Neighborhood Union collection

By Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Ph.D. June 1995

"She was taken sick and the two men not thinking her case was serious, went each morning to their work. After a few days, some of the more thoughtful neighbors, not having seen this woman about, called and found her very ill and greatly in need of care. They did what they could for her comfort, but in a few hours she died. Deeply grieved that at their very door and under the shadow of Morehouse College, a poor woman could sicken and die probably for the want of such womanly care as the neighbors could have given had they know, the college woman said, 'this should not be, we should know our neighbors better.'" (Shivery, 43; Rouse, 65)

After learning of the above tragedy, Lugenia Burns Hope grasped the opportunity to organize her immediate environs. Believing the neighborhood suffered from the lack of neighborhood commitment, Lugenia Hope initiated the call and her community responded.

On Thursday, July 8, 1908 neighbors in the West Fair community joined Hope in her home to discuss the need for settlement work in their community. Out of these earlier meetings evolved the Neighborhood Union, a community service organization designed to be the "moral, social, intellectual, and religious uplift of the community and the neighborhood in which the organization or its branches may be established." Adopting the motto, "Thy Neighbor as Thyself," the union proclaimed its mission: to build playgrounds, clubs, neighborhood centers, to develop a spirit of comradeship among neighbors; to promote child welfare; to impart a sense of cultural heritage; to abolish slums and vice; and to improve the overall moral quality of the community.

To wit, the city was divided into zones, districts, and neighborhoods, led by zone chairpersons, district directors, and neighborhood presidents and supervised by a board of directors and a board of managers. By 1915, branches were visible throughout Atlanta.

The Neighborhood Union's rich legacy is one of civic service, community building, and racial uplift. It hosted medical fairs, bazaars, clinics, and carnivals in order to provide much needed medical attention to the Black citizens of Atlanta; it set up kindergartens and day care centers; its settlement house provided temporary shelter for homeless families; it offered classes in motherhood training, child care, and cared for the elderly, vocational training in the arts for boys and sewing and millinery for girls. It's most successful long term project was the union's quest for quality education for African American children in the city. For decades, the group petitioned Atlanta's board of education, the mayor, and the city council, asking for additional schools, the restoration of dilapidated facilities, and the elimination of double and triple sessions with an increase in the salaries of African American teachers. The union protested the lack of high school students and the lack of special education classes, vocational art classes, and literary classes beyond sixth grade. (Most of these classes had been handled by the Neighborhood Union since its inception.) Joining with the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP, a ministerial alliance, and others the union was able to work for or against the passage of school bonds in special municipal elections. However, because funds appropriated for Black schools were not always forthcoming, even after elections, the union often found itself rallying and protesting in order to ensure that African American schools actually received the funds that had been budgeted for them. The union also contributed to the opening of Booker T. Washington High School in 1924, the first high school for blacks in Atlanta.

The female members of the union viewed their organization as an experiment in community cooperation and building, designed to enhance racial pride, to promote citizenship and underpinning Black families. For more than seven decades the Neighborhood Union received very little county and city support until 1924, when the city made the union responsible for the health care of African American preschoolers. For more than fifty years the agency that was created to serve "Thy Neighbor as Thyself" did exactly that. Until its demise, the Neighborhood Union was a continuous voice of protest for social justice reform.

As African American Women's History has become a key area of concentration for scholars globally, few collections offer the researcher as much as this one does. Thus over the last two decades, the Neighborhood Union Collection has been perused by persons seeking to explore Blacks in Atlanta during the Progressive Era, Black women in the southern club movement, Black women in interracial work, the histories of Morehouse and Atlanta University, community organizing in the urban African American South, the anti lynching crusade, and the life and work of Lugenia Burns Hope.

Recent scholarship on African American southern women collectively and individually has been impacted by the use of this collection. (This could extend Women, African American, Southern, and American histories.) Researchers have discovered the interrelationship of the members of the various organizations, women who have concentrated their efforts in race/gender protest work. Local or regional leadership have often been propelled into national roles because of their success in a smaller local, i.e. Lugenia Burns Hope and the national work with the YMCA in the World War I years.

The Union's public and private correspondence acquaints us with a "Southern Network" of race women who asserted that work represented the voices of over 300,000 cohorts on issues of equality and justice. It shows how these women organized an international council of woman of color, attracting women from Japan, South Africa, Haiti, Brazil, and many other places. These biannual meetings explored imperialism, Pan Africanism, colonialism, and gender discrimination. They also supported the emerging Negro History movement of Carter G. Woodson, with the incorporation of this material into the curriculum of African American schools.

The Neighborhood Union introduced and initiated further examination of southern African American women's activism. While serving as the catalyst in documenting the exact role of southern African American women in the national movement of African American women, it also houses these women's voices in the interracial movement. These social workers, educators, and community builders groomed generations of young women and men to accept challenge of race-work--their ancestral mission.

Hence, the availability of this guide to the Neighborhood Union Collection will be a significant tool in enhancing the researchers' efforts. It will make this heavily used collection even more compelling to an upcoming generation of scholars who seek to reconstruct the tradition of race work and race/gender politics in the lives of Southern African American women.

For additional information see the thesis by L.D. Shivery, Organized Social Work Among Negroes in Atlanta, 1890-1935.