Black Women's Organizations

The Phyllis Wheatley Club

Text by Lillian S. Williams, Ph.D.

The Phyllis Wheatley Club was one of the Buffalo black women's most significant organizations and suggests how they approached many of the contemporary issues that surfaced at the turn of the century. Its activities personified black women's reform in the Progressive Era and their notion of community. Although a volunteer organization, professionalism characterized the Phyllis Wheatley Club. Members included Oberlin College graduate Mary Burnett Talbert and Mrs. Charles H. Banks, an alumna of Hampton Institute in Virginia. Susan Evans had attended college in Chicago and had worked at a settlement house there prior to moving to Buffalo.

Club women were well aware of the creeping racism that seemed to permeate the country on the eve of the twentieth century, and they believed that black women had to take stance against it. Early on the Phyllis Wheatley Club protested the exclusionary racial policies of the Board of Directors of the Pan American Exposition, held in Buffalo in 1901, which highlighted the technical innovations that made Buffalo one of the most advanced cities in the hemisphere. The board's decision to exclude an African American exhibit set back the exhibition's policy a generation, for all recent expos had included blacks. At an interracial forum of 200 that the club sponsored at the Michigan Avenue Baptist Church. Mary Talbert cogently argued for the inclusion of blacks. Pragmatist that she was, Talbert also spoke of the financial success of previous exhibits on African peoples, noting how important such exhibits had been in helping to break down negative racial stereotypes.

The Phyllis Wheatley Club's fight against racism was to be a protracted one, with limited victories. It and the community continued to be plagued by the negative images of blacks that the press depicted. The club envisioned the formation of key alliances to succeed in its efforts toward change. It had been instrumental in organizing the NAACP in 1910, and it enjoyed widespread support from blacks and whites.