Elizabeth B. Pearce

In order to understand the history of human services and social work in the United States, it is important to place it in the context of the settlement and colonization of the states in the 1500s and into the 20th century. Many textbooks focus on the innovations of early White activists and social service providers, but without acknowledging the White supremacist practices that harmed Indigenous and Black individuals and families. This focus on White activists to the exclusion of others is known as the “whitewashing” of the history of social services.

As the dominant racial-ethnic group, White European Americans enforced laws and practices that harmed Black and Indigenous families; at the same time, they maintained the power position of being the only ones to solve these family problems created through White dominance. Specifically, they used aggressive tactics to dislocate Native American communities and to remove children from their homes to be sent to boarding schools, all of which disrupted family ties. The intentional enslavement of Black people from Africa and the ways in which Black families were separated (married and partnered couples broken up, children removed from their biological families) caused great harm to family and community relationships. Once we acknowledge these actions, the responses of White activists can be seen in a different light. Perhaps they would not have been needed at all, or certainly not as much.

As you read this chapter, you may confront some uncomfortable or painful feelings. If you are a member of a group that was affected negatively by White dominant actions, it may be a relief to see those actions acknowledged as a contributing factor to the need for the human services and social work fields. Or it may add to pain and trauma that you and your ancestors have experienced. If you are a White person, it may be tempting to deny the past, and its effects on the present. You may experience what is called “White Fragility,” a concept that explains how and why White people are sensitive, uncomfortable, or defensive when confronting information about racial inequality, White dominance, and injustice. And you may be someone who relates to multiple ethnicities and racial identities, and conflicting feelings. With any feelings that you experience, you are not alone. Pay attention to your own feelings, reflect on your responses, but keep reading.

This chapter will include White leaders who influenced the formalization of social services, and it will focus on the ways that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) actually innovated and created caring practices and services that heavily influenced human services then, and today. By examining cultural practices, this chapter attempts to resist and repair the damages caused by White supremacist ideology.

2.3.1 Why History Matters

History is used as a teaching tool to help shape the future. If what we learn from the historical record is not accurate, it will create a narrative that is false and reinforces harmful stereotypes.

Creating a more just future is embedded in the human services profession’s belief system, and an inaccurate view of the past distorts efforts to do so. Human services, like other academic disciplines, depends on history for training and equipping students. It also readily uses history to inform theories, philosophies, and ideologies that shape the discipline and next generations of human services professionals, social workers, mental health counselors, and other professions that help people solve life’s problems.

New students seeking to work in helping professions are learning a specific history that reinforces stereotypes: that BIPOC are the weak and inferior receivers of help, while Whites are the innovators and distributors of help and care. It is true that the majority of the people in helping professions such as social work are White (CSWE, 2020). However, failing to tell the stories of leaders who were persons of color creates an inaccurate view of history and reinforces White supremacist ideologies. These BIPOC historical leaders largely remain unnamed and have been barred access to professional recognition for their contributions to social welfare.

Working to decolonize history means that we attempt to tell the truth about all the people involved without emphasizing the White perspective. In addition, decolonization includes pointing out the strengths and accomplishments of marginalized communities that may not have been documented in the same ways that White accomplishments were.

Failing to tell the full narratives around how people of color have helped themselves and led as helping professionals within their own communities is a disservice to a complete and honest understanding of social welfare history. This led to a historical pattern where Whites were often the “wounders” and then a profession, like social work, was praised for creating a response that represented the “healers.” To truly understand the history of the profession we must also acknowledge how White supremacy and racism affects Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in family and community life.

2.3.2 Origins of the Profession Intertwined with Racism

It is difficult to determine the origins of the profession of human services, because people have been providing social welfare to one another far longer than the profession has officially existed. Even social work, which has existed longer than human services, and which shares a similar foundation, has a debatable origin, although often identified as having started in the mid to late 1800s (Austin, 1983.) During this time the United States enslaved Black people and committed to manifest destiny, the belief that expansion of the United States throughout the west was determined by God. These efforts destroyed Native American communities and families. While there is some interpretation and analysis involved in discussing the origin of human services, the timing is deeply connected to a time when White supremacist racist actions were institutionalized.

It has traditionally been stated social welfare work began from frameworks and principles that span from Europe, the United States, and the Middle East (Dulmus, 2012). It is difficult to date whether these principles or practices existed in other regions of the world, such as Asia, Central America, South America, or Africa. Although communal societies have long held the family or village responsible for the care of vulnerable persons, many Indigenous peoples groups passed down history orally and did not record their history in the same manner as Europeans did.

2.3.3 Europe’s Influence

Given that the United States and Europe are typically credited with officiating and establishing social work in the mid- to late 1800s, it is helpful to consider the social and political climate towards people of color in these two regions. Despite the oppressions of slavery, Black leaders were creating and using social welfare systems which we’ll discuss later in this chapter (Carlton-LaNey, 1999; O’Connell, 2013; Hounmenou, 2012). Ideas that were disseminated by British and French scientists in the 1800s were used to spread false notions that the “negroid” and other persons of color were inherently genetically inferior to Whites (Miles, 1997/2014), uphold racial slavery, place Western Europeans at the top of a human hierarchy, and exclude BIPOC leaders from participation in the official development of social welfare reforms (O’Connell, 2013).

These racialist theories intersected with emerging social welfare policies at the time and established a racialization of poverty, which means that BIPOC experienced poverty at greater rates due to structural factors. (O’Connell, 2010, 2013). Black churches and charities were faced with countering slavery and other racist policies, and they struggled with “the political risk of forming their own social welfare measures or accepting white philanthropy while attempting to combat racial hatred” (O’Connell, 2013, p. 17).

As rapid industrialization occurred in both America and Europe through much of the 1700s and 1800s, ideas about the poor and their plight reflected the changes. The Industrial Revolution brought with it a focus on laissez-faire economics and the Protestant ethic (Zastrow, 2010). Laissez-faire economics was a philosophy that favored businesses being generally permitted to operate without interference or regulations from government entities, doing whatever they found would lead to greater profits. The idea behind laissez-faire economics is that the market is capable of being self-governing; if anyone tries to raise prices on a commodity too much, then the competitors dealing in that commodity will see an increase in business, forcing the overcharging company to lower its prices to match the competition, for example. Similarly, if an employer tries to take advantage of its workers by paying them an unfairly low wage, those workers will leave and go to a company that can pay them a fair amount for the same work.

The Protestant ethic is the idea that people are responsible for their own lot in life. If one is rich, according to the Protestant ethic, it means one deserves it—that person has worked hard, been a moral and upstanding individual, and has not depended upon the help of others. Conversely, a poor person suffers in poverty due to their own personal and moral shortcomings: laziness, lack of education, poor will power, poor money management, greed, irresponsibility. This would be an example of the “unworthy poor,” an idea that emerged from medieval England. Unworthy poor were people who were seen to be responsible for their own poverty, whereas the “worthy poor” such as widows, orphans, or the disabled, were not considered responsible.

None of these ideas about poverty acknowledged the racism, enslavement, or genocide of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Supremacist actions caused and contributed to poverty, family trauma, and other life problems, but this was not taken into account when considering the help people needed or whether they were considered worthy or unworthy of assistance.

All of these ideas remain popular today. Put together, they created a very dangerous situation for the less fortunate. With employers being allowed to do whatever was necessary in order to make money, they didn’t have to treat their workers fairly. If one company got away with subpar working conditions, others followed suit. The resultant lack of jobs that paid a living wage exacerbated the already existent divide between the haves and the have-nots. Despite the fact that the poor were powerless to shape policy or challenge the status quo, they were blamed for their own circumstances.

In the United States, the genocide of Indigenous people groups is one of the earliest works of White supremacy. Armed with the false notion of manifest destiny, settlers created a framework for the nation built on the blood of native Indigenous populations. The nation was established and conceived upon a central tenet that those who were ethnically different from Whites were inferior. Indigenous scholars have explained that European explorers who colonized North America were unable or unwilling to even conceive of the community-oriented leadership that was used effectively by Indigenous peoples (Weaver, 2020). Thus, the contribution Native peoples could have had on social work or social welfare initiatives has been omitted, ignored, or downplayed. Native peoples were seen as subservient to Europeans and their contributions to a new social system that was established by early settlers was unsurprisingly edited from history books.

2.3.4 The Crowned White Founders of Social Welfare

From the murder of Native peoples and the stealing of their land, to legalized slavery and the Jim Crow era, BIPOC were subjected to institutional racism for centuries while the White founders of the social work discipline were emerging. Jane Addams (1860-1935) has been described as many things including sociologist, philanthropist, labor reformist, advocate for juvenile justice, women’s suffrage proponent, and settlement activist (Harris, 2011). Addams is noted for having a long list of accolades that credit her with many accomplishments including Yale University’s first honorary degree awarded to a woman and being the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (Alonso, 2004). She is recognized in textbooks as one of the earliest formers of the juvenile justice system and assisting in earliest conceptualizations of the child welfare system. She has been crowned by the social work profession as the “mother of social work” (Joslin, 2004).

By current understanding, Addams was born into “White privilege,”and benefitted from the concept of “The great white hope,” an early 1900’s slogan expressing the idea that one race is superior to others. This phenomenon glorifies the White hero who “selflessly” comes to aid the ethnically different marginalized community (Pimpare, 2010). Such efforts are seen as sacrificial as many White women like Addams spent time fulfilling duties and responsibilities as wives, mothers, and did not work outside of the home (Brownlee, 1979). By serving the needy, Addams appeared to be “selflessly” deviating from her privileged position.

To recognize and challenge this whitewashing of the history of human services, the discipline must consider whether these criteria are still valid in determining who is deemed a founding member of social services and who is not. Addams was not alone in her quest for social welfare for the oppressed. Many BIPOC sacrificed so that future generations would experience social justices that they were denied during their lifetimes. A host of Black activists, such as Edgar Daniel Nixon and A. Philip Randolph, both presently recognized for their avid social action, did jail time and suffered many hardships for advocacy work in the same period that Addams was gaining attention for her activism (Baldwin & Woodson, 1992; Kersten, 2007). Yet few BIPOC were awarded prizes. In the next section we will discuss BIPOC social welfare communities and leaders whose efforts have been hidden or downplayed in the past.

2.3.5 Black Social Welfare Forerunners

Three examples of Black early social welfare leaders are W. E. B. Du Bois, Eugene Kinkle Jones, and Ida B. Wells. Du Bois (1868-1963) lived during the same time period as Addams. Du Bois was the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard University (Morris, 2015). Interestingly, his work parallels that of the two founding women of social work. His work mirrored “macro” focused social work. In fact, his research and work were so prolific that some scholars label him a sociologist (Green & Wortham, 2015).

One scholar suggests that Du Bois is the rightful, forgotten heir to the title of “Father of Social Work” (Morris, 2015). Du Bois fervently wrote to advocate for the advancement of people of color. He poignantly spoke and organized civil action petitioning for structural change in institutions. Despite these ideas and actions that were well-aligned with social work, Du Bois is almost never mentioned as a founder of social work.

Du Bois, like Addams, did not have an opportunity to study social work, since the discipline was not officiated as an academic or vocational category when they were college-aged. Yet his labor to study for the purpose of social activism and reform seems synonymous with the same efforts as Addams. Du Bois fought for social justice amid Jim Crow, legal lynching practices (Morris, 2015), and legally supported institutional racism. Due to widely held racist views and structures, Du Bois most likely would have not received a Nobel Peace Prize due to the color of his skin.

A second example of a Black social work pioneer is Eugene Kinkle Jones (1885-1954), a leader in the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, now renamed the National Urban League (NUL), an organization that has historically advocated against racial discrimination(Fenderson, 2010). Jones is well known for his focus on advocating for better health, housing, and economic conditions. He worked for the incorporation of Black employees into labor unions, organized civil rights activism against businesses that were legally able to deny jobs to Black people, and advocated for school reform to incorporate more opportunities for people of color. Jones was elected to the leadership of the National Conference of Social Work (NCSW) in 1925. He was the first Black person on the executive board of the NVSW (Armfield, 2011; Armfield & Carlton-LaNey, 2001).

A third example of a Black social welfare leader is Ida B. Wells (1862 – 1931), who set the foundation for the modern-day civil rights movement. Much of her activism occurred via her work as a journalist and speaker. She was well known at the time for her anti-lynching activism, including building awareness internationally, as she worked for social justice. She worked for African American equality, especially that of women (Dickerson, 2018). She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP) in 1909 with W.E.B. Du Bois and others.

At times she was seen as controversial, especially within the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, one of the best known women’s suffrage organizations at the time. The majority of the women in the group were White, and some leaders there were not in agreement with Wells’ anti-lynching work (Duster, 1970). This may have contributed to Wells being less well-known and is an early example of the effects of intersectionality (a term which did not yet exist) but shows how two overlapping marginalized identities results in multiple layers of discrimination.

2.3.5.1 Modern Day BIPOC Leaders and Scholars

Currently, some scholars are seeking to uncover the work of people of color’s contributions to social welfare, including those historical figures less known than Dubois, Jones, and Wells. One scholar, Dr. Crystal Coles, uses a method that uses older documents to examine common activities and characteristics of people from the southern region of the United States (Coles et al., 2018). Coles highlights this unique role of research inquiry to explore marginalized peoples’ influences on social work. Coles studies primarily the impact African American women have had on social work in specified regions of the South.

Similar methods are used to examine the revolutionary lives of 121 Black women who led in many social welfare-involved vocational roles, though they were legally barred from doing so because of the color of their skin. Another scholar, Dr. Elizabeth Anne Hohl, posthumously assigned social roles and vocational titles that many were denied legal rights to claim because of their ethnicity and/or gender identity. These women, each of them born in the 1800s were deemed to have embodied roles such as: “community educators,” “civil rights advocate,” “abolitionist,” “community leader,” or “philanthropist” (Hohl, 2010). When looking deeper into the lives of these individuals and the types of activities in which they engaged, many of them could be known as a social worker, human services worker, or social welfare advocate.

One notable challenge with finding and naming standalone leaders among BIPOC is that many BIPOC communities valued and practiced co-sharing of roles. Focusing on an individual’s influence is more of a White culture characteristic; the celebration of Addams’ work is one example (Okun & Jones, 2000). An example of BIPOC’s more collective approach is found in Coles and colleagues’ work. They reference the work of a 100-year collaboration of women of color to create and sustain a health system in Virginia. These women, amidst the majority culture’s societal opposition and legal barriers were able to create a social welfare structure within the health sector that endured for a century. A few noteworthy women are:

• Lucy Goode Brooks (1818–1900) remarkably noted for having been a former slave; helped found the Friends Asylum for Colored Children.
• Grace Evelyn Arents (1848–1926) created a public housing association for workers.
• Mrs. Thomas Nowlan (first name and dates not available) was the residing president of a what would now be considered a retirement home and oversaw the Spring Street house, a facility known for assisting unwed mothers and women leaving prostitution.

Coles and colleagues’ work have initiated the process of uncovering and documenting the lesser known and uncelebrated BIPOC who embodied social welfare work alongside those who have been identified in mainstream literature.

Another example of a modern day BIPOC scholar is Hilary Weaver (Lakota) whose work on Indigenous peoples uncovers many untold stories of advocacy and social welfare efforts. In one piece of her work, Weaver described the four-decade story of two Indigenous women, the Conley sisters, who worked to protect a Wyandotte burial ground in Kansas City, leading a successful collective struggle. In this same chapter, Weaver described Laura Cornelius Kellogg, an Oneida woman and activist who founded the Society of American Indians and who fought for economic self-determination, education, and land recovery at great personal cost. The retelling of these stories of Indigenous advocacy and leadership further demonstrates how White filtering of history has omitted many BIPOC contributions to social welfare-involved work.

2.3.6 References

Armfield, F. L. (2011). Eugene Kinckle Jones: The National Urban League and black social work, 1910-1940. University of Illinois Press. https://doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036583.001.0001

Armfield, F. L., & Carlton-LaNey, I. B. (2001). Eugene Kinkle Jones: A stateman for the times. In I. B. Carlton-LaNey (Ed.), African American leadership: An empowerment tradition in social welfare history. NASW Press.

Austin, D. M. (1983). The Flexner myth and the history of social work. Social Service Review, 57(3), 357-377. https://doi.org/10.1086/644113

Baldwin, L. V., & Woodson, A. V. (1992). Freedom is never free: A biographical portrait of Edgar Daniel Nixon. Office of Minority Affairs, Tennessee General Assembly.

Brownlee, W. E. (1979). Household values, women’s work, and economic growth, 1800 1930. The Journal of Economic History, 39(1), 199–209. https://doi.org/10.1017/s002205070009639x

Carlton-LaNey, I., & Alexander, S. C. (2001). Early African American social welfare pioneer women. Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 10(2), 67-84. https://doi.org/10.1300/J051v10n02_05

Coles, D. C., Netting, F. E., & O’Connor, M. K. (2018). Using prosopography to raise the voices of those erased in social work history. Affilia, 33(1), 85-97. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886109917721141

CSWE. (2020). 2019 statistics on social work education in the U.S. https://www.cswe.org/Research-Statistics/Research-Briefs-and-Publications/2019-Annual-Statistics-on-Social-Work-Education

Dickerson, Caitlin. “Ida B. Wells, Who Took on Racism in the Deep South With Powerful Reporting on Lynchings.” The New York Times, 8 Mar. 2018. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/obituaries/overlooked-ida-b-wells.html

Dulmus, C. N. (2012). The profession of social work: Guided by history, led by evidence. Wiley.

Duster, Alfreda (ed.). (1970). Crusade for justice: The autobiography of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. University of Chicago Press.

Fenderson, J. (2010). Evolving conceptions of Pan-African scholarship: W. E. B. Dubois, Carter G. Woodson, and the “Encyclopedia Africana,” 1909-1963. The Journal of African American History, 95(1), 71-91. https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.95.1.0071

Green, D., & Wortham, R. (2015). Sociology hesitant: The continuing neglect of WEB Du Bois. Sociological Spectrum, 35(6), 518-533. https://doi.org/10.1080/02732173.2015.1064802

Harris, D. (2011). Re-defining democracy: Jane Addams and the Hull-House settlement, Public History, 33, 171-174.

Hohl, E. (2010). To uplift ourselves and our race: The new Negro woman of the 1890s. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. https://www.proquest.com/openview/c8bbae62c7cb5beae57bdda80622df75/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750

Hounmenou, C. (2012). Black settlement houses and oppositional consciousness. Journal of Black Studies, 43(6), 646-666. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934712441203

Joslin, K. (2004). Jane Addams: A writer’s life. University of Illinois Press.

Kersten, A. E. (2007). A. Philip Randolph: A life in the vanguard. Rowman & Littlefield.

Miles, R. (2014). Beyond the ‘race’ concept: The reproduction of racism in England. In E. N. Gates (Ed.), The concept of race in the natural and social science (pp. 249-274). Routledge. (Original work published in 1997)

Morris, A. D. A. (2015). The scholar denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology. University of California Press.

O’Connell, A. (2013). The deserving and non-deserving races: Colonial intersections of social welfare history in Ontario. Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, and Practice, 2(1), 1-18. https://journals.library.mun.ca/ojs/index.php/IJ/article/view/371/616

Okun, T., & Jones, K. (2000). Dismantling racism: A workbook for social change groups. dRworks. https://resourcegeneration.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/2016-dRworks-workbook.pdf

Pimpare, S. (2010). The welfare queen and the great White hope. New Political Science, 32(3), 453-457. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2010.498215

Weaver, H. (2020). We are beauty and we walk in it: Native American women in leadership roles. In T. Kleibl, R. Lutz, N. Noyoo, B. Bunk, A. Dittman, & B. Seepamore (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of postcolonial social work. (pp. 174-184). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429468728

Zastrow, C. (2010). Introduction to social work and social welfare: Empowering people (10th ed.). Brooks/Cole.