» The Role of Black Women’s Social Clubs in the Political, Social, and Cultural Activism in the South Carolina Lowcountry with Dr. Cherisse Jones-Branch on May 19th at 6pm

May 5, 2021
Programming, News & Notes

In 2020, the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture was awarded a a grant to digitize collection items representing Black women’s activism in the SC Lowcountry. This project is supported by the Digital Public Library of America. The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. These items will be a part of the DPLA’s larger collection titled the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection.


About the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection

The Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection is a collaborative project to provide digital access to materials documenting the roles and experiences of Black Women in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and, more broadly, women’s rights, voting rights, and civic activism between the 1850s and 1960.


The materials in this collection include photographs, correspondence, speeches, event programs, publications, oral histories, and other artifacts.


The collection explores both the roots of women’s activism in Black communities; the ongoing struggle to secure, protect, and use the right to vote, beyond the Suffrage Movement; and the intersections between voting rights and other civil rights.


Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection Avery Research Center

Due to Covid-19, we have had to adjust project plans, but one of the outcomes of the project is to document the importance and role of Black women’s clubs to activism. Thus, we are pleased to announce that on May 19, 2021 at 6:00 p.m. EST we will have College of Charleston alumna, Dr. Cherisse Jones-Branch discussing this topic, including on the clubs and their leaders, what their missions were, and how they were active politically, socially, and culturally.


About Speaker

Cherisse Jones-Branch is the James and Wanda Lee Vaughn Endowed Professor of History at Arkansas State University, where she is dean of the graduate school. She is the author of Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914-1965 (June 2021),  Crossing the Line: Women and Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II, and the coeditor of Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times.


Event Registration


Project Press

Virtual Event: From Black Women’s Suffrage to Black Lives Matter (September 29, 2020)

DPLA launches Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection (September 10, 2020)

Avery Research Center Supports Collection on Black Women in Women’s Suffrage Movement (August 2020)

Our Race, Gender, Politics, and History event. DPLA News. (July 2020)

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