Margaret Murray Washington

Educator and Clubwoman Margaret Murray Washington

Library of Congress

Quick Facts

Significance:

Educator, reformer, clubwoman

Place of Birth:

Macon, Mississippi

Date of Birth:

1861 or 1865

Place of Death:

Tuskegee, Alabama

Date of Death:

June 4, 1925

Place of Burial:

Tuskegee, Alabama

Cemetery Name:

Campus Cemetery, Tuskegee University

Margaret Murray Washington rose from humble beginnings to prominence as an educator, reformer, and clubwoman.

Margaret Murray was born in Macon, Mississippi, likely in 1861 to a washerwoman and an Irish railroad worker. After enduring a poverty-stricken early childhood, she was sent to live with Quaker missionary siblings at the age of seven.¹ This event had a profound effect on her life, opening up all the possibilities of education. In 1875, the Quakers sent Margaret to Nashville, Tennessee, to further her education. By the age of 14, she took the teachers’ examination and began to teach. Six years later, she enrolled in Fisk Institute. Margaret attended Fisk as a part-time student while working to pay her tuition. She graduated eight years later.²

At her graduation dinner, Margaret Murray met Booker T. Washington for the first time. He was there as a speaker and Murray found herself seated directly across from him.³ She took the opportunity to ask him for a job, and he hired her as an English teacher.⁴ A year after Murray arrived at Tuskegee, in 1890, she was promoted to the Lady Principal, responsible for the education of female students. The relationship between Booker T. Washington and Margaret Murray gradually became closer, and they married in 1893.⁵

Although Margaret Murray Washington had a liberal arts education, she held the same conservative values as her husband and championed the industrial arts curriculum at Tuskegee Institute. For female students, the curriculum included such things as sewing, laundering, cooking, and soap making. A trip to England in 1899 inspired Washington to further expand the women’s curriculum. During a visit to Swanley Horticultural College, she saw women engaged in gardening, landscaping, and beekeeping, among other agricultural pursuits. Washington instituted such a program for female Tuskegee students. The program included gardening, planting flower beds, care of orchards, beekeeping, and greenhouse botany.⁶

Margaret Murray Washington’s level of education, her prominent position at Tuskegee Institute, and her marriage to Booker T. Washington propelled her into the class of the Black elite. Eventually this led her to become a clubwoman, one of the elite Black women who formed clubs for support of each other and causes in support of Black Americans. Washington’s club experience started at Tuskegee. The Institute held farmer’s conferences, which attracted farmers from a wide area around Tuskegee to learn better, more scientific ways to farm. Since these conferences were only offered to men, Margaret gathered the women who inevitably came with them for what she called "Mother’s Meetings."⁷ These meetings began in 1892 and served as a way to introduce Tuskegee Institute’s ideals into the local community. The meetings included such topics as nutrition, cleanliness, and child-rearing, and they provided those who attended an opportunity to find support in each other. These meetings became so popular that, by the turn of the century, up to 100 women attended the meetings and the idea had spread to other communities.⁸

With the success of the Mother’s Meetings, Washington began to formulate plans for a club for middle-class Black women. The first meeting of the Tuskegee Women’s Club (TWC), held in March of 1895, included Washington and 12 other members. It was an exclusive club, particularly during its early years, requiring an invitation from an active member to join. Although formed to aid underprivileged people of the area, the club did not allow any of those individuals to join. Most of the original members of the TWC came from humble beginnings and felt they knew best what was required to help change circumstances of the lower classes. Margaret served as president of the TWC and remained in that position until her death in 1925.⁹

Initially, the TWC worked with women in the community to improve housekeeping skills, personal hygiene, and child-rearing techniques. As their membership grew, committees were formed within the club to focus in particular areas. Some of these included the jail division, the Temperance division, the Humane Society, the Suffrage division, and the Mother’s Meeting division.¹⁰

The success of the TWC and the attention that it received allowed Margaret Murray Washington entrance into the club scene of the elite Black women of the North. On July 29, 1895, over 100 delegates representing fifty-four clubs met in Boston for the purpose of creating a national organization. Washington served as a delegate of the Tuskegee Women’s Club.¹¹ On the first day of the conference, Washington addressed the women at Berkeley Hall with her speech, "Individual Work for Moral Elevation." She expressed the importance of unity between Black women across the nation:

The North, the South, the East, the West, must be one united whole in this great uplifting of our women — there can be no separation of interests, and the sooner each of us recognizes this fact, the sooner will the work be accomplished.¹²

Washington viewed moral elevation and racial uplift as key efforts towards racial equality. She continued:

I sometimes fear that we are too slow in doing for others because we are, as we think, doing well. Individuals here and there among our men and women are climbing the ladder in almost all of the avenues of life, but this is not race progress; it is the lifting up as we climb which means growth to the race.¹³

By the end of the conference, the club representatives decided to form the National Federation of Afro-American Women (NFAAW), created to serve Black clubwomen across the country.¹⁴ The conference selected Washington to serve as the organization’s first president. Well known for her work with the TWC and Tuskegee, Washington’s appointment represented the strength and unity of a rising movement.

Under Washington’s leadership, the NFAAW made a strong national impression with appearances at such venues as the Atlanta Exposition and the Republican Convention. As president, Washington attempted to unite the NFAAW, with another powerful club, The Colored Women’s Club (CWC). CWC had formed as early as 1884, but it failed to unite Black women’s clubs on a national level. Although Washington’s first attempt was unsuccessful, she orchestrated the unification of the two clubs in 1896 to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).¹⁵

Washington served as Chairwoman of the NACW’s Executive Board.¹⁶ In this position, she had strong influence on the club’s policies in its early years. Much like TWC, the NACW’s goal was "to make a difference in the black community through social reforms and uplift."¹⁷

Only two years after the formation of NACW, Margaret Murray Washington used her national visibility and her position as president of TWC to unite local Alabama clubs into the Alabama State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, initially acting as its president.¹⁸ At this point, Washington was president of TWC, president of the Alabama State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, and vice-president of NACW in addition to her duties at Tuskegee Institute.

In 1912, Washington was elected president of NACW. During her tenure, like TWC, the club functioned through different departments.¹⁹ In 1922, she stepped away from the NACW for her last club venture. She formed the International Council of Women of the Darker Races. True to form, Washington became the first president of this organization.²⁰

Margaret Murray Washington, born in poverty, dedicated her life to the betterment of her race, from locally to internationally. When she died on June 4, 1925, condolences came to Tuskegee from across the country, including one from President Calvin Coolidge.²¹ In 1972, Margaret became the first African American inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame.²²

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Footnotes

1. Sheena Harris, "Margaret Murray Washington: A Southern Reformer and the Black Women's Club Movement," in Alabama Women: Their Lives and Times, edited by Jenny Luke et al. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 143-158.
2. Jone Johnson Lewis, "Margaret Murray Washington, First Lady of Tuskegee," ThoughtCo, accessed November 21, 2024.
3. Lewis, "Margaret Murray Washington, First Lady of Tuskegee."
4. Jacqueline Anne Rouse, "Out of the Shadow of Tuskegee: Margaret Murray Washington, Social Activism, and Race Vindication," The Journal of Negro History 81 (1996): 31-46.
5. Crystal A. DeGregory, Pd.D., "HBCU Stories: Margaret Murray Washington: The Fisk Alumna Behind the Tuskegee Machine," HBCUstory, March 20, 2012.
6. Abra Lee, "Profiles in Botany: Margaret James Murry Washington," fine Gardening, accessed November 2024.
7. Rouse, "Out of the Shadow of Tuskegee: Margaret Murray Washington, Social Activism, and Race Vindication."
8. Shenna Harris, "A Female Reformer in the Age of Booker T. Washington: The Life and Times of Margaret Murray Washington" (PhD thesis, University of Memphis, 2012), 105-108.
9. Harris, "The Life and Times of Margaret Murray Washington," 108-112.
10. Harris, 108-112,120.
11. Harris, 135.
12. "The New Negro Woman," Boston Evening Transcript, August 28, 1895.
13. "The New Negro Woman," Boston Evening Transcript, August 28, 1895.
14. Harris, 135-137.
15. Harris, "The Life and Times of Margaret Murray Washington," 135-140.
16. Harris, 140.
17. Harris, 140-142.
18. Harris, 147.
19. Harris, 151-157.
20. Harris, 170, 181.
21. Rouse, "Out of the Shadow of Tuskegee: Margaret Murray Washington, Social Activism, and Race Vindication."
22. Harris, "The Life and Times of Margaret Murray Washington," 1.