National Council of Negro Women

In 1938, Carter was named to Thomas Dewey's staff to lead the Abandonment Bureau of Women's Courts.

In 1945, she entered into private practice and connected her work with the National Council of Negro Women concerned with international issues.

In 1955, she was elected chair of the Conference of International Organizations as a consultant to the United Nations.

She was very active in international issues affecting the status of women.

She served in the NAACP and the National Urban League and the YWCA.

Her work included being a legal advisor to the National Council of Negro Women.

The rise of Eunice Carter and her eventual success as a lawyer and the first female prosecutor of color in the U.S. is extraordinary.

Born Eunice Roberta Carter on July 16th in 1899, her early years were filled with many firsts.

And we had the broadest array of black leadership that you can think of from civil rights to revolutionaries were on that stage making presentation.

And I always will remember and always think of the great Dorothy Irene Haidt, Dr. Haidt, who was the president of the National Council of Negro Women.

Also a very high person, I think, led Delta Sigma Theta Foundation.

sorority for a long, long time.

As U.S. Secretary of Labor in the New Deal and the nation's first female cabinet member, Francis Perkins championed which landmark social insurance program that established old-age pensions and unemployment insurance? Question five.

An educator turned policy strategist, which leader founded the National Council of Negro Women and helped organize President Franklin D. Roosevelt's informal black cabinet to expand New Deal opportunities for black Americans? We'll be right back

with these answers after this break.

We'll be right back.

Uh, every year that the pigs, uh, procreate, they share that.

She was able to convince the National Council of Negro Women through a relationship she had with Dorothy Height that this was a great project to help women get out of poverty.

And so the National Council of Negro Women actually donated the first fifty-five pigs to the pig bank.

Within five years, um, two thousand pigs had been raised, uh, through the families that, the fifty-five families that got the first pigs.

So they were able to feed hundreds of family.

Last summer, I started my vacation in Jamaica and then Martha's Vineyard.

In Jamaica, we were with people like Siobhan Arline Bradley, the head of the, uh, National Council of Negro Women, Leah Daughtry.

She is the co-chair of the Democratic National Convention, and they were enjoying life, and I'm sitting here like, "Nobody's talking about it."

[laughs]

... not feeling good.

And by Avenger meetups, just so you guys are with us, you know, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the National Urban League, the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women.

Yeah.

When we leave these, these Avenger events, we are, we are typically fired up.

Dr. Katrina Thompson.

She's a member of the National Council of Negro Women, Memphis Section, and Registrar for the Shelby County Election Commission.

Good afternoon, my sister, Dr. Katrina Thompson.

How you doing today? I'm good.

Thank you.

Glad to have you here.

Somebody would say, huh? I thought they didn't have the National Council of Negro Women anymore.

The organization is still thriving.

Black Americans started turning to organizations like the NAACP or the National Urban League, groups that more directly challenged racist systems and advocated for large-scale structural change.

In 1935, Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator and activist, led a portion of the National Association of Colored Women's Members, who did not agree with the self-help philosophy of the group, to form the National Council of Negro Women.

Recognizing a need for women to still advocate for themselves and their specific challenges, Bethune's new group focused on using political activism to improve the state of Black Americans and their communities.

They also took an interest in international affairs.

Bethune also used her position as a director of the Division of Negro Affairs for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which, according to the Smithsonian, made her the first Black woman to head a federal agency, to talk to the press about the need for Black Americans to have federal jobs and other opportunities.

In fact, she was one of the main creators of the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which banned discrimination and all federal agencies and all industries engaged in wartime work.

Utilizing similar strategies as the National Federation of Afro-American Women that came before them, the National Council of Negro Women also created a newspaper.

It was called the Afro-American Women's Journal.

Say a quick word again about Dorothy Height and her unheralded role, and then we'll push to Rosa Parks for a second.

Yeah, so Dorothy Haidt as the longtime leader of the National Council of Negro Women was really essential in that summer of 1963 when there was a lot of question as to whether the march was the right strategic move as the Kennedy administration was trying to work on a civil rights bill, an exceedingly weak one in its first drafts.

And, you know, Dorothy Haidt was part of the contingent that got everyone to the table to say, okay, how are we going to leverage this march? How are we going to make sure that the Urban League, the NAACP, the AUW, the AFL-CIO, how are we going to get SNCC involved as the younger activists? And she used the council house for these purposes so that there could be private places for these leaders to meet because you know by 1963 they are all being followed surveilled uh tape recorded you know she provided that kind of cover that they needed to really hash out a lot of these issues and so she was such an important force and i'm glad that you mentioned rosa parks because so many of us kind of like martin luther king in the march on washington The association with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott sometimes happens to our detriment in not learning the complexity and the intelligence and the radicalism and the tremendous suffering of Rosa Parks as a result of her freedom work.

And so I try to capture her life after the bus boycott, the financial struggles and, you know, her moving to Hampton to work on the campus of Hampton University for a year, her struggles in Detroit, to talk about how despite many of the awards and the celebrations of Rosa Parks, she really struggled financially and it seemed like no one was really there to help lift her up.