Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs

W-106

This house was the last headquarters of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, organized in 1907 by educator and social reformer Janie Porter Barrett and other women who attended the annual Hampton Negro Conference. The Federation fostered cooperation among the state’s many African American women’s clubs, which had emerged late in the 19th century to address the needs of women and children and to improve education, health care, home life, and economic opportunity. In 1915 the Federation opened the Industrial Home School for Colored Girls, a rehabilitation center in Hanover County for girls in legal trouble.

Department of Historic Resources, 2017

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Ida J. Williams, et al., The History of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs (1996). First Annual Report of the Industrial Home School for Colored Girls (1916). Nashville Globe, 25 July 1913. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 23 May 1916. Tonya Dé Neé Blair, “Building Within Our Borders: Black Women Reformers in the South from 1890 to 1920” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Southern Mississippi, 2015). Colita Nichols Fairfax, Hampton, Virginia (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Black America Series), 50. Cindy Kierner, et al., Changing History: Virginia Women through Four Centuries (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2013). “Barrett, Janie Porter,” Dictionary of Virginia Biography 1:357-359. Newport News Daily Press, 3 Feb. 2016. Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/settlement-houses/barrett-janie-porter-1865-1948-african-american-social-welfare-activist/