“The Half Has Never Been Told”: Maritcha Lyons’ Community,Black Women Educators,the Woman’s Loyal Union,and “the Color Line” in Progressive Era Brooklyn and New York

Abstract

Schoolteacher Maritcha Lyons was among the pioneering African American women who, in 1892, built one of the first women’s rights and racial justice organizations in the United States, the Woman’s Loyal Union of New York and Brooklyn (WLU). The WLU is recognized for its antilynching work in alliance with Ida B. Wells, and as an organizational springboard to the National Association of Colored Women. This essay examines struggles on “the color line” by Lyons, other WLU members, and women educators, through their community’s engagement in 1880s and 1890s Brooklyn and New York contention over school integration, and a 1903 debate on the founding of the Brooklyn Colored Young Women’s Christian Association. These women’s and their community’s battles against segregation and for separate institutions reveal lesser known aspects of WLU women’s activism, and the complexities of urban racism and Black resistance in the “Progressive Era” that witnessed Reconstruction’s dismantling, lynching, and “Jim Crow.”