period, believed that adopting white middle class styles of appearance and comportment would improve dominant views of blacks and lead to greater regard for African Americans as a whole. Many African Americans believed that earning the respect of whites through a display of proper comportment (sexual purity, Christian morality, cleanliness, education, hard work, thrift, modesty of manners and speech, etc.) would help to secure black civil rights and economic inclusion. This was a mixed ideological approach, grounded in the belief in and showcasing of black pride and dignity and yet oriented around African American assimilation into a Euro-American majority culture. Black elites emphasized self-help, moral purity, and heterosexual patriarchal family structures as the keys to mainstream American society that would uplift the entire race. As black women organized self-help and community projects in churches and secular women’s clubs to uplift their race, they leveraged the ideas and practices of respectability.

The first wave of what is known as the women’s club movement of the Progressive Era began with upper-class white women seeking to aid people they described as the poor relief. As white women launched this reform effort, many black women were already engaged in community self-help and mutual aid through small, private gatherings such as sewing circles and church clubs that were usually held within homes. African American women then led a second and particular wave of national club organizing. Spurred by Ida B. Wells’s courageous campaign against lynching and by the commonplace sexual disparagement of black women in public culture, black women already active in their local communities nationalized their efforts. In 1895, Boston-based black women’s club organizer and editor, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, held the first trans-regional meeting. A hundred club women traveled to Boston from ten other states in order to forge a collective response to an insult leveled against the character of Ida B. Wells (Barnett) by the president of the Missouri Press Association.

In addition to facing disparaging commentary in the male-dominated mainstream press, black club women faced marginalization by their white women counterparts. Black women were not allowed to represent their own clubs at conventions like the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1900. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a refined Bostonian and prominent African American club organizer, was not permitted to enter the convention, despite having been previously “approved” by members of white women’s clubs. Recognizing the urgent need to organize and defend themselves, black women grew their movement. They consolidated their energies in 1896 with the founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), which united the National League of Colored Women and the National Federation of Afro-American Women. They increased membership steadily through the 1920s. The NACW undertook a strong defense of black women’s morality and virtue, aiming to promote positive images of the sexuality of black women who were frequently stereotyped as hypersexual and subject to sexual insult and assault. Defending black women’s character, these organizers felt, would increase racial pride overall and reshape public opinion about African Americans as a race.

The formalization of the NACW did not substantially alter black women’s social, political, and economic agendas for community self-help. Rather, the NACW served as a broad, collective platform for discussion and offered a new outlet for the ideas and voices of black women struggling to improve their personal and communal lives. African American women had been nurturing symbiotic relationships long before the 1890s, creating support circles within enslaved communities that were empowering and instrumental to survival. As they transitioned into the postbellum period, African American women continued to work for self-improvement and racial advancement upon a foundation of pre-established ties. The umbrella network of the NACW built on black women’s former organizational knowledge and accomplishments.

Black and white women’s clubs were often led by prosperous, educated women. However, due to job discrimination and economic disparities resulting from racial prejudice, “elites” in the African American community more closely resembled the white middle class of the time. Historian Michele Mitchell describes black reformers as hailing from both an aspirational class and an elite strata of society. Black women organizers, many of whom were descendants of slaves from the South, understood themselves to be closely linked to the poor and struggling classes of their race, and their activism reflected this sense of kinship. Black club women focused on the concerns of all poor, black working mothers and their children, linking the welfare of black children to the status of the entire race. Their reform agenda was geared toward informing and supporting mothers with health education and child-care programs, educating children, and caring for the aged. They also worked to end lynching, the unfair treatment of prisoners in the convict lease system, and Jim Crow segregation. Many of these issues were not of particular concern to white women because they were not subjected to the societal oppression levied against black women.

Black women’s activism therefore deviated from the standard domestic attachments assumed within a Euro-American Victorian family structure. Women like Ida B. Wells often faced conservative pushback from black ministers who clung to a Victorian patriarchal understanding of women’s and men’s roles as a defense mechanism against journalistic, minstrel show stage, and social science critiques of black families. Despite lacking full support from their male counterparts, African American women across the nation took action against racist legislation through the establishment of local clubs that worked to advance all African Americans.

Black Detroit in the Antebellum and Jim Crow Eras

While the National Black Women’s Club movement developed across the country, members of the Detroit Study Club began convening in Detroit. Black residents of Detroit had been organizing in numerous ways since at least the early 1800s. In the first half of the century, Detroit was a hub for the Underground Railroad due to its politicized black community and important geographical location on the border with Canada. Second Baptist Church, founded in 1836 by thirteen former slaves, served along with other churches in the city as a sanctuary for enslaved people escaping from the South. Among the congregation of Second Baptist was William Lambert, a principal conductor on the Underground Railroad who arrived in Detroit in 1838 at the age of twenty-one. Lambert worked closely with the church’s first pastor, William C. Monroe, and also with George DeBaptiste, who had arrived in Detroit in 1846. Together, Lambert, DeBaptiste, and fellow activists created a secret system of communication for travelers on the Underground Railroad. The Detroit-based UGRR network stretched across southeastern Michigan and included a well-known Ypsilanti family, the Arays. In the 1820s, Jacob Aray, a man of mixed black and white heritage, relocated to Michigan with his extended family, including his son Asher. By the 1840s, Asher Aray and his wife Catherine operated a sizable farm along Michigan Avenue and attended meetings of the Michigan Anti-Slavery Society in Ann Arbor and Detroit. The Arays and other members of the Ypsilanti community such as John and Mary Starkweather and George and Mildred McCoy (parents of the famed inventor Elijah McCoy) collaborated to house, feed, and support enslaved people en route to Canada by way of Detroit. In 1853, the Arays facilitated the flight of twenty-eight runaways from Kentucky, an uncommonly large group. A celebratory dinner for the freedom seekers held at the Second Baptist Church in Detroit was said to have attracted as many as 200 supporters, including the prominent white abolitionist Laura Smith Haviland.

Later, in the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era, black Detroiters organized to fight against persistent racial prejudice through journalism and association work. In 1883, Robert Pelham Jr. and his brother Benjamin Pelham co-founded the Detroit Plaindealer, the first black newspaper in the city. In 1890, Robert Pelham served as the Detroit delegate to the Michigan meeting of the short-lived National Afro-American League, which worked toward achieving full citizenship and equality for black Americans. A member of what a local journalist in 1902 called the Cultured Colored Forty, Pelham was integral to Detroit’s black middle class, a group that had made economic gains through merchant and service oriented professions. While the auto industry in Detroit was slow to make a significant economic difference for the black community, black-owned businesses grew. A new black middle class began to emerge made up of businessmen, newspapermen, doctors, lawyers, and school teachers. Many among this small group of black entrepreneurs were close associates of the Pelham family, including William W. Ferguson, a Michigan state representative. William Ferguson also owned the largest press in the city, which printed the Pelhams’ Detroit Plaindealer. Ferguson rose to prominence in the black community by fighting segregation in restaurants. In Ferguson v. Gies (1890), the landmark case brought by Ferguson, the Michigan court ruled that separation by race in public places was illegal. A well-networked advocate for black social advancement, Robert Pelham, Jr. was also the husband of Gabrielle (Lewis) Pelham, future founder of the Detroit Study Club.

Acknowledgments

This class project would not have been possible without the support of the Detroit Study Club and its members: Vice President Linda Bowie Williams and Historical Committee representatives Cynthia Long and Terees Western, as well as archivists Dawn Eurich and director Mark Bowden at the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library.

References

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