"Drill into us ... the Rebel tradition": The Contest over Southern Identity in Black and White Women's Clubs, South Carolina, 1898-1930.

IN HER MEMOIRS, MAMIE GARVIN FIELDS, AN AFRICAN AMERICAN CLUB-WOMAN from Charleston, South Carolina, relates a story about the statue of South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun that still stands in Francis Marion Square, in the center of downtown Charleston. According to Fields:

   At the same time that [Frederick] Douglass was preaching against slavery,
   John C. Calhoun was preaching for it.... Our white city fathers wanted to
   keep what [Calhoun] stood for alive.... [T]hey put up a life-size figure of
   John C. Calhoun preaching.... Blacks took that statue personally. As you
   passed by, here was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you,
   "Nigger, you may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your
   place."

Fields describes how black residents threw rocks at and otherwise defaced the statue, until it had to be raised out of reach of passersby.(1) Her words indicate that at the turn of the century--almost forty years after the South's defeat in the Civil War--black and white southerners still struggled with the meaning of defeat and emancipation. Many white women turned to the Lost Cause, the movement to honor the Confederacy, in order to recapture what they believed were the "glory days" of the South--the antebellum South of their childhood or of their parents. African American Charlestonians, on the other hand, rejected the message of black inferiority implicit in such statues as they sought to improve their social and economic conditions. They focused instead on black history, pride, and American citizenship.

Recently, historians have provided excellent analyses of white southern women's clubs' participation in Progressive-era social reform and black clubwomen's efforts to uplift the race through similar, but separate, social welfare programs.(2) This article focuses instead on the tension between black and white elite clubwomen's attempts to tell the story of southern, and American, history. The self-education component of women's clubs--their programs in history and literature--was important because it provided an opportunity for women's edification and growth, and the content of these offerings is critical as well. A survey of the history and literature examined by South Carolina club-women reveals how their consideration of these materials shaped their understanding of what it meant to be black or white in the postbellum South. Their attention to history and literature is compelling because clubwomen did more than simply study within the confines of the club. Through educational outreach and support for community libraries, they also attempted to transmit to children and the general public the ideals of southern, American, and racial identity that they celebrated. What is significant about black and white clubwomen in South Carolina, therefore, is not only their "progressive" behavior as reformers but also their ability to fuse history and identity construction with social reform work. Their program of building southern identity through the study of southern history and literature--their "cultural work"--shaped the New South as much as their "social work." Furthermore, their literary agenda is evident in their reform agenda: the social welfare programs that white clubwomen built and lobbied for were for whites only, and white clubwomen in South Carolina did not embrace the interracial work that church women in the 1920s would promote. At the same time and without state aid, black clubwomen used their own resources to fund social welfare programs for blacks. Ultimately, the racial underpinnings of the history that black and white clubwomen read, studied, and repeated, made white women part of the effort to create a culture of segregation in the New South as black women fought to combat that culture.

In the late nineteenth century, building on an earlier tradition of charity through church and benevolence societies, vast numbers of black and white women across the nation began to participate in a myriad of women's organizations, including the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), church missionary societies, and woman suffrage associations.(3) Black women's clubs organized at the turn of the century in the North and South, coming together in the National Association of Colored Women. In South Carolina, Marion Birnie Wilkinson and others founded the South Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (SCFCWC) in 1909. Federated clubs combined self-education with social work to varying degrees, as they sought to uplift the race by promoting respectability and pride in African Americans. They worked to improve standards of housekeeping and childcare in black homes at the same time they fought for state support for black institutions such as the Fairwold Home for Delinquent Colored Girls, founded by the SCFCWC in 1917. But their first purpose, as listed in the federation constitution, was the education of black women, and clubs across the state also read and studied history and literature. Some clubs, such as the Book Lover's Club of Charleston, were primarily literary clubs.(4)

White women's clubs, which began to flourish in the South in the 1890s and early 1900s, were usually organized expressly for the study of literature and history mid then later took up community service. They worked to institute kindergartens, playgrounds, and libraries, supported homes for juvenile delinquents and the hiring of jail matrons, and promoted other improvements in public health, education, and justice. Efforts ranged from the Kelly Free Kindergarten Association, which opened a kindergarten for mill workers' children in Charleston, South Carolina, to ongoing lobbying for state funding of kindergartens in the public schools, which was done by the legislative committee of the white South Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs (SCFWC), an umbrella organization of local women's clubs founded in 1898. Even when the social welfare agenda of the SCFWC began to exceed its literary program, however, many clubwomen refused to abandon their studies, and in fact, some clubs never did fully embrace reform work.(5)

The records of the SCFWC and its member clubs show that a sense of place pervaded much of their literary and reform work. Southern identity provided a little-noticed link between white women's clubs and the Lost Cause. While this took place primarily in literary clubs, even civics clubs sometimes expressed the motivation for their reform work in Lost Cause rhetoric.(6) In South Carolina, a crucial overlap existed in membership and ideals between many women's clubs and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), an association organized to promote the Lost Cause by defending, preserving, and transmitting the memory of the Confederacy. The UDC dedicated itself to building Confederate monuments and writing and regulating history. The organization limited its social work to Confederate veterans and their widows and children. Recently, scholars focusing on history and memory have begun to highlight the role of the UDC in this movement, providing a new understanding of women's importance to the Lost Cause. Southern white women assuaged defeat by celebrating white men's "masculine" roles as protectors.(7) At the same time, the club-women buttressed segregation because separation of the races protected white women from the supposed danger of black rape. Women's central role as proponents of the Lost Cause becomes even more evident if clubwomen are compared with members of the UDC.(8) The UDC and federated women's clubs were two of the largest women's associations in the South in the early twentieth century, and many white women's clubs talked about the same issues as the UDC, a group exclusively focused on the Lost Cause.(9) This overlap of topics testifies to the pervasiveness of Lost Cause ideology in southern society.(10) Exploring the literary and historical studies of women's clubs aid in understanding how whites came to terms with the Jim Crow South.

White clubwomen and the UDC understood well that monuments, rituals, and texts legitimized collective memories and that the history encompassed in these was a powerful tool for ordering the present.(11) As they looked to the past to build a New South, the exhaustive effort that they expended demonstrates that the past could not simply be remembered; rather a collective memory had to be invented, shaped, and constructed. The southern nation imagined by both clubwomen and members of the UDC was one in which white supremacy dominated, with space for only a subordinate--though free--black population. This racial ideology provided these women with further justification of the Confederate cause. And it allowed them to participate in, and enjoy the advantages of, the social order created by recently enacted disfranchisement and Jim Crow laws as a solution to the "Negro problem."

The SCFWC and the UDC both organized after the process of disfranchisement and the legalization of segregation had already begun in South Carolina. A state constitutional convention in 1895 disfranchised most African American voters, and segregation laws affecting school systems in 1895 and railroad cars in 1898 quickly followed. The clubs' work, however, overlaps the full implementation of such laws in the state and cities there, with additional segregation laws continuously passed, such as those in 1915 regarding textile mills. Although, as women, members of the SCFWC and UDC did not enact Jim Crow legislation, the ways in which they made and enforced a culture of segregation reveal how southerners accepted separation as timeless, natural, and just.(12) White clubwomen and the UDC were successful at creating a culture of segregation because they operated at the local level, through everyday events and ordinary people, as noted by historian Thomas C. Holt. Minstrelsy, he claims, "established a tradition, a system of signs, symbols, and layered racial codes that penetrated deep into American culture."(13) The same could be said about the Lost Cause. Evidence in South Carolina suggests that white southern clubwomen should be considered responsible for the segregated South in the same way that historians have begun to discover the role of women as "legitimators" and as "cultural organizers" within the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Germany. While they did not engage in violence or in vitriolic language, clubwomen and other proponents of Confederate celebration did help legitimize Lost Cause principles centered on southern honor and gender ideals and, as a result of their support for libraries and schools, uphold segregation through their telling of history, especially to children.(14)

Efforts of white clubwomen and the UDC were not completely successful in claiming southern history, as black clubwomen negotiated a different black, southern, and American identity. African American women were forced to respond to attempts by white women to delimit the South around slavery, the Confederacy, and white supremacy. Because they repudiated the Lost Cause, black women sought to define an alternative history, culture, and identity for themselves. It would be a mistake, however, to view this identity as created only in response to the Lost Cause. It was also grounded in African Americans' own sense of history and pride. Tellingly, blacks often stressed their American citizenship and contribution to the nation, rather than responding to precepts of the Lost Cause with an alternative version of southern history.

Contemporary blacks, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, understood the threat that the UDC and other proponents of the Lost Cause posed to black Americans. Justifying and honoring the memory of the Confederacy promoted a false memory of the success of slavery in regulating race relations and a refusal to reorder the racial hierarchy, despite the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. This enabled both the North and South to ignore crucial questions concerning black emancipation in the new South.(15) First the Ku Klux Klan and then mob lynchings proved that whites were more than willing to use violence in order to enforce white supremacy, despite emancipation.

As Mamie Garvin Fields indicates in her story of black Charlestonians' reactions to the Calhoun statue, African Americans did link their continuing impoverishment and disenfranchisement to the recalcitrance of white southerners as symbolized by the Lost Cause. Black clubwomen across the South and in South Carolina understood that they had to define African American identity for themselves through their study of history, literature, and culture. Like white women's clubs, black women's clubs also often combined literary self-improvement with social welfare efforts that included building juvenile reformatories, improving schools, providing health care, and establishing day care centers and kindergartens. But unlike white women's clubs, black women were motivated by their desire to uplift the race and improve black economic and social conditions.

Through literary clubs, black clubwomen armed themselves with the knowledge of black talent and a proud African heritage. They celebrated race men such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and race women from Phyllis Wheatley to Marian Anderson. In their historical studies, they stressed black accomplishment as survivors of slavery, leaders in the abolitionist movement, and union soldiers in the Civil War. In so doing, they emphasized their place in the nation rather than a peculiarly southern identity. Furthermore, they understood the importance of having black teachers and black literature in the classrooms so that their children could grow up proud and strong, rather than weak and inferior.

Although comparatively few records are available, extant written documents and oral histories from the South Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and other local sources reveal that African Americans rejected the Lost Cause and that black clubwomen read and told a different history from their white counterparts. After studying history and literature themselves, they took their message to the community, promoting their own "true histories" to others, especially children, through schools and libraries. While such efforts would not be enough to break down the walls; of segregation and discrimination, black clubwomen did fight Jim Crow with words as well as action.

On May 25, 1921, on what the secretary of the Current Literature Club of Columbia, South Carolina, described as "a red letter day for the Club," Thomas Nelson Page, southern author and defender of southern culture, addressed the white club members on the subject of southern writers. Just ten years later and one hundred miles down the road in Charleston, W. E. B. Du Bois, author and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was made an exception to the "members only" policy of the Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club, who had the honor of his attendance at the birthday celebration of their club. As their respective selection of guests indicates, these two women's clubs in South Carolina, each dedicated to the education and self-improvement of its members through the study of literature and history, read completely different stories of the southern past.(16)

White women's clubs in early-twentieth-century South Carolina were literally composed of women and daughters of the Confederacy--that is, many of their members had either lived through the war or been born shortly thereafter. Many also belonged to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In South Carolina, links between women's clubs and the UDC are most evident in the lives of Mary and Louisa Poppenheim, sisters from Charleston, who edited a journal, the Keystone, which was the official organ for several state federations of women's clubs and divisions of the UDC. They promoted the Keystone as a journal "by and for Southern women." The Poppenheims recognized and facilitated a close relationship between the two types of organizations by publishing editorials, articles, and news aimed at both groups of clubwomen throughout the region. In addition, Mary Poppenheim was the state president, and eventually national President-General of the UDC, and Louisa was SCFWC president and an officer in the national General Federation. Yet each also was active in the other kind of organization, holding committee chairmanships and attending national conventions.(17) A survey of leaders and local membership records shows that elsewhere in the state, many prominent women held offices in both associations, and membership rolls overlapped.(18) While this connection may have been more meaningful in South Carolina, a state in the forefront of southern nationalism, other cities and states in the South were also home to those who were active in both organizations.(19) For many South Carolina women, although not all, this overlap between women's clubs and the UDC was significant. Undoubtedly, they belonged to a network of active women in their communities, and some were members of many groups including church societies, the WCTU, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. But while some women joined a wide range of associations because of social convention or they were asked by friends or colleagues, the overlap in leadership as well as membership--and the dedication shown by many women to both clubs and the UDC--signals a more significant concurrence between the two. The agenda of women's clubs and the UDC reinforced each other.

Most clubs in the SCFWC originated as self-improvement or literary study clubs, and they naturally gravitated toward the history of the South for their studies. Imbued with a desire to defend the southern cause usually associated with the UDC, their records show that club agendas also focused on southern history, literature, and pride. In so doing, members looked back longingly at the Old South, recognizing, according to the Wednesday Club of Laurens, that "the Old South is gone forever but memory serves to dwell on the happy, prosperous, wonderful conditions which characterized our dear Southland."(20)

Through their study of southern history and literature and their support of libraries and educational programs for children, white southern clubwomen and the UDC promoted the values and order perceived to be found in the past.(21) The advent of modernization brought about a national movement--in which southern women took part--to understand the present through use of' the past.(22) Thus, they created a southern identity by inventing and preserving traditions and a collective history. More importantly, before they could draw from the past, they had to invent a suitable one. Their preservation of the so-called true history of the war--that is, the South's interpretation of the war's causes and results--served to "invent tradition" through reinterpretation of the Confederate past. The emphasis on "true history" allowed southern women to transform the past from defeat to near-victory.(23) They celebrated the values of bravery and loyalty that the Confederate soldiers symbolized, as well as the racial order of the antebellum period.

Eric Hobsbawm argues that the invention of tradition is meaningful because it provides a sense of continuity and stability in a changing world.(24) This link with the past was imperative throughout the entire postbellum era, as southerners faced change and disorder from the damage of the Civil War and emancipation, Reconstruction, New South industrialists' promotion of industrialism and new values, the Populist challenge, and Progressive-era reforms, both political and social.(25) In the 1890s, the Lost Cause flourished at the same time that Jim Crow laws were enacted in all the southern states. The codification of segregation occurred not from a new belief in white supremacy but rather from a new need to enact or enforce it in response to perceived threats from Populism, industrialization, and economic strife.(26) In addition, the evident progress of African Americans in education caused fear among those who denied that such progress was possible.(27) Whites described blacks as uppity or insolent and decried the fact that they no longer knew their place.(28) Furthermore, challenges to long-established gender roles frightened southerners, who justified segregation on the supposed need to protect white women from black men.(29) Men who were no longer able to support families due to economic changes and women who began entering the public world through clubs and other associations--including suffrage leagues--threatened assumptions of the male as "protector" and the female as "protected." Segregation was also bolstered by the Lost Cause itself through its defense of slavery and the racial hierarchy that undergirded it.

The pages of the Keystone, speeches, and local club meeting minutes reveal how members of the SCFWC defined southern culture or identity.(30) Clubwomen and members of the UDC alike emphasized values learned from the Lost Cause: honor and chivalry. In their telling, Confederate soldiers not only bravely and honorably defended the South's righteous cause, state's rights, but also protected southern values of chivalry, community, and family from the northern way of life. They had to battle histories written by northerners that called Confederates "rebels," substituting "War between the States," for "Civil War." They approached their studies with a zealousness of purpose because the suffering that they and their families had experienced during the war was meaningless unless explained in light of the "true history" of the cause.

Although the minutes of many local South Carolina women's clubs are full of references to southern identity, several representative examples illustrate how white clubwomen attempted to establish a southern history steeped in the glorious Confederacy.(31) The Up-to-Date Club of Chester noted that they had studied the history of the Civil War in anticipation of the Confederate veterans reunion. Their report indicates the depth of feeling sustaining such study, claiming, "Each description was vivid and the eloquence was nothing marred, if these daughters of southern sires, found sometimes their voices tremulous and their eyes moist, as they pictured the superb valor and self-sacrifice of those ragged, war-torn veterans, who even in defeat won the laurels of unsurpassed courage."(32)

Countless clubs studied South Carolina and southern history, often with a special emphasis on slavery or the Civil War. The Over the Teacups Club in Darlington studied the state and the region in 1901-1902, 1906-1907, and again in 1913-1914. In addition to glowing histories of male southern, political, and Confederate heroes, this club also read works by southern women like Mary Chesnut's Diary from Dixie, in which she described "scars left by Sherman on the Southern mind and heart," and a letter written by Mrs. Jefferson Davis during Union occupation. On one occasion, when the club member responsible for the day's program was absent, members decided to study a poem to the Confederate dead. Those in attendance at the January 14, 1907, meeting might well have wondered if they had walked into a UDC meeting: after a sad program on Father Abraham Ryan (the poet of the Confederacy), they had refreshments in a dining room decorated in Confederate colors and heard a poem in tribute to Robert E. Lee on his birthday.(33) Up the road in Rock Hill, during its study of South Carolina in 1897-1898, the Amelia Pride Book Club had a superintendent of schools address the club on slavery and heard talks on Booker T. Washington, the Story of the Confederate flag, and Daniel Emmett (the author of "`Dixie', that song that appeals to the patriotic sentiment and has taken a deep hold upon the affection of our people").(34) These choices indicate the breadth of study, the sentimental appeal of history, and the importance of regulating the history of race in clubwomen's studies. They also indicate the persistence of this theme, which did not abate over time.

Like the Amelia Pride Book Club, the Perihelion Club returned to topics on the South several times and even heard the same paper on the Civil War read by Mrs. Roddey on two separate occasions, after which the secretary noted that the club "particularly" enjoyed this paper, "even on the second reading." This club not only chose John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Sidney Lanier, Thomas Nelson Page, the Ku Klux Klan, and "How Southern Women Helped the Lost Cause," as topics for 1899-1900 but also requested four members, Mrs. Nance, Mrs. Williams, Mrs. Mobley, and Mrs. Roddey, to give personal reminiscences of the "War Between the States." If these were typical of published accounts of the war written by southern white women, they stressed the bravery of Confederate soldiers, personal deprivations suffered by southern families at the hands of unscrupulous Union soldiers, and the loyalty of family slaves.(35) The study of southern heroes was crucial, because these exemplars set standards of southern values. Women's clubs as well as the UDC studied the lives of their heroes through such presentations as narratives of Jefferson Davis at the Perihelion Club. Clubwomen could explicitly foster their consciousness as southern women through programs of self-education.

Promoting southern literature was linked to studying southern history, because UDC members and clubwomen believed that only southern authors could accurately portray the history of the South, describe its contemporary citizens, and capture the values and character of the region. Louisa Poppenheim implored the readers of the Keystone to support southern literature, reminding them, "No country can hold its own in literature which does not foster its native talent." She then provided readers with reviews of books written by southerners, in which she highlighted the authors' knowledge of local conditions.(36) The Keystone's self-promotion as a southern periodical provides a nationalistic tone to the work of both the clubwomen and the UDC members represented therein.

The emphasis on true southern literature was crucial because it was through literature that southerner and northerners learned stereotypes and truths about each other. This is evident in a Keystone article, entitled, "Southern Life in American Fiction," by Virginia Hughes. Hughes first defined southern identity through its chivalric gender roles and then examined literature that contradicted these images. Most disturbing to Hughes was the inaccurate representation of African Americans in Uncle Tom's Cabin, which she compared unfavorably to Thomas Dixon's novels.(37) Hughes's article shows why clubwomen focused so intently on southern literature--the benefits of "true histories" would be undercut unless read alongside "true fiction" of the South.

As study clubs, women's clubs were a natural site for promoting southern literature. Along with Shakespeare and Dickens, clubwomen read Thomas Nelson Page and William Henry Timrod. This emphasis on things southern did not wane over time; the Current Literature Club of Columbia continued its study of southern literature well into the 1920s and was fortunate enough to have Thomas Nelson Page address the club. The secretary's description of Page echoes the attitude of clubwomen themselves: "When he came to speak of the writers of the Confederacy he did so with great feeling and showed himself as he is, intensely Southern pride of race and love of home animated every word of his delightful talk." While other Americans were undoubtedly patriotic and loyal, that intense "pride of race and love of home" seemed to her to be uniquely shared among southerners.(38) Women in the Old Homestead Club of Darlington were especially privileged to have a member read "some beautiful, unpublished lines of Timrod, which were written to her mother years ago," and it was also revealed that a member "could boast of having slept in the bed that had been the personal property of Mr. Timrod."(39) The intimate nature of the connection that these clubwomen had with the literary representatives of the South no doubt made their studies more meaningful to them.

Clubwomen's focus on southern history and literature mirrored the literary program of the UDC in many ways. That organization's members also studied history and literature and presented programs on both at meetings. Mary Poppenheim and other nationally prominent members, such as Mildred Lewis Rutherford of Georgia, were both heavily involved in the UDC historical committee, which disseminated information on so-called true history and helped members censor inappropriate narratives.(40)

Although women's clubs in South Carolina, like groups across the nation, did study Shakespeare and Rembrandt, and although other clubs in the North and West studied their own local history, the intensity of the South Carolina clubs' focus on the South is overwhelming. Their emotional descriptions of southern heroes and their seriousness of purpose in defending southern history cannot be dismissed. This emphasis can be found across the state, from Charleston, an old colonial port city, to Laurens, a New South mill town. The evidence suggests further investigation of other southern states is necessary, because in South Carolina, this emphasis links clubwomen to the Lost Cause, which can no longer be thought of as the exclusive purview of women in the UDC. And the Confederate celebration found throughout the minutes and records of women's clubs, in addition to those of the UDC, shows that the Lost Cause pervaded southern middle-class and elite society and that women were crucial supporters.

For white clubwomen, then, the "true history" of the South included defending the Confederate cause as just, its soldiers brave, and its white women and slaves loyal. In addition, defense of the Confederate nation both implicitly and explicitly looked to the antebellum South as an ideal that included slavery as the best model for race relations. When the Outlook Club listened to a paper on antebellum southern life, the secretary commented that "This paper interestingly described those leisurely (lays around which a certain halo lingers."(41) Such yearning for the past was not as harmless as it appears on the surface, for it included nostalgia for the seemingly better race relations that existed in slavery. Clubwomen's support for the Lost Cause had critical implications for southern society in the early twentieth century. Most significantly, just as they studied literature to promote the true history of the South, clubwomen and UDC members also used literature to disseminate their version of the history of slavery, one in which slaves were loyal and happy. Thus, club members who studied the history and literature of the South reinforced their belief in white supremacy through their understanding of race relations in the southern past.

Typically, in the history and literature both read and written by clubwomen and the UDC, slaves had been content in slavery. The Poppenheims included faithful slave stories, both reminiscences and fiction, in the Keystone. Louisa Poppenheim praised George Eggelston's portrayal of African Americans in her review of A Carolina Cavalier, claiming that the character, "Marlborough is the real Southern Negro, who knows of no greater distinction than to be the servant of his master."(42) Sudie Merriam Coleman, former president of the SCFWC, contributed several stories to the Keystone, written with slaves speaking Negro dialect and promoting the happy plantation image. In one story, "Sam," a loyal slave, tells of the benefits that he has received from his master and the sad fate of a disobedient slave, who, because of his outbursts, is traded to a mean master and dies running away from him.(43) These, the only African Americans with voices in the Keystone, have only the articulation given to them by their white author. Such sentimental portrayals of the plantation South were popular at the turn of the century and enabled southerners to focus on reconciliation with the North, avoiding northern interference in southern race relations.

Locally, clubs reinforced these messages through the papers and historical studies that promoted similar ideas. For example, Mrs. Charles R. Hyde spoke to the Charleston City Federation on "The Instruction of the Negroes Prior to 1860." In her talk, she emphasized the positive influence that whites had had on blacks in the antebellum South, describing detailed attempts to Christianize blacks in the state. The Over the Teacups Club of Darlington read Henry Grady's "tribute to the old time slaves of the South, and their fidelity to their master's and their interests." The Old Homestead Club also discussed African Americans at two of their meetings. On the first occasion in 1908, they heard papers on "The Joys of Being a Negro" and "The History of Slavery"; listened to Negro songs; planned a debate entitled "Resolved; That Education Unfits the Negro for Menial Labor" (not held due to absences); and finally, "several minutes were spent, by the married members, discussing the servant problem of today." Twenty years later, the club reported a similar program, in which they read stories of the "old Plantation Negro," that "charmingly depicted the devotion and fidelity of these Negroes to their `White Folks.'" They also heard a paper on black superstitions and haunts, "in spite of their simple, childlike faith in God. Mrs. Evans read a true, original story bringing out a pathetic contrast between the artlessness of one of her father's war-time slaves and the arrogance of his college bred son today."(44) According to Louisa Poppenheim, "To the patient teachings and personal training of the Southern woman are due the civilization and Christianizing of the negro in America." She argued that because women trained house servants, they were responsible for Christianizing "African savages."(45) The juxtaposition of discussions of the loyal slave with the servant problem and the arrogant college graduate demonstrates that clubwomen in the postwar South struggled to understand blacks around them in comparison to their image of the contented and faithful slaves of the plantation. Their stereotypes were built on preconceived notions, and they had difficulty dealing with blacks who did not fit the mold.

As part of their campaign to defend slavery, both women's clubs and the UDC targeted Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as an example of a misinformed characterization of slavery that proved the necessity of promoting literature written by southerners. That clubwomen in South Carolina found her book dishonest as well as distasteful is evident from their minutes. The Amelia Pride Book Club criticized Stowe's work, and the secretary noted in the minutes, written in verse:

   "Mrs. Mobley read a criticism On Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe As she helped
   to sway brother against brother, We've no love on her to bestow. As Mrs.
   Stowe and her literary contemporaries Are now all gone We hope Uncle Toms
   Cabin will be consigned to oblivion.(46)

Therefore, as southern women promoted their vision of southern identity, they dismissed northern, negative views of slavery as wrong and promoted instead the histories written by white southerners that defended slavery.

The inability of these southern women to consider blacks as other than happy and loyal slaves reinforced their support for the Confederate defense of slavery. Moreover, by uniting white southerners around a history and identity based in the celebration of the Lost Cause, white clubwomen and the UDC promoted a white southern identity that excluded blacks who refused to embrace the Lost Cause version of the history of slavery and southern race relations.

For clubwomen and UDC members, the true history of the South included not only the benevolence of slavery and the justness of the Confederacy but also the horrors of Reconstruction that had been inflicted upon the region under the rule of inept black political leadership and ended only by the heroic work of the Ku Klux Klan. Their descriptions of Reconstruction echo those of white redeemers--under the "dark days" of Republican "misrule," whites had to endure various indignities until "white rule and civilization were restored" by Wade Hampton and the white Democratic redeemers.(47) To these women, the Klan stood for southern patriotism, and, in their minds, the Klan's protection of white womanhood sanctioned its violence. Louisa Poppenheim promoted Thomas Dixon's portrayal of Reconstruction and the Klan in his books, The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots, warmly praised the author in book reviews, and even published an advertisement for The Clansman in the Keystone.(48)

Locally, clubs read The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots and studied Dixon's life. Their minutes contain references to support for the Klan, such as Mrs. Hutchinson's 1914 presentation at the Amelia Pride Book Club. Mrs. Hutchinson, a charter member of the group, displayed items worn by her father while a member of the Ku Klux Klan.(49) Likewise, at one meeting the New Century Club of Columbia heard an address on secession and then personal reminiscences. At the following meeting, Mrs. Edwards spoke on South Carolina's part in the Confederate War, and Mrs. Childs, "recounted the workings and object of the Ku Klux Klan, and the great part it played in the reclaiming of power by the white people.... In place of current events, Mrs. Wardlaw brought the original draft of secession, written in pencil by Judge Wardlaw, and a Confederate primer that was sent her husband when a child." Seventeen years later in 1923, the club again had a report on the Klan. For her presentation, Mrs. W. Davis interviewed a member, although the minute do not reveal how she gained access to the Klan.(50) These incidents reveal that clubwomen did their part to promulgate the history they believed concerning slavery, the war, and Reconstruction, a history that reinforced white supremacy in the South.

Their work was all the more insidious because after studying these stories themselves, white clubwomen then sought to tell the same story--the same "true history"--to others. They supported the numerous Confederate monuments dotting the southern landscape and ritual celebrations of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other heroes of the Lost Cause that the UDC spearheaded.(51) More importantly, because reaching children was essential to ensuring the continuity of their programs, they worked within the schools and libraries. For white clubwomen, the focus on "true history" was a crucial element in educating Confederate children. This essential task, the passing on of Confederate values to the next generation, had several components. Most explicitly, clubwomen and the UDC understood that they needed to teach children that the South was justified in seceding from the Union. As part of a moral education, the women also worked to elevate values exemplified by the soldier's and to pass to the next generation the southern identity and community that clubwomen and UDC members worked to build among themselves. Both organizations emphasized the need for so-called true history books in the schools and sponsored essay contests for children. This work was significant because it was directed not only to their own offspring but also to future generations, thereby ensuring the continuity of tradition.

Like clubwomen throughout the nation, the South Carolina Federation focused on children and education, justifying their work in the public sphere using the rhetoric of maternalism. As chair of the SCFWC education committee in 1904, Louisa Poppenheim recommended that clubwomen investigate school conditions such as the number of pupils attending and teachers' salaries, as women's clubs throughout the nation were doing. As a southern woman, however, she also advocated asking what history books were being used in order to ensure that histories taught the "true" story of the Civil War. Perhaps believing that southern authors could best teach children the southern point of view, she also asked, "[I]nstead of teaching Southern children `Snow Bound,' `Evangeline,' and `Vision of Sir Launfall,' why are they not made familiar with our own Southern poets and the literature of our section?" Clearly, this work was the duty of clubwomen and one that the education committee, one of the most active in the Federation, could not leave to the UDC alone. At the local level, mothers at the Over the Teacups Club in Darlington "resolved to see that their children studied true facts about our state," after a lecture by Col. Dargan on South Carolina history.(52)

Reviews in the Keystone by Poppenheim helped clubwomen ascertain which books were appropriate or "true." For example, she censured American Political History because, "In treating the `War Between the States,' the author makes the South the aggressor and dwells too much upon the evils of slavery rather than the doctrine of states' rights." In a review of Recollections of a Rebel Surgeon and Other Sketches, Poppenheim warned, "How much better would be Recollections of a Confederate Surgeon or any adjective other than that one `rebel,' which no Confederate deserves and which should never be associated with the Southern men who took part in the War between the States."(53) These examples are typical of the reviews, which take as their first standard of merit the author's portrayal of the South and her people.

One of the major efforts undertaken by clubwomen throughout the nation was building libraries. In the South, libraries were an ideal repository for Lost Cause tracts. In order to ensure that libraries contained appropriate books, the Poppenheims printed a list in the Keystone of books approved by the UDC and thus recommended for donation. Further promoting their cause, the South Carolina Federation called for a special topical traveling library on southern history and literature.(54)

Anxious to have Confederate children avail themselves of such historical resources, the SCFWC sponsored scholarships and essays in the public schools, as did the UDC. The Perihelion Club, for example, decided to follow up on the state federation's essay contest for South Carolina history and tradition with a similar contest in the local schools.(55) Clubwomen also promoted local schools because they believed that southern schools best taught southern values. A history of Charleston's schools in the Keystone extolled Mrs. Elizabeth Wotten, one of Charleston's teachers, who was "A most ardent daughter of the South, a firm believer in States Rights; in her eyes South Carolina could do no wrong, if any of her pupils have been lukewarm in their allegiance to the South, the fault does not lie at her door, she did her utmost to teach them what was to her the only right view that could be taken."(56)

At the same time that white women in women's clubs and the UDC were attempting to define southern identity around images from an Old South that portrayed slavery as benign and slaves as happy and a Reconstruction that portrayed blacks as savage and immoral, blacks in the South both understood and rejected these messages in many ways. Although historians and contemporary white observers often deemphasized the centrality of race to the Lost Cause, African Americans consistently underscored the need to combat what they perceived to be this pernicious telling of history. Examining specific examples of what blacks found so dangerous about the Lost Cause and reasons why they rejected Confederate identity as southern identity helps shed light on their subsequent attempts to create an alternate sense of place. Like white clubwomen, members of black women's clubs in the South Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs included self-improvement and study components in their organizations, and, like white clubwomen, their programs in history and literature reveal their concerns.(57) Although black and white women used many of the same tools--promoting history and literature both within clubs and in schools and libraries--they had different goals. Even as black women confronted Lost Cause teachings, their emphasis on American citizenship rather than southern history indicates that they were not simply reacting to the Lost Cause ideology.

At the turn of the century, prominent black male leaders tried to warn African Americans against efforts by the UDC and other southern organizations to rewrite the history of slavery and the war. Astute blacks perceived sectionalism as a growing danger. Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois were two of the most outspoken black leaders on the need for African Americans to combat a white supremacist telling of history. Douglass fought for blacks to remember the Civil War and slavery at a time when many preferred to look ahead to progress rather than to a bleak past. As historian David W. Blight has argued, Douglass realized, "Historical memory ... was not merely an entity altered by the passage of time; it was the prize in a struggle between rival versions of the past, a question of will, of power, of persuasion."(58) Douglass wanted to celebrate emancipation rather than Union and Confederate soldiers and sectional reunion. Similarly, Du Bois also understood that in accepting the Lost Cause interpretation, Americans affirmed a history of slavery, the war, and Reconstruction that was deeply racist. Perpetuating that history was pernicious because it shaped policy and society in the present.(59)

Even more than they feared the history of slavery as presented in the Lost Cause mythology, Douglass, Du Bois, and other African Americans protested its contemporary effects evident in race relations, education, and economic progress. In South Carolina, Columbia's black newspaper, the Palmetto Leader, noted the activities of southerners who "denounced" Abraham Lincoln at the "Annual Meeting of the South Carolina division of the Confederacy." The Palmetto Leader also challenged the UDC's monopoly on defining true history. One editorial noted that the UDC had complained about My Maryland--a musical about a woman from Frederick, Maryland, who was shot while waving the Union flag--because it did not give a true portrait of the war. Blacks could sympathize, the editorial continued, because they "too have said many times `What a pity it is that David Griffith did not present a true picture of the Negro while he was at it in his notorious and misnamed Birth of a Nation.'"(60)

For black readers of the Palmetto Leader, Lost Cause and Confederate celebrations were an attempt to impose race relations from the Old South upon the post-emancipation period. Rejection of the Lost Cause echoed earlier protests against the Confederacy itself, such as the Norfolk, Virginia, Emancipation Parade that took place in 1863. There, black women stomped on Confederate flags, burned Jefferson Davis in effigy, and buried the carcass.(61) Although African American clubwomen, particularly those who lived in the South, focused most of their time and energy on aiding blacks through services including kindergartens, nurseries, and other reform projects, they realized that combating Lost Cause ideology was also necessary to uplift the race. National Association of Colored Women (NACW) president Mary Church Terrell, in a stinging article published in The Nineteenth Century, a London magazine, accused most white southerners of being unable to forget the Civil War, as evidenced by their flying the Confederate flag and concurrent hostility to blacks. She concluded that southerners were therefore unable to make any progress, mental, spiritual, or material, in the building of a so-called New South. Through such an attack on the South, she hoped to alert white northerners to southern intransigence, as well as perhaps change the ways of southerners themselves by appealing to their hope for progress in the New South. That northern whites seemed unconcerned is evident from her inability to have the article published in the United States.(62)

If not the most significant component of the black clubwomen's agenda, literary and historical study was still critical to promoting black pride and was also understood to be necessary in uplifting the race. In South Carolina, many women's clubs divided their agenda between social reform projects and self-improvement. The constitution of the SCFCWC, for example, listed the promotion of education for black women first, followed by goals focused more explicitly on social and economic welfare and civil rights.(63) How black women fashioned their "true history" indicates just how parallel their lives were with white women. One group celebrated the birthday of Robert E. Lee, the other the life of Frederick Douglass. One group read Thomas Nelson Page with tears in their eyes, while the other group read W. E. B. Du Bois with determination. One group vilified Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the other celebrated her birthday.(64)

Although few records of early-twentieth-century black women's clubs in South Carolina are extant, it is still evident that local black women's clubs promoted African American history and literature as part of their literary programs. The Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club in Charleston reported that it desired a greater variety of reading materials and drew up a list of books on black literature or by black authors. Each member took the name of a book that she was expected to purchase, presumably for the use of all in the club as well as for herself. The entire program of one meeting was devoted to Africa's contribution to world civilization, and at other meetings, the club read chapters of W. E. B. Du Bois's Darkwater, Phyllis Wheatley's poetry, and the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar (in addition to Shakespeare). The club purchased The Negro in Our History, although it is unclear whether this book was intended for club use or for donation to the city's Avery Institute, and received a request from a library for books, especially by Negro authors. Other financial expenditures included a donation to Carter G. Woodson, presumably in support of the Association for the Study of Afro-American History and Life, founded in 1915.(65)

In 1917 the club voted to discuss great men of the race using Benjamin Griffith Brawley's The Negro in Literature and Art. This book, written by a professor of English at Atlanta Baptist College, was an attempt to critique literature written by black authors by the same standards applied to white writers. Brawley in effect was attempting to "legitimize" the study of black authors for their contributions to literature generally. One can imagine that Brawley's book therefore inspired deeper pride in black achievement among members of the club. Brawley critiqued Phyllis Wheatley, Paul Dunbar, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Du Bois, and William Stanley Braithwaite, along with others. His book introduced clubwomen to various writers who they could then read independently. In the spirit of his objective standards, Brawley did not hesitate to criticize, for example, Wheatley for her "childish" verse, even as he praised her earnestness, piety, and imitation of Alexander Pope's style.(66)

Members of the Louise Fordham Holmes Literary and Art Club of Charleston not only read black authors but also white novelist Julia Mood Peterkin, who was known for her sympathetic portrayals of black plantation workers in the early twentieth century. Peterkin was the wife of a plantation owner in South Carolina. In 1928 club member Esther Mazyck reviewed Peterkin's Black April for the club. Her review was described as "a most sympathetic interpretation of a white Southerner's conception of the lowly Negro." Apparently, the club appreciated Peterkin's depiction of an all-black community who spoke the Gullah language and practiced folk lore, and if they resented the sexual promiscuity and negative characteristics of the black characters, they did not record their unease.(67)

In Columbia, a group of young women formed the Brawley Book Club, named for the author, and committed themselves to a special study of black authors in order to become more familiar with the "best minds of the Ages."(68) Members of the Booker T. Washington Literary and Social Club in Georgetown celebrated the club's tenth anniversary by singing the National Negro Anthem and presenting papers on the lives of Washington and Frederick Douglass. The Sunlight Club of Orangeburg celebrated Douglass's birthday with a special day in February.(69)

The South Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs did its part to encourage clubs across the state to take up such study, advocating that individual clubs "strive to instill and encourage race pride through appreciation of Negro music and literature." The Federation helped provide clubwomen with the information necessary to carry back to their communities through speakers such as Came Thompson who "read papers touching on various phases of Negro achievement" at the SCFCWC convention. They also asked clubs to remember National Negro History Week and Douglass Day.(70)

Nationally, the NACW recognized the importance of self-improvement and education. The NACW encouraged clubwomen to celebrate Harriet Beecher Stowe's birthday as well as to study black history and literature. Mary Church Terrell led a celebration of the centennial of Stowe's birth in 1911 and called for the NACW to establish a scholarship in her name.(71) The Palmetto Leader, which covered SCFCWC activities extensively, also promoted black history and literature through a column on Negro history and editorials that advocated every family starting a library of Negro literature in their homes.(72)

Both black and white clubwomen focused their attention on history and literature. Clubs provided relatively well educated members the chance to continue to read and study. The Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club was organized to give women the opportunity for "culture and sell-improvement."(73) Their reading material reveals what was important to them. For white women, literature and history represented an opportunity to tell the truth about southern history, a truth that included a defense of the Confederacy and of slavery. For black women, literature and history instead provided evidence of black achievement, pride, and place in the American nation. For both groups, the stories they learned were too important to remain within their respective circles; each women's club dedicated energy to promoting those truths to others.

Black clubwomen also understood the importance of public monuments and ceremonies, as vividly described by Mamie Garvin Field's recollection of the contested terrain of the town square. African American clubwomen promoted Frederick Douglass and other black heroes and celebrated his birthday alongside those of Lincoln and Washington every February. Black and white clubwomen believed strongly in teaching children the history from their particular historical perspectives. For that reason, tension between white and black versions of southern history was most rampant in South Carolina classrooms. Black and white women fought to dictate school textbooks, lessons, and songs.

In her memoirs, black clubwoman Mamie Fields recalled the experience of black children in Charleston, who until an NAACP campaign in 1919 had predominately white teachers in the segregated public schools. Fields attended the Shaw School in Charleston as a young child. She resented the efforts of white teachers to teach black children the Lost Cause version of history, recalling,

   One thing they did drill into us was the Rebel tradition. They had a great
   many Rebel songs and poems. All had to learn "Under the Blue and the Gray"
   and recite it once a week. The whole school did it, in all the classes. We
   stood to recite.... Then we would sing "Dixie," the whole school, in
   unison, "I wish I was in de lan' of cotton," in dialect, too. Then they
   were fond of songs like "Swanee River," "My Old Kentucky Home," "Massa's in
   de Col,' Col' Groun'." This was what they wanted to instill in us.

Fields was adamant that although white southern teachers might try to instill Confederate patriotism, blacks could seek alternative ideology at their own schools. "But you never heard these songs and poems at Claflin [a black college], which was established by Northerners," she boasted, "And you never heard them at Lala's [a local black woman's school]." Instead Lala taught them about slavery and abolitionists: "She taught us how strong our ancestors back in slavery were and what fine people they were. I guess today people would say she was teaching us `black history.'" When Fields became a teacher herself, she stressed American citizenship and taught her students America the Beautiful and the Pledge of Allegiance because, she said, "My school was in the United States, after all, and nor the Confederacy."(74)

African Americans rejected Lost Cause ideology by teaching black history and black pride as well as American citizenship, which was emphasized in Emancipation Day celebrations. Because the white women's clubs and the UDC influenced curriculum and textbooks in the public schools, black children were forced to learn a history of slavery that emphasized either the savagery or childlike behavior of blacks and their concurrent dependence upon paternalistic whites. White teachers enforced white supremacy through the use of books such as William Gilmore Simms and Mary C. Simms Oliphant's The History of South Carolina, a widely used textbook that portrayed blacks as inferior and Reconstruction as a dark chapter in South Carolina history. The text explains that at the end of the war, for example, "The State had a tremendous problem to face in the sudden freeing of thousands of irresponsible, uneducated, unmoral, and, in many cases, brutish Africans."(75) Black clubwomen found it necessary to teach themselves and their children pride and dignity in their heritage. As clubwoman, educator, activist, and South Carolina native Mary McLeod Bethune argued, "If our people are to fight their way up out of bondage we must arm them with the sword and the shield and the buckler of pride--belief in themselves and their possibilities, based upon a sure knowledge of the achievements of the past."(76) They merged celebrations of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, which emphasized American citizenship, with teaching African American history and literature, in order to stress black identity.

Although most black public schools in the state did have black teachers, in Charleston students were taught by white teachers. Civil rights activist and clubwoman Septima Poinsette Clark recalled that she found the white teachers to be of poorer quality and remembered black teachers for their high expectations of black children. Thus, clubwomen in Charleston joined the NAACP campaign to remove white teachers from the black public schools. Thomas Miller, former president of South Carolina State College, came to Charleston in 1919 and, together with the NAACP, started a campaign to replace white teachers with black.(77) The Charleston chapter of the NAACP, founded by eighteen men and eleven women in 1917, was led by members of the Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club and their husbands and fathers. Members included Mrs. Benjamin Cox, president of the club, and Susie Dart Butler, the most prominent clubwomen in Charleston, who was NAACP treasurer.(78) Undoubtedly, then, Butler, Cox, and other leaders in the Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club who were also teachers at Avery and NAACP members joined this campaign as well.

The NAACP first approached the school board requesting black teachers by emphasizing the necessary bond between child and teacher. The white school board, however believed that the interests of white supremacy were served by keeping black children under the influence of white teachers. Charleston School Superintendent A. B. Rhett attributed what he perceived as good race relations to the fact that "colored children from a very early age were under the control and influence of white principals and teachers and were taught to look up to and respect white people."(79) When the petition was rejected, the NAACP went to the state assembly to seek passage of a law that would make it illegal for a white person to teach in a public school for black children. Clubwomen, teachers, and other NAACP members gathered thousands of signatures on a petition that they presented to the legislature. Legislators responded with two bills that were not acted upon because two weeks later the Charleston school board reconsidered its position and agreed to allow black teachers in September of 1920.(80) The significance of this campaign cannot be overstated. Not only did thousands of blacks in Charleston come together to demand change, but they also went over the heads of the Charleston school board to the state assembly and forced the local group to back down. Ironically, the state assembly could not reject their petition because it was, on the face of it, furthering segregation. But the substance of what blacks in Charleston were fighting for should not be lost in the significance of a campaign strategy in which blacks made the segregated school system work for themselves. Blacks understood that having black teachers would enable them to control to some degree what was being taught and to instill pride in children, even as it also provided respectable, relatively high-paying jobs for black women.

Black clubwomen in South Carolina sought to influence the history and literature taught in black schools and, in many cases, were uniquely positioned to do so. Because many clubwomen were teachers, this was an obvious course of action and was probably most often done unofficially through the teachers themselves. In some cities, there was a strong relationship between a particular school and club because of the prevalence of teachers from that school among the club membership. The best examples of this relationship were probably the Sunlight Club in Orangeburg, which was closely associated with South Carolina State College and Claflin College; the Culture Club in Columbia, many of whose members were affiliated with Allen or Benedict Colleges; and the Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club in Charleston, tied to Avery Institute. In the first decade of the Phyllis Wheatley organization, at least fourteen members were teachers at Avery. The club took an active interest in the school, sponsored essay contests there, and hosted a graduate of the institute who gave a speech to the Avery Alumni Association on the club movement. At Claflin College, Mamie Fields recalled the teachings of two Sunlight Club members: Etta Rowe, who taught history, and L. A. J. Moorer, a librarian who began a Friends of Africa club.(81)

Black clubwomen expanded efforts to encourage the study of black literature to the local libraries. In Charleston, Susie Dart Butler opened her father's book collection to local black residents. The holdings eventually became part of the Charleston Public Library system, and Butler undoubtedly ensured that black authors were represented on her shelves. The Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club recorded their support for this project, requesting books, "especially by Negro authors," for the library in 1931. In Orangeburg, the Sunlight Club Community Center contained a library for local residents, which also included special mention of the black authors whose books could be found there. In a booklet published to mark the fortieth anniversary of the SCFCWC, the club noted, "The shelves of books by Negroes occupy a choice corner," a corner that was donated by Marion Wilkinson and her family.(82)

Pride in black history and literature was spread to the public in other ways as well. The Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club and the Sunlight Club both sponsored concerts by Marian Anderson; the Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club proudly noted that her concert brought "culture and edification" to the mixed race audience. At the same time, African American clubwomen were able to showcase black talent.(83)

Such local efforts echo the concern of the national network of black clubwomen to which Marion Wilkinson, state federation president, belonged. Wilkinson was the beloved leader of the black women's clubs movement in South Carolina and the wife of South Carolina State College president Robert Shaw Wilkinson. A member of the network of southern black clubwomen and educators, she introduced many prominent figures and programs to South Carolina. She was an influential member of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR), an organization that grew out of the NACW's interest in pan-African issues. This group formed from leaders in the NACW because black women realized that while educating themselves through their clubs was important, they also had an obligation to promote black literature and history in the schools in order to educate African American children. Founded in 1920 by Margaret Washington, the ICWDR counted most of the leaders in the NACW among its members, including Wilkinson. Wilkinson was vice-president throughout the 1930s, and other prominent clubwomen, such as Washington herself, Mary Church Terrell, Lugenia Burns Hope, Mary McCrorey, Mary McLeod Bethune, Nettie Napier, Emily Williams, Addie W. Dickerson, Addie W. Hunton, Elizabeth C. Carter, Mary Josenburger, and Nannie H. Burroughs served as officers as well.(84)

In order to facilitate improved educational opportunities, the ICWDR formed their own study groups for African American literature and history, and Washington worked especially hard to include appropriate works in school curriculums. In South Carolina, Marion Wilkinson informed Washington that she heartily agreed with Washington's plans for study and research committees. "I am deeply interested in this phase of our work and it makes a strong appeal to me," she wrote, "for I feel that it will be far reaching in results and in time will be the big idea of our organization."(85) The ICWDR also promoted a better understanding of the plight of women of color throughout the world through the study of conditions in countries such as Haiti. While there is no direct evidence of the effect of the ICWDR in South Carolina, with Wilkinson serving as a vice president, South Carolina clubs in the SCFCWC undoubtedly received the study guides from the ICWDR and supported her work throughout the state.

A history written shortly after the Council was founded explained that the Committee on Education's course of study was intended for "clubs, schools, and leaders in general." It described the effort to integrate black history and literature and the history of people of color throughout the world into the curriculum as imperative both for self-knowledge and for demonstration to whites. "For one to appreciate himself," the author stated, "he must know himself and certainly for another to appreciate him, there must be definite knowledge of his attainments and aspirations. Pride in one's self comes through racial consciousness." This would come through the exchange of information among people of different nations--countries in Africa, the Philippines, and Haiti. Moreover, it would correct the surprising lack of knowledge among black American children of leaders of their own race, such as Frederick Douglass. As evidence, the author cited a member who visited a public school and found that only one child had heard of Douglass. Referring to black teachers, the author then asked, "If we, as teachers, do not think to do this, who will do it?" The ICWDR existed in order to provide both the impetus and the information that were needed in order to aid teachers and local schools.(86)

Marion Wilkinson also participated in a regional effort to promote black history and literature in the Women's Committee of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC). She chaired the committee on recommendations, which, in addition to calling for better conditions on railroads and improved funding to black schools, also drew attention to black history and literature. The committee recommended "That a special effort be made to put books by Negro authors into the public libraries" and that black and white college students alike needed better access to "well prepared literature concerning the history, growth, and accomplishment of the Negro race in America."(87) Presumably Wilkinson's participation in both the CIC and the ICWDR carded over into the state federation of women's clubs, which she headed.

Through their local clubs, state women's clubs federations, the ICWDR, and the CIC, Wilkinson and other black clubwomen fought against the negative stereotypes of African Americans promulgated by white women through Lost Cause-approved texts even as they pushed for the study of black history and literature not only in black homes but also in the public schools. They focused on black leaders, emancipation, and their American citizenship. In one of the most bizarre and brilliant examples of African American rejection of the Lost Cause and concurrent celebration of emancipation, the Palmetto Leader attempted to co-opt the celebration of Robert E. Lee's birthday in the South by advocating that African Americans join white southerners in honoring him. An editorial praised Lee for his brilliance as a military strategist and described him as "the great soldier who surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in 1865, thereby causing a re-united nation and the freedom of four million slaves."(88) Such praise was a stunning inversion of the UDC's idolization of Lee as a Confederate hero and created an alternative legacy for the general that focused on emancipation.

White clubwomen and members of the UDC saturated the air with Lost Cause ideology.(89) The content of the history that they promoted through Lost Cause rhetoric mid publications had grave implications for race relations in the region. Although southern white clubwomen most often attempted to ignore the presence and needs of African Americans in their communities, when they did acknowledge African Americans, it was often in the past tense--that is, rather than dealing with blacks who lived among them, they preferred the image of happy and loyal slaves. These white women reinforced a benevolent view of slavery and southern race relations through their defense of the southern cause in the Civil War, which, while justified under the guise of "states' rights," was predicated on the southern states' right to retain slavery. Finally, clubwomen and UDC members alike promoted the negative interpretation of Reconstruction that was common in the South and that stressed the dangers of "negro rule." Together, these views of southern history strengthened the dominance of whites and dependence of blacks. At the same time that white men hanged black bodies from trees as a warning against "uppity" blacks who prospered economically or otherwise transgressed white expectations, southern white women worked to ensure that emancipation did not change ingrained and disabling beliefs in black inferiority.

The UDC is most known for the public monuments they built to the Confederacy. But the UDC and white clubwomen also disseminated their understanding of race relations through the histories they promoted in schools. In addition, they more explicitly expressed their views on race by defending slavery and attacking Reconstruction via monuments to loyal slaves, book reviews, and club meetings. Thus, a broad range of southern white women combined agendas for defending the Confederacy, defending slavery, and attacking Reconstruction in an attempt to define southern as white and black as inferior. Defeat in the Civil War and emancipation made it imperative that the memory of the Confederacy and the southern identity that these women created enforce white supremacy. By promoting the image of blacks as loyal, happy slaves or subordinate servants, members of women's clubs and the United Daughters of the Confederacy in South Carolina participated in constructing past and present visions of solutions to the "Negro problem." Although they were unable to vote in the political elections that disfranchised African Americans and instituted Jim Crow laws, white women through their club work were also responsible for contributing to the creation of a culture of segregation at the beginning of the century. They legitimized the Confederate defense of slavery, and they sanctioned the segregated system of the New South. As men had promoted disfranchisement as the means to political stability, women created a stable southern community by unifying white southerners with programs that fostered a white southern identity. Unable or unwilling to challenge gender oppression, they ensured their own place in southern society by reinforcing racial hierarchy through their literary program as well as segregated social welfare reforms.

White women's clubs in South Carolina accomplished more than social reform. While not an official objective, constructing a southern identity based in racial ideology was among their goals and was similar to the aim of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, with perhaps unintended--but no less real--consequences. African Americans had to battle not only Jim Crow laws but also exclusion and degradation promoted by white women's organizations. In contrast, black clubwomen promoted a sense of pride in their race as they fought Lost Cause ideology. While such efforts did not directly attack segregation, they helped build the sense of self that was necessary before more radical campaigns could be undertaken. In their struggles over the nature of southern history in the early twentieth century South, black and white clubwomen helped shape politics, ideology, and southern identity within the larger society. Examining their strategies for teaching history and black pride reveals a constant negotiation over public space and collective memory. Whose story is told, whose monument is raised, and whose text is read still remain contentious issues.(90)

(1) Mamie Garvin Fields with Karen Fields, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir (New York and London, 1983), 57. The statue was pictured on the front cover of the Keystone, III (August 1901).

(2) On Southern white clubwomen, see for example, Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago and London, 1970); Marsha Wedell, Elite Women and the Reform Impulse in Memphis, 1875-1915 (Knoxville, 1991); Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920 (New York and Oxford, 1997), see especially Chap. 6; Anastatia Sims, The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women's Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 1880-1930 (Columbia, S.C., 1997); and Mary Martha Thomas, The New Woman in Alabama: Social Reforms and Suffrage, 1890-1920 (Tuscaloosa and London, 1992). On the women's club movement nationally, see Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (New York and London, 1980). On southern black clubwomen, see for example Dorothy C. Salem, To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform, 1890-1920 (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1990); Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer (Athens and London, 1989); on black clubwomen generally, see Deborah Gray White, "The Cost of Club Work, the Price of Black Feminism," in Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock, eds., Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism (Urbana and Chicago, 1993), 247-69; Anne Firor Scott, "Most Invisible of All: Black Women's Voluntary Associations," Journal of Southern History, LVI (February 1990), 3-22; Stephanie J. Shaw, "Black Club Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women," Journal of Women's History, III (Fall 1991), 10-25; Anne Meis Knupfer, Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African American Women's Clubs in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New York and London, 1996); and Tullia Kay Brown Hamilton, "The National Association of Colored Women, 1896-1920" (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1978). For a comparative study see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill and London, 1996).

(3) Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (Urbana, 1991).

(4) Joan Marie Johnson, "`This Wonderful Dream Nation!': Black and White South Carolina Women and the Creation of the New South, 1898-1930," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1997), Chap. 9. Black women joined exclusively literary or social clubs, service clubs, and clubs that mixed both goals. Many clubs combined the two purposes even if they leaned more heavily toward one. It is difficult to obtain a precise count of each type of club in the South Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (SCFCWC). Clubs in Charleston included, among others, the Book Lovers Club, the Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club, the Mary Church Terrell Literary Club, and the Louise Fordham Literary and Art Club, all evidently literary clubs. Charleston had a sizable enough middle- and upper-class black population to sustain them. Other clubs expressed a community service orientation through their names: the Uplift Club, the Lend a Hand Club, and the Helping Hand Club. Fortieth Anniversary Booklet of the South Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, 1909-1949 (n.p., 1949), 3.

(5) The South Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs (SCFWC) reported in 1912 that, when asked to state their primary interest, clubs responded as follows: 32, literary; 26, civics; 18, education; 7, library; 5, music; and 7, difficult to classify. Keystone, XIII (May 1912), 4. On the reform work of the SCFWC, including those literary clubs that were progressive either in their embrace of social welfare reform or in their discussion of liberal ideas on social justice or women's rights, see Johnson, "`This Wonderful Dream Nation!,'" Chaps. 7-9; on the reluctance of other literary clubs to take on reform work, see ibid., Chap. 8.

(6) Joan Marie Johnson, "The Colors of Social Welfare in the New South: Black and White Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1900-1930," in Elna C. Green, ed., Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830-1930 (Athens and London, 1999), 160-80.

(7) Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York, 1987). For the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Lost Cause see also Karen Lynne Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Transmission of Confederate Culture, 1894-1919," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern Mississippi, 1997); and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "White Women and the Politics of Historical Memory in the New South, 1880-1920" (unpublished paper written in 1998; in my possession).

(8) Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "`The Mind That Burns in Each Body': Women, Rape, and Racial Violence," in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York, 1983), 328-49, and LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (Athens, Ga. and London, 1995).

(9) In 1913 the Keystone claimed to reach over 28,000 women in the state federations of women's clubs in South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, and Virginia and the state divisions of the UDC in South Carolina, Virginia, and North Carolina. Keystone, XV (June 1913), 1.

(10) For a memoir that captures the pervasiveness of the Lost Cause see Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (New York, 1947; rpt., Athens, 1981).

(11) David Thelen calls for the historical study of memory in "Memory and American History," Journal of American History, LXXV (March 1989), 1117-29. See also James Michael Lindgren, Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism (Charlottesville, 1993), for a study of how preservation in Virginia was used to achieve conservative ends. For an argument that Charlestonians in the 1920s and 1930s turned to historic preservation to protest contemporary materialism, see Robin Elisabeth Datel, "Southern Regionalism and Historic Preservation in Charleston, South Carolina, 1920-1940," Journal of Historical Geography, XVI (April 1990), 197-215.

(12) On segregation in South Carolina see Theodore Hemmingway, "Beneath the Yoke of Bondage: A History of Black Folks in South Carolina, 1900-1940," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1976), 51-74. On race and ideology see Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York and Oxford, 1982), 143-77; and George M. Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn., 1988). For a recent study on the culture of segregation, see Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, 1998). See also Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York and Oxford, 1984), for an excellent study of race relations in the postwar South.

(13) Thomas C. Holt, "Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History," American Historical Review, C (February 1995), 16. Holt also argued, "It is at this level ... that race is reproduced via the marking of the racial Other and that racist ideas and practices are naturalized, made self-evident, and thus seemingly beyond audible challenge" (p. 7).

(14) Kathleen M. Blee, "Women in the 1920s Ku Klux Klan Movement," Feminist Studies, XVII (Spring 1991): 57-77 (quotations on p. 71), and Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford, 1991); Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York and Oxford, 1994); and Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York, 1987). In the case of the Klan, Nancy MacLean argues that by their participation, women made the Klan credible as upholders of family values, thus winning public sanction for the group.

(15) An early interpretation of the Lost Cause by historian Rollin G. Osterweis followed up on Du Bois's insight and argued that the Lost Cause was centrally about race. Writing in the early 1970s, Osterweis seems to have been seeking to understand the recalcitrance of southern states during desegregation and finding an explanation in the Lost Cause. Recent historians of the Lost Cause, however, have not emphasized the integral relationship between the Lost Cause, segregation, and race relations. Osterweis, The Myth of the Lost Cause, 1865-1900 (Hamden, Conn., 1973). An exception is Karen L. Cox, who has examined the role of race and the UDC in her paper, "Gender, Race, and the Lost Cause, 1890-1930," delivered at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting, New Orleans, November 9, 1995. On blacks and historical memory see David W. Blight, "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory," in Genevieve Fabre and Robert O'Meally, eds., History and Memory in African-American Culture (New York and Oxford, 1994), 45-71. For the Lost Cause as a civil religion see Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens, 1980); for the Confederate Celebration, see Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy. An interpretation by Fred Arthur Bailey analyzes the role of class in the significant and successful efforts of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), and the UDC to control the history being taught to southern school children. Fred Arthur Bailey, "Free Speech and the `Lost Cause' in Texas: A Study of Social Control in the New South," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, XCVII (January 1994), 452-77; and Bailey, "The Textbooks of the `Lost Cause': Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories," Georgia Historical Quarterly, LXXV (Fall 1991), 507-33.

(16) Minutes, May 25, 1921, p. 31, Vol. I, Records of the Current Literature Club (Manuscripts Division, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia; hereinafter SCL); and Minutes, 1931)-31, Folder 1, Box 1, Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club Collection. (Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, College of Charleston, Charleston; hereinafter Avery).

(17) For example, Mary chaired the literature department of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and Louisa was on the credentials committee of the South Carolina UDC. See Keystone, VIII (November 1906), 3, and Keystone, VII (December 1905), 14.

(18) These included Mrs. Martha Orr Patterson, president of the SCFWC and second vice president of the South Carolina UDC; Mrs. R. D. Wright, treasurer of the SCFWC and third vice president of the South Carolina UDC; and Mrs. James H. White, president of the Johnston UDC chapter and New Century Club. Of thirty significant leaders in the SCFWC or the South Carolina UDC whose status in both is known, twenty-five were members of both associations and only five were not, a percentage probably somewhat higher than a more complete sample would yield. On the local level, there was also significant overlap. In Rock Hill, for example, of thirty-one local UDC officers, sixteen have been identified as women's club members. One of those, Mrs. R. D. Smith, was the official poet of the Ann White chapter of the UDC in Rock Hill, and her poem to South Carolina is in the files of the Perihelion club, a club in which she was a member. Most of the leaders were born in the state or the region, making it likely that they would qualify for membership in the UDC. Information compiled from the Keystone; South Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs, Yearbook ... (various cities, 1898-1930); South Carolina United Daughters of the Confederacy, Minutes of the Annual Meeting ... (various cities, 1905-1930); and records of the South Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs (Archives and Special Collections, Dacus Library, Winthrop University, Rock Hill, S.C.; hereinafter WUA)

(19) The Keystone also gives many examples of this overlap in other southern states, including Mrs. Cone Johnson, Texas Federation of Women's Clubs president and state UDC president. See Keystone, VII (December 1905), 7, and passim. In a study of Atlanta women, Darlene Rebecca Roth found that in the 1890s, thirty-one of sixty Atlanta UDC members also belonged to the Atlanta Woman's Club; this number decreased in the 1930s to twenty-one of one-hundred-six. Seventy percent of the women in clubs like the UDC, the DAR, and the Society of Colonial Daughters had been born in Georgia. Roth, Matronage: Patterns in Women's Organizations, Atlanta, Georgia, 1890-1940 (Brooklyn, New York, 1994), 89-90, 94-97. Although Mary Martha Thomas did not examine UDC membership in her study of Alabama clubwomen, she did find that eighteen of twenty state federation leaders before 1920 were born in the South. Thomas, New Woman in Alabama, 67.

(20) Minutes, March 30, 1921, Wednesday Club Papers (Laurens County Public Library, Laurens, S.C.).

(21) Women also promoted these values through the building of public monuments. The UDC was the organization behind the building of most Confederate monuments in the South. In South Carolina, women's clubs expressed support for monuments and UDC efforts. For UDC monument building see Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South," Chap. 4; for support by women's clubs see Johnson, "`This Wonderful Dream Nation!'" Chap. 4. Black clubwomen did not have an extensive program of monument building equivalent to that of the UDC. However, they did oppose certain UDC monuments, such as the proposed memorial to the Black Mammy, and also preserved Frederick Douglass's home as a national monument. Joan Marie Johnson, "`By Our People, For Our People': African American Clubwomen, the Frederick Douglass Home, and the Black Mammy Monument" (unpublished paper written in 1999; in my possession).

(22) On history, memory, and nationalism, see Michael G. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991) and David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge and New York, 1985).

(23) This parallels the invention of tradition by the Welsh as described by Prys Morgan: "The Wales we have been describing was not a political state, and for want of such a state the people were driven to give a disproportionate amount of their energies to cultural matters, to the recovery of the past and, where the past was found wanting, to its invention. The old way of life decayed and disappeared, the past was very often tattered and threadbare, and so a great deal of invention was needed." Prys Morgan, "From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period," in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge and other cities, 1983), 43, 98-99.

(24) Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions," ibid., 1-2. Although the UDC did not claim that their rituals such as Memorial Day celebrations had occurred during the past, their need to link with the past is the same as that described by Hobsbawm.

(25) Although the industrialization promoted by the New South creed did not come close to overtaking agriculture as the primary occupation in the South, Paul M. Gaston's exploration of the rhetoric of New South spokesmen indicates that they created a larger sense of change than was merited by real conditions. See Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York, 1970), 189-90.

(26) In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward asserts that the codification of segregation in the 1890s occurred in order to end the threat posed by Populists to southern Democratic political power and to stifle the possibility of unity between lower-class whites and blacks. Documentation of de facto segregation already in place before the 1890s successfully curbed Woodward's optimistic assertion that the possibility for alternative positive race relations existed. Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 3d edition, 1974). See also Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (London, Oxford, and New York, 1964), who documented antebellum segregation in the urban South. Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861-1877 (Chapel Hill, 1965), found rampant de facto segregation in the 1870s and 1880s. Hemmingway, "Beneath the Yoke of Bondage," points to restrictions on voting in South Carolina beginning as early as 1878, well before the 1895 constitution that disfranchised the bulk of black voters. Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Urbana, Chicago, and London, 1980), argues that while political segregation was already in place before the 1890s, there was more integration in public accommodations. Rabinowitz, however, stresses that at no time were blacks ever accorded the same rights and privileges as whites. Moreover, he contends that in areas such as education, segregation was at least an improvement over exclusion. John W. Cell postulates that segregation was a new form of white supremacy, not a holdover from the Old South, and that it occurred in the 1890s because of its links to modernization and urbanization. Segregation was necessary to keep new industrial mill owners from making the economically sound decision to hire less expensive black labor. Segregation's link to industrialization was a decision imposed on industry by those with political power (former planters) in order to separate black and white workers and thus eliminate the possibility of their combined political power. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge and other cities, 1982), 131-70.

(27) Two recent historians of North Carolina both argue that interracial class cooperation in social reform (prohibition) in the 1880s collapsed when whites feared that black Republicans could assume too much political power. Jeanette Thomas Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy: The Black and White "Better Classes" in Charlotte, 1850-1910 (Chapel Hill and London, 1994), and Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow.

(28) Bernard E. Powers Jr., Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885 (Fayetteville, Ark., 1994), 78-79; Myrta Lockett Avary, Dixie After the War: An Exposition Social Conditions Existing in the south During the Twelve Years Succeeding the Fall of Richmond (New York, 1906; rpt., New York, 1969), 400-402; and Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner, 133-34.

(29) Joel Williamson argues that radical segregationists scapegoated blacks for whites' inability to fulfill their expected roles as breadwinners due to worsening economic conditions. His interpretation, however, does not fully examine how gender roles for men and women were changing. Williamson does not address women's increased public activity, which may have also spurred men's need to assert control (over blacks rather than white women). Williamson, Crucible of Race, 112-15. Bryant Simon finds similar problems in "The Appeal of Cole Blease of South Carolina: Race, Class, and Sex in the New South," Journal of Southern History, LXII (February 1996), 57-86.

(30) Culture, as used here, refers to the system of meaning encoded in their "way of life": values of family, community, honor, land, manners, gender, and race roles, as well as food, music, and literature. Culture, and southern culture in particular, are not easily defined. My definition attempts to locate shared meanings in shared experiences of southern life. Suzanne Desan writes, "By interpreting the symbolic patterns and significance of these cultural phenomena, the historian can uncover how the social system fits together and how its participants perceive themselves and the outside world." Desan, "Crowds, Community and Ritual in the Work of E. P. Thompson and Natalie Davis," in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1989), 53. For the difficulty of defining southern culture, see "Introduction," in Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill, 1989).

(31) Examples of references to southern identity that follow in the text are representative of those found throughout the Keystone, as well as in the following records: from the city of Rock Hill: Perihelion Club Papers, Amelia Pride Book Club Papers, Castalian Club Papers, Outlook Club Papers, Keystone Club Papers, and Over the Teacups Club Papers; from Chester: Palmetto Literary Club Papers (all in WUA); from Darlington: Over the Teacups Club Papers and Old Homestead Club Papers (Darlington County Historical Commission, Darlington, S.C.; hereinafter DCHC); from Laurens: records of the Wednesday Club; from Columbia: records of the Current Literature Club, New Century Club, Social Survey Club, and Thursday Club (SCL) and Columbia Chapter, National Council of Jewish Women (Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio); and from Charleston: Century Club Papers, Civic Club Papers, Charleston City Federation Papers (South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, S.C.) and National Council of Jewish Women, Charleston, South Carolina, Records, 1906-1949 (Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College).

(32) Keystone, I (August 1899), 10. Such melodramatic rhetoric runs throughout club and UDC documents, and while the tone was typical for the time, their words do capture the intensity with which some clubwomen approached their history.

(33) Minutes, May 13, 1902; May 27, 1902; January 14, 1907; and "A Diary From Dixie," typescript, n.d., Darlington Over the Teacups Club Papers, DCHC. Even the Castalian Literary Club, started by Mrs. A. E. Smith for female students at Winthrop College, chose South Carolina as its first topic of study. Minutes, 1901, Vol. I, Folder 1, Box 1, Castalian Literary Club Papers. WUA.

(34) Minutes, March 22, 1898, p. 68; April 6, 1898, p. 69; May 13, 1898, p. 71; and July 22, 1898, p. 76, Vol. I, Folder 2, Box 1, Amelia Pride Book Club Papers, WUA. This club often returned to the subject of the South in their programs, such as December 1926, p. 51, Vol. IV, Folder 4, Box 1, when the topics were the greatness of South Carolina and John C. Calhoun, and April 1923, Vol. III, Folder 3, Box 1, when the club unanimously voted for southern literature as the next study topic.

(35) Minutes, January 23, 1902, p. 29, Folder 1, Box 1; April, 1903, p. 63, Folder 1, Box I; May 20, 1920, p. 18, Folder 3, Box 1; and Yearbooks, 1899 and 1900, Folder 9, Box 3, Perihelion Club Papers, WUA.

(36) Keystone, III (January 1902), 3. These reviews predominate the book review pages of the Keystone. For a few of the many examples see Keystone, I (February 1900), 13; Keystone, I (March 1900), 13; Keystone, III (May 1902), 12; and Keystone, V (April 1904), 11. Furthermore, the editors appealed to southern pride by asking, "Do they not love the reputation of their state enough to want her to foster in her borders one publication which is endeavoring to promote the interests of [its] literary aspirants?" Keystone, III (January 1902), 3; and Keystone, II (January 1901), 3.

(37) Keystone, VII (February 1906), 8-9.

(38) See, for example, Minutes, January 11, 1922, p. 4, Vol. I; February 22, 1922, p. 55, Vol. I; January 23, 1924, p. 16, Vol. II; January 11 and 23, 1928, p. 118, Vol. II; and May 25, 1921, p. 31, Vol. I (on Page), Records of the Current Literature Club, SCL. After a reading of Thomas Nelson Page's "Mars Chan" by a member, February 22, 1922, p. 55, Vol. I, the secretary noted that "needless to say, there were few dry eyes in the room when she finished the beautiful story of Ole Virginia."

(39) Clipping, May 3, 1903, and Minutes, April 4, 1903, Old Homestead Club Papers, DCHC. See also the Outlook Club, a group that mixed history and literature and presented a program that included papers on South Carolina statesmen from John Laurens, John C. Calhoun through Wade Hampton, and poets and artists including Timrod. Minutes, September 27, 1921; December 1921; January 17, October 17, and December 22, 1922; and January 23 and March 23, 1923, Folder 3, Box 1, Outlook Club Papers, WUA. A member of the club painted a portrait of Wade Hampton, which was on public display, for the UDC Museum in Richmond. Minutes, February 22, 1922. The club apparently enjoyed these topics so much that they repeated them in 1928-1929.

(40) Fred Arthur Bailey, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford and the Patrician Cult of the Old South," Georgia Historical Quarterly, LXVIII (Fall 1994), 509-35.

(41) Minutes, November 13, 1928, Folder 3, Box 1, Outlook Club Papers, WUA.

(42) Keystone, II (May 190l), 12. See "Faithfulness of Slaves," n.d., clipping in scrapbook, United Daughters of the Confederacy Relic Room and Museum, Columbia, S.C. The Keystone covered the death of a faithful slave, Charlotte Stewart of Fort Mill, S.C., who was buried with her former master's family. Keystone 2 (November 1900), 7.

(43) Keystone, II (February 1901), 6-7.

(44) "City Federation Hears Addresses," Charleston News and Courier, February 5, 1920, p. 4, c. 5; Minutes, November 27, 1906, Darlington Over the Teacups Club Papers, DCHC; and Minutes, February 29, 1908, and November 27, 1927, Old Homestead Club Papers, DCHC.

(45) Louisa B. Poppenheim, "Woman's Work in the South," in The South in the Building of the Nation (12 vols., Richmond, 1909 to 1913), X, 622-37, quotation on p. 623.

(46) Minutes, August 12, 1896, pp. 20-21, Vol. I, Folder 2, Box 1, Amelia Pride Book Club Papers, WUA.

(47) See for example, Mrs. Wullburn, "Education Institutions in South Carolina," typescript, n.d. [c. 1936-38], Century Club of Charleston Papers (Charleston Library Society, Charleston).

(48) Keystone, III (May 1902), 12, and Keystone, VI (March 1905), 14. The need for white women to protest, lynchings for exactly this reason is discussed by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (New York, 1979) 93, 167, and 111-16.

(49) Minutes, February 3, 1914, p. 13, Vol. II, Folder 1, Box 1, Amelia Pride Book Club Papers, WUA. The Amelia Pride Book Club also noted in its minutes that "The Clansman.... could not be acted in Columbia this season," a remark written over something that has been erased. Minutes, October 1, 1906, p. 116, Vol. I, Folder 2, Box 1, Amelia Pride Book Club Papers WUA. See also when a member gave a history of the Klan and "the great part it played in the reclaiming of power by the white people," Minutes, March 27, 1906, pp. 14-15, Vol. I, Records of the New Century Club, SCL.

(50) Minutes, March 13, 1906, p. 13, Vol. II; March 27, 1906, pp. 14-15, Vol. II; November 11, 1923, p. 48, Vol. IV, Records of the New Century Club, SCL.

(51) For example, the Amelia Pride Book Club of Rock Hill included in their reports accounts of monuments unveiled in the state and the region, ranging from the Confederate monuments in Ft. Mill, S.C., the Wade Hampton statue in Columbia, the Calhoun statue in Washington, D.C., the General Gordon statue in Atlanta, to the statue to South Carolina women in Columbia. Minutes, May 21, 1896, p. 11; August 12, 1896, pp. 20-21; March 30, 1901, p. 22; June 1901, p. 26; September 18, 1906, p. 111; April 30, 1907, p. 123; and May 24, 1909, p. 158, Vol. I (page numbers restart), Folder 2, Box 1, Amelia Pride Book Club Papers, WUA. For more on the monuments themselves, see B[ettie]. A[lder]. C[alhoun]. Emerson, Historic Southern Monuments: Representative Memorials of the Heroic Dead of the Southern Confederacy (New York and Washington, D.C., 1911), and Ralph W. Widener, Confederate Monuments: Enduring Symbols of the South and the War Between the States (Washington, D.C., 1982). Clubs also celebrated Lee, Davis, and Memorial Day, rescheduling club meetings when necessary. See Minutes, January 15, 1915, p. 30, Vol. II, Folder 3, Box 1, Amelia Pride Book Club Papers, WUA; Minutes, January 1928, p. 81, Vol. V, Folder 4, Box 1, Perihelion Club Papers, WUA; Minutes, May 10, 1921, p. 136, Vol. III, Records of the New Century Club, SCL; and Minutes, May 13, 1901, p. 9, Vol. II, Century Club of Charleston, S.C., Papers (Charleston Library Society).

(52) Keystone, VI (August 1904), 5, and Minutes, December 20, 1906, Darlington Over the Teacups Club Papers, DCHC.

(53) Keystone II (July 1900), 11, and Keystone III (March 1902), 12. See also Keystone I (March 1900), 13.

(54) Keystone IV (May 1903), 4. Favorites included histories by Susan Pendleton Lee and Dr. William Jones.

(55) Minutes, December 18, 1930, p. 143, Vol. V, Folder 4, Box 1, Perihelion Club Papers, WUA.

(56) Wright taught at Madame Togno's school in Charleston and then Barhamville from 1854 to approximately 1863. MBW, "Some of Charleston's Most Noted Schools, Past and Present," Keystone, I (May 1900), 11. "MBW" may be Martha B. Washington, a member of the Charleston UDC chapter.

(57) Jimmie Lewis Franklin calls for more research into how African American southerners were able to retain a strong African American identity and "a southern sense of place" simultaneously. Franklin, "Black Southerners, Shared Experience, and Place: A Reflection," Journal of Southern History, LX (February 1994), 3-18. See also Genevieve Fabre, "African-American Commemorative Celebrations in the Nineteenth Century," Fabre and O'Meally, eds., History and Memory in African-American Culture, 72-91, for the tradition of African American commemorations and memory in which Fabre argues that in the nineteenth century, black concern with inventing tradition and celebrating the past was very future-oriented; and Thadious M. Davis, "Expanding the Limits: The Intersection of Raze and Region," Southern Literary Journal, XX (Spring 1988), 3-11, for an argument that African American authors who claim southern identity are subverting or countering the presumption of southern as white.

(58) David W. Blight argues that Douglass's interest in keeping the memory of the war alive came from his understanding of the war as an ideological struggle rather than a struggle on the battlefield; his sense of nationalism and desire for blacks to be a part of the nation; his concern with the Lost Cause; his criticism of American historical amnesia; and his desire to forge an alternative meaning of the war based in emancipation. Blight, "`For Something Beyond the Battlefield': Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War," Journal of American History, LXV (March 1989), 1156-78 (quotation on p. 1159).

(59) Blight, "Du Bois," 45-71.

(60) Columbia (S.C.) Palmetto Leader, December 12, 1925, p. 4, c. 1; and November 12, 1927, p. 4, c. 1-2. My Maryland was a popular musical that played in New York and Philadelphia before coming to Columbia. The musical was based on the play, Barbara Frietchie, by Clyde Fitch, who in turn based his story on a supposedly historic incident captured in the poem, "Barbara Frietchie," published In War Time and Other Poems (Boston, 1864) by John Greenleaf Whittier. The 1899 play involves a young southern woman who falls in love with a Union officer during the Civil War despite the disapproval of her friends and family. After he is killed in battle, she defiantly raises the Union flag from her balcony and is shot by a Confederate soldier who has gone crazy because of unrequited love for her. Fitch's father was from Connecticut and his mother from Maryland. Plays by Clyde Fitch in Four Volumes (Boston, 1915), II; Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama: From the Civil War to the Present Day, Vol. I (New York and London, 1927), 265, 274; and James D. Hart, ed., Oxford Companion to American Literature (New York, 1995), 48-49.

(61) Antoinette van Zelm, "Virginia Women as Public Citizens: Emancipation Day Celebrations and Lost Cause Celebrations," paper delivered at the Fourth Southern Conference on Women's History, June 12, 1997, Charleston, S.C. (in my possession), 6. This paper comes from her dissertation, "On the Front Lines of Freedom: Black and White Women Shape Emancipation in Virginia, 1861-1890," (Ph.D. dissertation, College of William and Mary, 1998).

(62) Mary Church Terrell, "A Plea for the White South by a Coloured Woman," The Nineteenth Century, July 1906, 70-72.

(63) "Constitution," n.d., South Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (SCFCWC), private collection, Louisa Robinson, Orangeburg, S.C. Mrs. Robinson is descended from leaders in the colored women's club movement; her mother and aunt were charter members of the Sunlight Club of Orangeburg. This small private collection contains memorabilia and a few papers relating to colored women's clubs.

(64) Minutes, January 14, 1907, Darlington Over the Teacups Club Papers, DHC; Palmetto Leader, April 17, 1926, p. 8; Minutes, May 25, 1921, Current Literature Club Papers; Minutes, 1922-23, Folder 1, Box 1, Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club Collection (Avery); Minutes, August 12, 1896, pp. 20-21, Vol. I, folder 2, box 1, Amelia Pride Book Club Papers, WUA; and "A History of the Club Movement Among the Colored Women of the USA," typescript, 1902, Folder 2, Box 1, 49-51, Rosalyn Saunders Papers (Avery).

(65) Jeannette Cox, "A History--by Administration--of the Phyllis Wheatley Literary and Social Club," 1936, manuscript, Folder 2, Box 1, and Minutes, 1922-23, 1926-27, and 1931-32, Folder 1, Box 1, Phyllis Wheatley Club Collection, Avery.

(66) Benjamin Griffith Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art (n.p., 1910), Black Biographical Dictionaries, 1790-1950 (Alexandria, Va., n.d.), microfiche 36.

(67) Charleston News, May 26, 1928, p. 6, c. 3; Julia Peterkin, Black April (New York, 1927); "Julia Mood Peterkin," in Jean C. Sine and Daniel G. Marowski, eds., Contemporary Literary. Criticism, Vol. 31 (Detroit, 1985), 301-12.

(68) "The Brawley Book Club,"Palmetto Leader, August 8, p. 4, c. 1-2, and October 18, 1930, p. 7, c. 2.

(69) "Georgetown S.C.," Palmetto Leader, April 17, 1926, p. 8; "Year's Program, Sunlight Club, 1930-31," pamphlet, private collection of Louisa Robinson.

(70) Palmetto Leader, May 2, 1925, p. 1, c. 5-6 (first quotation) and June 25, 1927, p. 1, c. 1 (second quotation); and Minutes, Annual Meeting, April 26-28, 1929, SCFCWC, private collection of Louisa Robinson.

(71) "A History of the Club Movement Among the Colored Women of the USA," pp. 49-51, Rosalyn Saunders Papers; Mary Church Terrell, "The Centenary of the Birth of Harriet Beecher Stowe," typescript, ca. 1911, Container 29, Mary Church Terrell Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.), microfilm, reel 21.

(72) Palmetto Leader, January 31, 1925, p. 1, c. 1, and January 3, 1931, p. 4, c. 1-4. Wilkinson supported black newspapers as much as possible.

(73) Cox, "History--by Administration," Phyllis Wheatley Club Collection, Avery.

(74) Fields, Lemon Swamp, 42-45 (first three quotations, p. 45) and 126-27 (fourth quotation, p. 127). "Lala's" was Fields's cousin's school, formally called Miss Anna Eliza Izzard's School, which she ran from her home. There, Fields learned to be proud of their ancestors' accomplishments during slavery. Benjamin E. Mays, a South Carolina State College high school graduate, friend of Marion Birnie Wilkinson, and president of Morehouse College from 1940 to 1967, stated in his memoir that he could not bring himself to sing the song "Dixie" because he associated it with a pro-segregation viewpoint but could easily sing the national anthem. May, Born to Rebel: An Autobiography (Athens, 1971), 275.

(75) William Gilmore Simms, The History of South Carolina, ed. Mary C. Simms Oliphant (Columbia, 1927), 212-13. On the other hand, the Klan is portrayed in a positive light.

(76) Mary McLeod Bethune, "Clarifying Our Vision with the Facts," Journal of Negro History, XXIII (January 1938), 12.

(77) Septima Poinsette Clark, with LeGette Blythe, Echo in My Soul (New York, 1962), 18-19. For more on this campaign, see Edmund L. Drago, Initiative, Paternalism, and Race Relations: Charleston's Avery Normal Institute (Athens and London, 1990), 174-76.

(78) Drago, Initiative, Paternalism, and Race Relations, 172.

(79) Ibid., 175.

(80) Columbia (S.C.) State, February 6, 1919, p. 11.

(81) Drago, Initiative, Paternalism, and Race Relations, 102-3, 113; Fields, Lemon Swamp, 101-2; and Cox, "History--by Administration," Phyllis Wheatley Club Collection, Avery.

(82) Minutes, 1930-31, Folder 1, Box 1, Phyllis Wheatley Club Collection, Avery; Fortieth Anniversary Booklet of the South Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, 1909-1949 (n.p., 1949), 11.

(83) Minutes, 1928-29, Phyllis Wheatley Club Collection, Avery; "Marion [sic] Anderson Enthralls Large Audience at State College," Palmetto Leader, January 30, 1926, p. 8, c. 6.

(84) For officers, see "Officers," n.d., typescript, Folder 238, Mary (Church) Terrell Collection (Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.) hereinafter Mary (Church) Terrell Papers, Howard; and letterhead, Addie W. Dickerson to Mrs. R. R. Moton, October 31, 1938, Records of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, 1895-1992, Part I (Lillian Serece Williams, ed., University Publications of America, Bethesda, Md., 1993), microfilm, reel 9, frame 00694. While primary documents do exist in several archival collections, few historians have studied this group. See for example Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope, and Eleanor Hinton Hoytt, "International Council of Women of the Darker Races: Historical Notes," SAGE, III (Fall 1986): 54-55. Primary documents are located in the Mary (Church) Terrell Papers, Howard.

(85) Marion Wilkinson to Margaret Washington, n.d., Folder 240, Mary (Church) Terrell Papers, Howard.

(86) "International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World," typescript, n.d., Container 20, Mary (Church) Terrell Papers, (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress) microfilm, reel 14.

(87) Minutes, Annual meeting, Women's General Committee, Commission on Interracial Cooperation, April 7-8, 1926, Commission of Interracial Cooperation Papers (Atlanta University, Atlanta, microfilm), reel 44, series VI:191.

(88) William Frank Williams, "The Searchlight," Palmetto Leader, January 24, 1925, p. 4, c. 3.

(89) For one example see Lumpkin, Making of a Southerner, 122.

(90) David Glassberg, "Public History and the Study of Memory," Public Historian, XVIII (Spring 1996), 7-23.

MS. JOHNSON is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati.