Precursor to Women of Color Feminism: The International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World and Their Internationalist Orientation

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World (ICWDR) was founded in 1922 by prominent members of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). This exclusive council, initially comprising eighteen well-educated and highly respected middle-class African American women, was actively engaged in a variety of political agendas and social reform efforts locally and nationally. Situating discrimination of African Americans across the United States into the larger context of ongoing global European and American racialized colonial oppression and imperialist interventionism, this group of women pursued a Pan-Africanist agenda promoting “racial uplift” by “undermin[ing] American racism within larger global processes of racism, imperialism, and eventually decolonization” (Materson 2009: 36). More specifically, these reformers directed their energies toward a transnational endeavor of raising the racial consciousness of women of “darker complexions” across the globe by creating reading and conversation groups. These groups would “study any question or all...