Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement

V. P. Franklin and Bettye Collier-Thomas

To work and serve the hour in helping to solve the
many problems confronting the race; to study the
conditions in the cities and counties; and in the spirit
of Christ, by personal contact and sympathy, to lift as
we climb.

—Motto, National Association of
Colored Women (1896)¹

When Jennie L. Moton, president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), issued the call for the twenty-first biennial convention to be held in Boston in July 1939, she pointed out that the group was returning to the city where African American women first came together to address their pressing concerns, and made it clear that the goals of the organization remained the same since Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin's call in 1896. “Mrs. Ruffin sent forth a call to the colored women of the country and asked them to meet her in Boston as guests of the New Era Club.” Jennie Moton declared that “for 43 years the organization that grew out of this call has been working for the uplift of the Race generally and for the advancement of Race women in particular.”²

At the NACW's 1939 convention, the delegates participated in a

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