Desire, Dispossession, and Dreams of Social Data: Black Clubwomen’s Intellectual Thought and Aesthetics During the Progressive Era in Public Writing and Print Culture

Carefully and conscientiously we shall study the questions, which affect the race most deeply and directly. Against the convict lease system, the Jim Crow car laws, lynchings and all other barbarities which degrade us, we shall protest with such force of logic and intensity of the soul that those who oppress us will either cease to disavow the inalienability and equality of human rights, or be ashamed to openly violate the very principles upon which this government was founded. —Mary Church Terrell, “What Role is the Educated Negro Woman to Play” (1902)1