The South Side Community Center of Ithaca, New York: built through "community mothering," 1938.

Eleanor Roosevelt lauded members of the Frances Harper Women's Club for their foundational work in building the South Side Community Center. In her words, this club "realized a community need and went to work in a practical way to solve the problem." (2) The creation of the South Side Community Center in 1938 was the culmination of collective activist work constructed around the ideologies and efforts of an African American women's volunteer club in Ithaca, New York. Black women in this city merged their Christian beliefs and collective activism through the Frances Harper Club in order to obtain a public space for exercising their beliefs in racial equality and interracial civil rights. This movement developed in tandem with other black women's volunteer clubs across northern cities and southern locales. The efforts of the national black women's club movement were based on the ethos of social uplift and the rights of black people. Black women's clubs across the country established homes for elderly people, organized mother's clubs and literary societies, and promoted anti-lynching campaigns. Ithaca's Frances Harper Women's Club galvanized resources to transform their specific community-mothering ethic into a tangible community institution.

BLACK ITHACA: A SOCIAL HISTORY

Ithaca is located in Tompkins County to the northwest of Binghamton and the southwest of Syracuse. African Americans have lived in Tompkins County since the early nineteenth century. The initial African American community formed through the collaboration of artisans, craftspeople, and day laborers. In 1833, an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church became this community's first institution. The church was founded to protest segregated seating at the predominately white Methodist church. The 136 African American residents of Ithaca raised five dollars, purchased land from a local developer, and erected St. James AME Zion Church, a one-story church in the heart of the African American settlement on Wheat Street, which later became Cleveland Avenue. (3) This church soon served as the center of political and social activity for African Americans in Ithaca. In 1848, Frederick Douglass addressed a church-sponsored anti-slavery rally there. (4) Church members were also part of Ithaca's Underground Railroad network. Even though racial tensions swirled regarding church memberships, there was interracial solidarity on slavery and Ithaca's role in the Underground Railroad network. Once fugitives made it to Ithaca, they were sheltered in homes owned by both African Americans and whites. The known addresses of these homes were 325 South Cayuga Street, 113 East Seneca Street, and 1457 East Shore Drive.

By the 1850s, the small yet vibrant black community was composed of a mixture of skilled and unskilled laborers, southern and northern-born blacks, and runaways who lived, worshipped, and worked together. A small number of African American families found housing on the north side of Ithaca by the end of the 1850s. These families tended to be southern-born former slaves or fugitives who managed to stay, though they did not possess the same skills as African Americans living on the south side. The members of St. James AME Zion Church, located on the south side, had lived in Tompkins County for at least a generation and consisted mainly of skilled laborers. Social divisions arose, and the southern newcomers decided to branch off and create their own neighborhood church, the Wesleyan Methodist (colored) Chapel in 1857. By the early nineteenth century, a period marked by a slight growth in population, social diversity within the African American community was both apparent and institutionalized through the establishment of two churches with distinct social differences. In 1903, the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel was renamed the Calvary Baptist Church. The establishment of different denominations for black Christians living in Ithaca heightened these social distinctions.

Even though churches served as centers of social activity for African Americans, other clubs and groups formed, as well, providing alternative social spaces for churchgoers and non-churchgoers alike. In 1892, the Henry Highland Garland Garnet Lodge, sponsored by the Black Masons organization, began meeting twice weekly on West State Street, while the Black Knights of Pythias, listed in the 1900 Ithaca City Directory, met on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month at the Odd Fellows Hall. An Order of the Eastern Star was established in Ithaca around the same time. (5) The Ithaca Colored Brass Band was active for six years and the Silver Tone Mandolin Club performed concerts throughout the 1920s. (6) On April 11, 1921, the Ithaca Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed and its early meetings were held at St. James AME Zion Church.

By the end of the 1920s, the second wave of the Great African American Migration brought a new populous to Ithaca; there was a marked increase in the black, southern-born, female population, who had come in search of domestic employment. With its steady employment and established cultural institutions, migrants viewed Ithaca as a viable town in which to settle. The local black press played a role in inspiring that attitude. The short-lived Monitor newspaper, for example, was published in the spirit and tradition of the African American magazines of its day; its pages highlighted and celebrated African American cultural concerns. (7) The editor, C.O. Wilson, and manager, Elliot Douglas, both self-proclaimed "race men," set out to give an "unbiased and unbossed" account of the cultural conditions of African Americans in Ithaca and central New York. Their paper highlighted the Negro baseball teams that played in the area, The Colored Vets and the Zebras. (8) The Monitor also covered social events attended by African American college students in the area, such as black fraternity and sorority gatherings, (9) and the social and spiritual events offered by the two main black churches in Ithaca.

The Monitor devoted coverage to all community events, even those directed by and for women. In fact, women's clubs became vital components of the social fabric of black Ithacan life. On the national level, the first generation of black women's clubs was concerned with presenting a respectable black womanhood to both the black and white public through the activities they sponsored, namely teas and dinner parties. Other groups fostered youth programs to promote respectable womanhood as a repudiation of the then-popular notion that black women were not "true women" according to the standards of popular culture and beauty in the 1920s. These events served as public displays of political strength in rebuking the image of blackness and black womanhood as exotic. This expansion of the critique of representations of blackness came on the heels of the cultural explosion known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Renaissance is often situated only in Harlem, New York because artists and intellectuals interested in a diversity of black expression gathered there, but its effects were in full bloom in other locales, including Ithaca. This was an era in which African Americans redefined their cultural identity, fusing African roots with American themes, and the movement was reflected in Ithaca by the social and cultural affairs hosted by black women's groups. Mrs. Ruth Mann, a life-long Ithaca resident who attended black women's club events as a teenager in the 1920s, remembers when "people would set out their china and wear beautiful gowns." (10) The Cayuga Temple Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World (I.B.P.O.E.W) women's group sponsored all-ages activities, and its drum corps was well known in central New York. On May 19, 1923, the Cayuga Temple I.B.P.O.E.W. Daughters of Elks No. 54 presented Jazz a La Mode at the Star Theater. This concert was the highlight of the June Monitor.

Sophisticated dinner events were common at this time, as well. The Tomahawks, a women's group, hosted six-course dinners and elegant entertainment and an event held on April 16, 1923 featured Oliver Piano Brown's Orchestra. (11) There were three active women's groups at this time: the WA Ha Ma, Inc., the Eastern Star, and the Francis Harper Women's Club. The WA Ha Ma group was purely social and hosted teas designed for local black women to socialize and cultivate community connections. The Eastern Star is an organization with national ties that also held local socials at members' homes and sent delegates to regional conventions, while the annual mother's and daughter's banquet was sponsored by the Frances Harper Women's club, a group that differed slightly in that it was inspired by the works and life of Francis Ellen Watkins Harper. This club moved its mission beyond the social realm, bridging a shift from social activity to concrete institutional and interracial activism in the black women's clubs of Ithaca.

The Frances Harper Women's club is credited with initiating the creation of an African American community center in Ithaca. The members of the Francis Harper Women's Club were no different than the majority of black women living in Ithaca in the 1920s, however. Lucy Brown remembers: "My mother worked for Professor Howard Merrick, who was the head of the Graduate School [at Cornell University. She worked! I can tell you she only had Thursday and Sunday afternoon off. All the rest of the time she worked." (12) As with black domestic workers across the country, who performed day work, this shift in schedule represented a drastic improvement from live-in work. (13) Live-in work did not enable domestic workers to create succinct task schedules or clear domestic boundaries. The transition to day work provided clearer work distinctions and unprecedented autonomy, affording black women the time to reorient their community and restructure their social organizations. For instance, the members of the Frances Harper club met regularly--usually on Thursdays, their day off--to socialize, and their gatherings slowly evolved into sites of activism. (14) The creation of the South Side Community Center was a goal and eventual site of activism for members of the Frances Harper Women's Club. This mission set the club apart from other black women's clubs in Ithaca and consolidated them with the national black women's club movement, though they were not formerly connected through membership in the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. Ithaca's Frances Harper Women's Club serves as an example of the shift in community coalition building and social political organizing that emerged during the late 1920s and '30s. The movement began with a black women's club, but evolved into a series of interracial collaborations. At the core of this movement was the community-mothering ethic orchestrated by the Frances Harper Women's Club.

THE FRANCES HARPER WOMEN'S CLUB: A CLUB APART

Even though the Francis Harper Women's Club was known for social events in the 1920s, it began in the late nineteenth century as a local literary society for Ithaca's black women, its primary goal being to foster personal and social improvements. Even though the exact founding date of the Frances Harper club is unknown, its establishment provides evidence of the services many black women's literary societies in the nineteenth century and beyond offered its members, specifically poetry readings and musical performances; advice on dealing with parliamentary procedures; the development of leadership skills unhampered by either male or white dominance; and increased awareness of racial issues. (15) The life and works of this woman, who lived from 1825 to 1911, inspired all of the clubs that bore the name "Francis Harper". Harper wrote, recited, and published poetry, fiction, essays, and letters intended to teach people how to live with high moral purpose and dedicate themselves to social service. (16) She was a prominent abolitionist and women's rights activist whose career bridged the antebellum and post-Civil War eras. Harper called for women's suffrage, prohibition, federal funding for education, and civil rights protections for black Americans. Her work was crucial in the 1880s, a period in which she worked to create viable interracial alliances as national superintendent of "Work among Colored People" in the predominately white Woman's Christian Temperance Union. (17) She was later a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women, the director of the American Association of Educators of Colored Youth, and a tireless worker for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Women's clubs, most notably the F.E.W. Harper Leagues, Frances E. Harper Women's Christian Temperance Unions, and the Frances E.W. Harper Reading Circle of St. Joseph, Missouri, followed her lead not only in naming themselves after her, but in adopting her ideals and activist practices.

Ithaca's Francis Harper Women's Club focused on the social service aspect of Harper's legacy, which linked directly with their own "community mothering" practices. Their first recorded effort was a mother-daughter tea held in 1923. (18) However, their largest undertaking was laying the groundwork for a community youth center. This group first met every Thursday at 221 S. Plain Street, the apartment of one of the members, for arts and crafts. After a few months, they expanded their efforts. To overcome their limited economic resources, they decided to broaden their support base and restructure in order to make the center a reality. These structural changes included changing their name to the Serv-Us League and involving their husbands.

This newly reconstituted group of eleven men and women initiated the process of creating a center by conducting a house-to-house canvas of the south and north side neighborhoods to request funds for the project; they raised a total of $229. As The Ithaca Journal reported, "The league's aim was to provide a social-health-educational-cultural and recreational center for Negroes of Ithaca. The Center was to be non-sectarian and non-political with efforts directed toward uniting the community for the betterment of each and every individual." (19)

This creation of non-sectarian and non-political public spaces to incorporate African Americans into mainstream society mirrored the activism occurring in major urban areas through the work of organizations like the NAACP, the Urban League, and other black women's clubs. Unlike the women working at the national level, however, the first generations of Ithaca's African American clubwomen were mostly non-college educated. By the 1930s, some members had attained college degrees, but they still constituted the minority of club membership. Like the larger club movement, members of Ithaca's Frances Harper Women's Club organized to promote safer neighborhoods, political and civil equality, and racial pride--activist practices based on "community mothering" principles that fueled the black women's club movement during the early twentieth century. (20) Ithaca's Frances Harper Women's Club was on the cusp of the expansion of black women's activism into local institutional arenas, which historian Deborah Gray White claims is a parallel to the creation of the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. The NCNW purported to be "an organization of organizations" with a structure designed to support interracial efforts developed for and by women. (21) In Ithaca, the Frances Harper Club channeled their efforts into the creation of the South Side Community Center, a place where community needs would be met and nurtured and interracial harmony could be fostered.

The founding ethic of this center, "community mothering," refers to accepting responsibility for children who may or may not be biologically related to the mothers or Frances Harper Club members in question. Hence, the arrangements of "community mothering" were both formal and informal and served as the impetus for activist practices devised to impact the community. (22) The term "community mothering" combines Patricia Hill Collins's concept of "other mothering," Cheryl Townsend Gilkes' description of mothering as a form of community-based political activism, and Katrina Bell McDonald's claim that mothering is activist due to the collective and empathic nature of a group of mothers aiding one another through the nurturing and rearing process of raising children. (23) Women involved in "community mothering" are committed to raising children through collective means and community-determined ideals. Although they are not related by biology or marriage, community mothers build social networks that resemble blood-related affinities--fictive-kin family models that are common in black family structures as a result of economic hardships and cultural choices. Because motherhood is a revered position and an acceptable entry point into leadership for black women, "community mothering" is the foundation of the black women's club movement.

Collins explains "other mothering" (or, as I call it, "community mothering") "consists of a series of constantly renegotiated relationships that African American women experience with one another, with black children, with the larger African American community, and with self. These relationships occur in specific locations such as ... in black community institutions." (24)

By 1930, Frances Harper Women's Club members decided to branch out, and invited prominent white city officials and local businessmen to join the group, which they renamed the Serv-Us League. As a result, two interracial groups were formed for the purpose of creating a community center. The Serv-Us League continued to fundraise, while the board of managers for the Southside Community Center developed programming. Members of the Frances Harper women's club were instrumental on both boards and continued to maintain the original mission of the community center as a non-sectarian and non-political site designed to unite the community for the betterment of each and every individual in the community.

With these new social and economic contacts, the Serv-Us League was able to acquire more funds from the city, and the South Side Community Center concept became part of the Community Chest, an outgrowth of local social service agencies and the precursor to the United Way. All Community Chest agencies stressed job training and health education, as well as recreational activities, much like Frances Harper Women's Club members. By 1932, the League had raised enough money through social activities, bakes sales, and private contributions to purchase a house located at 305 South Plain Street. They rented the two upstairs apartments to help maintain the house, and used the downstairs space for after-school activities. The first major hurdle to their success arrived in 1935; the famous flood that occurred that year rendered the house a hazard. League members then had to expand their plans from mere renovation to the construction of an entirely new structure. Robert Treman of Treman, King and Company Hardware and Louis Bocheever, Director of Publicity at Cornell University, drafted the architectural plans.

At this point, the Board of Managers decided to utilize individuals with more experience in social service delivery. The selected individuals, Mr. James Gibbs, former director of the Dunbar House, a black community center in Buffalo, and Serv-Us League's president, Mrs. Jesse Cooper, solicited municipal and federal support to build the new center. A public fundraising campaign generated $10,000 from Ithaca's white and black residents in conjunction with federal dollars from the Federal Works Progress Administration. The hitch was that government assistance was only available to publicly owned facilities and, until then, the South Side Community Center had been a private agency. City officials deemed the South Side Community Center a strong candidate for federal funding due to its mission and the perception that the Center would be the best place to deal with a small problem of teen delinquency. The main incident on city officials' minds was one from the fall of 1935, in which six young African American males were sentenced to a correctional facility for disorderly conduct and officials concluded that their mischief had stemmed from a lack of parental supervision during after-school hours. Therefore, when Mrs. Cooper and Mr. Gibbs presented their proposal, the city was supportive. The board of managers decided to deed the house at 305 Plain Street to the city of Ithaca in early 1936.

On March 6, 1936, ground was broken for the creation of the South Side Community Center. Over $1,200 in donations from Cornell University made it possible to build an adequate gym; these funds were donated in honor of an African American Cornell alumnus, Jerome ("Brud") Holland, who had been active in the South Side House and was a star student athlete at Cornell. The Gym-A-Torium (gymnasium and auditorium) was named after him. (25) Holland eventually earned his doctorate degree, became a U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, and was appointed the first black director of the New York Stock Exchange.

COALITION BUILDING PAYS OFF

Eleanor Roosevelt dedicated the building on February 17, 1938, calling it "a dream come true" for the black community. (26) At the time, Mrs. Roosevelt was visiting Cornell's Human Ecology Department for Farm and Home Week, and when she heard about the South Side Project, she wanted to see it for herself. Her comments were brief: "I dedicate this building to the service of the people of the community," and "I am glad the two races are working together for in that way we will have a better understanding. Here, in this building, you will find a happier, healthier, better future for your children and therefore a happier and better community." (27)

She then gave Isaiah W. Murray, the newly elected President of the Board of Managers, the key to the center, and Mrs. Vera Irvin, a member of the Serv-Us League, spoke about the initial intentions of the Frances Harper Women's Club. Mrs. Irvin acknowledged that the women of the Frances Harper Women's Club wanted to build a safe place for the children of their community and these comments reiterated the mothering ethic at the core of the club's activism. In addition, four Works Progress Administration (WPA) officials spoke about current and future projects. Construction was still underway at the time, but the final cost of the project amounted to $49,052 or more than double the original estimate of $22,000; $32,052 was contributed by the WPA. An interracial contingent of community members co-signed the mortgage note and later donated money.

In April of 1938, a $15,000 mortgage campaign began--a ten-day project that began with 125 volunteer workers. Paul S. Livermore, chair of the campaign, stated that, "The modest allocation from Community Chest and receipts from the Negro memberships will finance a sound and healthy program on a self-sustaining basis." (28) This campaign was the first one "permitted" by the Community Chest, which was viewed as the primary financier; regular Chest funds paid for annual expenses. On April 27, 1938, the volunteers met for dinner at the center site to receive final instructions in campaign strategies. Members of the Board of Managers and Serv-Us League spoke to supporters and, for entertainment and four young girls sang spirituals. A second fundraiser dinner held on May 9, 1938 at the close of the campaign, and both the campaign and the center received statewide attention. The Governor of New York State, Herbert Lehman, wrote, "I am watching with keen interest the progress of the South Side Community Center, and I am very happy to contribute to its success." Walter White, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, commented, "You are intelligently facing the Negro problem here and it is tremendously important to make a success of this laboratory experiment that if successful, will be followed in other states." (29)

THE GRAND OPENING

The center finally opened on August 22, 1938, though its formal opening was in September and featured a week of functions that involved many Ithaca residents, not only African Americans. The new building was highly regarded. Its lounge consisted of a library laden with magazines and newspapers. To the left of this lounge was the executive director's office, and next to that a small canteen. Next to the canteen was a large recreation room, which could also be used for a dining room, and a small but completely equipped kitchen was attached to the dining room. The gym-a-torium, which was 60 feet long and 40 feet wide, covered one entire side of the building. Showers and baths for men and women, as well as small meeting rooms, were also located on the main floor, whose ceiling extended up to the second floor, constituting a semi-cathedral area. The second floor featured pool and billiard rooms, the library, and a large room used for fraternal organization meetings. Several hundred spectators could witness basketball games and other activities from the modern four-room apartment that served as the directors' living quarters. A boys' workshop and hobby room was located in the basement. (30)

The South Side Community Center was host to many activities. A typical day began after school at 3:30 P.M.; boys played sports on the first floor and girls played with toys on the second floor. After 4:00 P.M., the boys and girls scout troops would meet. Boxing instruction began at 6:30, while arts and crafts for girls were held in the lounge. Etiquette classes for young ladies took place at 8:30. The space was also used for rehearsals of the South Side Community Chorus, a group consisting of 45 members who traveled around the state to raise funds for the center. In 1939, the center also sponsored interracial week, which consisted of daily programs displaying the talents of all races and ethnic groups in the community.

As Mr. Art Watkins remembers, "When I came here at 13, the center was the focal point of Ithaca's cultural and social activities. Just about everybody was meeting here, black and white social groups, service groups, political parties; they all met here." (31) The Center also served as headquarters for the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, various fraternal orders, adult education groups, and hobby clubs, as well as providing a forum for all types of recreational and social activities. On Mondays, six religious instruction classes met. On other evenings, Dr. Emma Galvin taught black history classes. Dr. Galvin had finished her dissertation requirements at Cornell University in 1943, but could not obtain a tenure-track position. As Mrs. Lucy Brown remembers, Dr. Galvin taught her classes with even more fervor after this rejection because she wanted to instill the idea that obstacles may slow one down, but cannot destroy one's desires. Later, Dr. Galvin became a lecturer at Ithaca College, an academic consultant to the Ithaca City school system, a National Committee member of the American Association of University of Women, past president of Pi Lambda Theta, an International Honor Society and Professional Association of Education, and an Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., member. She was also nominated to the Citizen's Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality for the State of New York by President Nixon and involved with the Ithaca chapter of the League of Women Voters and the Ithaca Business and Professional Women's Clubs. In 1959, Dr. Galvin was named the Ithaca Business and Professional Woman of the year, but her teaching philosophy was always embedded in a community-mothering ethic: racial pride and uplift. The notion of self-uplift is a basic tenet of "community mothering". Dr. Emma Galvin demonstrated "community mothering" ethics in her teaching and community service, which was embedded in local interests and beyond. (32)

A RETURN TO COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP

After a decade, the South Side Center finally returned to community ownership. The first celebration of this transition was a mortgage-burning party held on February 22, 1944. At the ceremony, Mr. James Conley, the WPA File Director, commented on the significance of the national consciousness "in which," he said, "we are outgrowing the narrow confines of prejudice and making progress toward a sounder social structure in which false barriers will have no place." (33) The Center represented more than just a community space for black children in Ithaca; it became a symbol of racial harmony, another goal of the black women's club movement, and thus the community-mothering ethic was institutionalized.

City officials and 300 people from all over Tompkins County and Central New York State attended the ceremony. The mortgage note was torn into four pieces that represented the children, the young people, the young adults, and the elders of the community and dropped into an urn. Event speakers recognized the initial efforts of the Frances Harper Women's Club, whose members worked to provide a place for their community's children to be supervised during after-school hours and, in accordance with the values of women's clubs both locally and nationally, to learn self-uplift.

Four years later, 200 community members participated in the tenth anniversary celebration of the South Side Center. Dr. Emma Galvin, then-President of the Board of Directors, chaired the program. The gathering gave recognition to the women who had begun the initiative--for their community. In her speech, Mrs. Jessie Cooper, president of the South Side Community Center Board of Managers, summarized the struggle to initiate, complete, and sustain the center, lauding members of the Frances Harper Women's Club and the Serv-Us League "who realized a community need and proceeded to do something about it." (34)

In conclusion, the "community-mothering" ethic had come full circle, having created a community institution that embodied the initial goals of its planners: to nurture and protect community youth. Organizing around the Center connected a small group of local black women activists with the national black women's club movement taking place in larger cities. The programming and services offered by the South Side Community Center evolved directly out of the activism born from the ethics of "community mothering", as well as the inspiration derived from the life and works of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. This combination set the stage for institutional change born from the efforts of local, activist community mothers, and firmly embedded "community mothering" into the national discourse.

(1) Dr. Deidre Hill Butler is an assistant professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies at Union College in Schenectady, New York.

(2) "Center Rites Stress Understanding: A Greeting for First Lady at Center Ceremony," Ithaca Journal 18 February 1938, p.5.

(3) Wheat Street was renamed Cleveland Avenue in the early part of the twentieth century. Local historian Carol Kammen has researched the name change and connected it to the Grover Cleveland Presidency. Carol Kammen, personal interview, May 1993.

(4) Carol Kammen, "Creating a Church for Themselves: in 1830, Ithaca's Black Methodist Episcopal formed a Separate Church," Ithaca Journal, 22 Feb. 1992, sec. B: 12.

(5) Horn, Field, et al, A Heritage Uncovered: The Black Experiences in Upstate New York 1800-1925. (Elmira: Chemung County Historical Society, 1988) 22-23.

(6) M.D. Goodhue, Ithaca City Directory. Ithaca: Norton and Goodhue, 1909. Ruth Mann, personal interview, Feb. 1993.

(7) C.O. Wilson. The Monitor: The Unbiased and Unbossed. (2) June 1923.

(8) The paper did not document that these ball teams were part of the larger Negro Leagues of the time.

(9) The first black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., was established at Cornell University in 1906. Community members aided in the fraternity's development. The initial meetings were held at community members' homes. The few black students at Cornell were thus integrated into the social activities of Ithaca's black community after being excluded from social events on the predominantly Caucasian campus. (9)

(10) Carol U. Sisler, Margaret Hobbie, and Jane M. Dieckmann, eds. Ithaca's Neighborhoods: The Rhine, The Hill, and The Goose Pasture. (DeWitt Historical Society)

(11) C.O. Wilson. The Monitor: The Unbiased and Unbossed (2) June 1923:3.

(12) Lucy Brown. Personal interview, 2 September 1992.

(13) Elizabeth Clark Lewis. Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington D.C. 1910-1940. Smithsonian Institute Press, 1994.

(14) Anne Firor Scott, "Most Invisible of All: Black Women's Voluntary Associations" Journal of Southern History 56 (1990):3-22.

(15) Elizabeth McHenry. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham: Duke University Press. 2002.

(16) Hazel Carby. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

(17) Alison M. Parker. 'Justice is Not Fulfilled So Long as Woman is Unequal Before the Law': Woman's Rights, Race, and Activism in the Writings of (Frances Watkins Harper." Unpublished Conference Paper delivered at the Berkshire Conference on Women's History. June 2005.

(18) C.O. Wilson. The Monitor, the Unbiased and Unbossed. (2) June 1923.

(19) South Side Center Owes Birth to Negro-Woman's Club." Ithaca Journal 26 April 1938.

(20) Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1990. Edwards, Arlene. "community mothering": The Relationship between Mothering and the Community Work of Black Women." Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 2 (2000):87-100.

(21) Deborah Gray White. Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994. New York W.W. Norton & Company. 1999. p. 149

(22) James, S.M. "Mothering: A Possible Black Feminist Link to Social Transformation," eds. Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women. New York Routledge. 1993. 32-44.

(23) Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1990. p. 118; Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, "'Holding Back the Ocean with a Broom': Black Women and Community Work," in The Black Woman, edited by L. Rodgers-Rose, London: Sage, 1981, pp. 217-32; Katrina Bell McDonald, "Black Activist Mothering: A Historical Intersection of Race, Gender, and Class," Gender and Society 11, no. 6(1997), 773-95.

(24) Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1990. p. 118.

(25) Rodney Brooks. "Gibbs tells history: South Side Community Center began as a Woman's Club." Ithaca Journal. 31 August 1976,4.

(26) Sisler, Carol, Margaret Hobbie, and Jane Marsh Dieckmann. Ithaca's Neighborhoods: The Rhine, The Hill, and The Goose. Ithaca: New York Dewitt Historical Society of Tompkins County. 1988, 102.

(27) Center Rites Stress Understanding: A Greeting for First Lady at Center Ceremony." Ithaca Journal 18 February 1938, 5.

(28) "$15,000 Campaign for South Side Center Fund" Ithaca Journal 26 April 1938.

(29) Ibid.

(30) Bart J. Scanlon. "Ithaca's New Community Center" Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life 18 (1940), 360-361. All of these activities were usually posted on the center calendar, which was packed with events, including a party for high school graduates that was attended by a record number of ten graduates in 1939, a father and son banquet, a reception for graduates of the Cornell summer school, a young people's Halloween party, and oratorical contests.

(30) In the 1940s, the center sponsored a reception for African American students graduating from Cornell. In addition, weekly dances were held on Friday nights.

(31) Shane, Corey. "Interview" 14850. May 1993.

(32) Annette Henry, Taking Back Control: African Canadian Women Teachers' Lives and Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.

(33) "South Side Center Free of Debt." Ithaca Journal 29 February 1944.

(34) "South Side Center Notes 10th Birthday" Ithaca Journal 1948.

Diedre Hill Butler (1)