• DOI:10.2307/2716966
• Corpus ID: 150176400

Florence Kelley and the Quest for Negro Equality

@article{Athey1971FlorenceKA,
  title={Florence Kelley and the Quest for Negro Equality},
  author={Louis L. Athey},
  journal={The Journal of Negro History},
  year={1971},
  volume={56},
  pages={249 - 261}
}

• Louis L. Athey
• Published 1 October 1971
• History
• The Journal of Negro History

In his eulogy to Florence Kelley, W. E. B. DuBois proclaimed that "save for Jane Addams, there is not another social worker in the United States who has had either her insight or her daring, so far as the American Negro is concerned."l Yet the historical literature on this famous woman reformer contains almost nothing about her activities in behalf of equality for all Americans regardless of race. Her biographers refer to her becoming a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but emphasis is placed upon her better-known work as an early American socialist, as a friend and translator of Friedrich Engels, as the first woman to be appointed Chief Factory Inspector in the United States under Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois and, more importantly, upon her myriad of reform crusades as the General Secretary of the National Consumers' League from her appointment in 1899 to her death in 1932.2 The purpose of this paper is to recount and evaluate Florence Kelley's part in the quest for Negro equality. Deeply influenced by her father, William D. "Pig-Iron" Kelley, Republican Representative from Pennsylvania and a staunch supporter of Lincoln, and her great-aunt, Sarah Pugh, a Quaker humanitarian opponent of slavery and discrimination based upon sex, Florence Kelley as a child was taught to detest social inequities. But it was probably her own experience under the lash of senseless social discrimination which made her an ardent foe of social injustice. She had been denied entrance to the graduate school of the University of Pennsylvania for what she considered the social crime of being a woman; her