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Introduction and background
SCHOOL FOUND ERS Lucy Craft Laney (1854-1933), Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955), Nannie Helen Burroughs (18831961), and Charlotte Hawkins Brown (1883-1961) lived and worked within a shared historical framework and sense of mission to their race and sex. With the exception of former slave Laney, all were born within a few years of each other in the post-Reconstruction South. Their lively correspondence over decades shows their support of each other and their similar views on many issues. They shared strong religious convictions, belief in black women's leadership as a key to racial progress, and maternal love for the schools they founded. The harsh economic and social conditions they faced as black women laboring to keep their fledging schools afloat partly explains their bond. As the first postslavery generation of educated black women, they are also linked by their views on the role of education in uplifting the race and in gaining respect and acceptance for their maligned black sisters. Over the years, as social and economic events raised and then dashed their fortunes, the individual imprint of each woman's work became evident. Yet they remained, through the first half of the twentieth century, committed to a collective movement of black female leadership dedicated to empowering themselves and improving the lives of their people.
The era in which these women launched their careers was marked by virulent and violent racism against black people. Black women were doubly stigmatized as a result of the legacy of sexual exploitation endured by their mothers and grandmothers under slavery. Many white women, whose legal rights were barely above those of former slaves, used the lingering myth of white female purity to distance themselves from the plight of black women and to exclude them from their organizations.' Under these conditions, a cadre of black women, whom historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham calls "the female talented-tenth" (1993, 21) formed their own organizations and institutions and committed themselves to "race uplift" (Perkins 1983) in general and to improving their image and status in particular.2 Such work by educators Laney, Bethune, Brown, and Burroughs was infused with a consciousness of their roles as leaders of their race and sex.
These educators have remained on the margins of history, invoked as examples of black...
