empowered by women you don't even know...

Housewives League paved way for jobs, businesses

LARRY DAVIS
The Detroit News

Detroit's blacks in the 1930s pushed to make Detroit that better place they had hoped to find when they fled the South in the 1920s. Escaping overt racism and poverty, they arrived in Detroit and other Northern cities only to find themselves fighting for jobs, housing, education and first-class citizenship.

On June 10, 1930, 50 black women, led by Fannie B. Peck, wife of the Rev. William H. Peck, organized the Housewives League of Detroit and began a movement to promote economic growth in the black community.

The Housewives League -- a nonprofit sister group to the Booker T. Washington Businessmen's Association organized by her husband, the pastor of Bethel A.M.E. -- required members to support black businesses, buy black products and patronize black professionals, thus keeping black money in the black community. The effort received support from the NAACP and the Urban League.

Members, who had grown to 10,000 by 1934, picketed and boycotted, demanding that merchants employ blacks and sell black products. They also lectured and created exhibits emphasizing their position, issued Certificates of Merit to businesses that met the group's sanitary standards, gave tours and organized spending drives.

Their publications included the Semi-Annual Trade Guide that listed approved businesses, a calendar and a bimonthly Housewives League Bulletin. These publications were sometimes carried door to door during trade campaigns aimed at keeping black dollars in the community.

In addition, the group formed junior units for girls 5-15 in 1935, along with high school and college units for young men and women in 1946. They taught etiquette, scrapbooking, unity and achievement.

Betty Shabazz, who later married Malcolm X, was a member of a junior unit in Detroit.

The Housewives League became so popular that chapters sprang up in other cities, including St. Louis, Mo.; Cincinnati, Ohio; Frankfort, Ky.; Austin, Texas; and Baltimore, Md. In 1933 the leagues organized themselves into the Housewives League of America and Fannie Peck was elected president. Conventions were held in many states.

In the group's early decades their only source of money came from members' pockets, fundraisers, ads sold in their publications, and the sales of black newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender, said Lydia Hibbert, 81, a past Housewives president.

"We funded ourselves with patrons, not donations," Hibbert said.

During the Depression, the League's work was so successful that "in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit, Harlem and Cleveland, (the League) relied on boycotts" to gain "an estimated 75,000 new jobs for blacks," wrote historian Jacqueline Jones in "Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present" (Basic Books, 1985).

Its impact was "second only to government jobs as a new source of openings," she added.

The League continued to work through the 1960s before fading out, ironically, just as the Black Power movement grew, Hibbert said.

"Integration diluted the buying power of black dollars," she said.

Dale Rich, MSU professor Darlene Clark Hine and the Detroit Public Library's Burton Collection contributed.

Additional Facts
Timeline
1930: Mrs. Fannie B. Peck founds Housewives League of Detroit on June 10.
1933: National Housewives League of America organizes in Durham, N.C.
1947: National Charter issued.
1949: Issues revised program outline, Trade Campaign Techniques and Purse-size Business Directory in Detroit.
1956: First national meeting in South Central Region in St. Louis, Mo.
1958: 25th anniversary celebration of National Housewives League in Durham, N.C.
1960: Joint sessions with National Business League and National Bankers Association in Cincinnati, Ohio.
1967: Arena J. Buggs elected president of the National Housewives' League of America Inc. in Cincinnati, Ohio.
1969: Gertrude Tolbert elected president in Washington, D.C.
Source: 34th annual meeting, National Housewives of America Inc. program (July 11-14, 1971)


Now that's power!
Pass it on!