"Ye Gave Them a Stone": African American Women's Clubs, the Frederick Douglass Home, and the Black Mammy Monument

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, the institutionalization of disfranchisement and segregation and the surging popularity of the Lost Cause, a movement to honor the Confederacy, led African Americans who recognized the power of public image to attempt to take control over their public representations. This article examines the ways in which African American clubwomen rejected the message of African American contentment in slavery and continued inferiority implicit in a proposed monument to honor the Black Mammy in Washington DC, and, through the purchase and restoration of the former home of Frederick Douglass, negotiated an alternative public identity for African Americans that focused on African American history, heroism, and respectability. African American women wanted to turn attention away from their service in white homes to their lives in their own homes as wives, homemakers, and mothers. Clubwomen's attention to public representation was an important foundation for their social welfare work.