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Civic League formed in 1911 as a pan of the urban wing of the Progressive
Movement, and affiliated with the State Federation of Women's Clubs. White
leaders of the Civic League encouraged the formation of the Cooperative League
in 1913 under the leadership of African American social worker Sarah Fernandis.
An integrated advisory committee, composed of equal numbers of leading members
from both leagues, was set up to help guide the Cooperative League. A close
relationship between the two leagues, mediated by the advisory committee
continued into the 1930s. However, while it is significant that the Civic League
promoted interracial cooperation during a wave of Jim Crow fervor, it is also
significant that it encouraged a separate, segregated organization for Black women.
The segregation continued over the years, and the memberships of the two
organizations seldom mixed. Moreover, the two organizations were not only
separate but unequal: there was no advisory committee with Black members for the
Civic Leagued
While the Cooperative Women's League focused on neighborhood
improvement, the Housewives League focused on building a consumers movement
among Black women. Reporting a membership of 2,000 women organized into 18
branches in Baltimore in the early 1930s, the Housewives League encouraged the
patronage of Black-owned businesses as a strategy for building community self-
sufficiency and providing jobs opportunities for Black youth. Nationally, the
Housewives League had been established by the Colored Merchants Association
(CMA), which in turn was founded by the National Negro Business League in mid-
1928. The Housewives League was conceived as a mechanism to augment the
CMA's campaign of cooperatives of Black retailers. In Baltimore, CMA's
cooperatives failed to take root, but the Housewives League did, and the League's
advocacy of "buying only where you can work" helped to prepare the ground for the
watershed struggle of the Black freedom movement in the first half of the
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