“Indian and black girls exercising with medicine ball,” Hampton Institute, c. 1899. Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
At the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans were keenly aware of the legal, social, and ideological barriers to full-fledged citizenship. From the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to 1901, the “nadir of race relations,” African Americans experienced racial terrorism, political oppression, disenfranchisement, and the reification of Jim Crow laws through the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. Racial ideologies about Black people’s unsuitability for citizenship undergirded these daily abuses. Many white individuals argued that African Americans showed a physical, mental, and moral lack of fitness for citizenship.
As some white Americans advocated racist eugenic logic, African American women used exercise to achieve overlapping corporal and civic goals. Physical culture tightened the relationship between physical fitness, gendered discourses of citizenship, and notions of racial advancement. Aspiring-class African American women in particular perceived a natural connection between physical culture and prevailing ideas of racial progress. The Progressive Era proved ripe for this relationship. The simultaneous development of racial uplift campaigns and the physical culture movement allowed for the marriage of physical fitness and Black advancement. Well-known African American “race men” and “race women,” including W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Booker T. Washington, all advocated some form of physical culture for Black people.
For these Black reformers and others, striving for physical fitness became just as important as striving for other forms of fitness (such as intellectual, moral, or civic fitness). Racial uplift advocates believed they could not morally elevate the race without physically strengthening the Black female population through exercise. Thinking critically about the intersection of race, gender, and self-presentation in the early twentieth century, Black women utilized exercise to present themselves as “fit” during the age of physical culture and racial uplift. From their perspective, moral fitness coincided with physical fitness, and both proved essential for racial and civic uplift.
The history of Black women’s exercise began with race women arguing for the health and physical development of Black girls and women in the late nineteenth century. Educator Olivia Davidson, for example, became an important advocate of young Black women’s bodily care in the 1880s. She attended Hampton Institute, married Booker T. Washington, and served as vice principal of Tuskegee Institute—a résumé that granted her significant influence in Black female circles. But Davidson did not rest on her laurels. A close look at her personal life and pedagogical values uncovers the ways in which she struggled for Black women and girls’ wellness, including her own.
Throughout her life, Davidson faced profound health challenges that undoubtedly shaped her views on Black women’s bodies. Her hospital record and personal correspondence reveal that she suffered from weakness, constant pain, and tuberculosis, which probably caused her death at the age of thirty-four in 1889. Booker T. Washington mentioned briefly in Up from Slavery that Davidson “literally wore herself out in her never ceasing efforts in behalf of the work she so dearly loved.” Davidson’s unceasing efforts to get Tuskegee established were marked by bouts of illness and fatigue, and she regretted how these periods of affliction stalled the important race work she performed at Tuskegee. At a time when tuberculosis posed a significant threat to Black life, many African American reformers’ enthusiasm for physical culture indeed stemmed from their personal battles with illness in addition to social and political imperatives.
In 1886 Davidson addressed the Alabama State Teacher Association about African Americans’ physical condition, particularly the condition of Black women’s bodies. The title of the speech, “How Shall We Make the Women of Our Race Stronger?,” pointed to both external and internal senses of strength. She prioritized Black women’s physicality in her talk by noting, “Let us consider how the physical development of one woman can be accomplished: James Freeman Clarke in his inimitable essay on the training and care of the body says, ‘Good health is the basis of all physical, intellectual and moral development. We glorify God with our bodies by keeping them in good health.’ Mainly because I believe this is true, I have put this part of my subject first.” She decried the prevalence of “nervous and organic diseases” that blocked “the highest avenues of usefulness” for Black women, and she placed the healthy Black female body at the heart of African American progress.
Davidson’s comments indicate a shift in the late nineteenth century in which Black leaders tied notions of progress to the material body in addition to less tangible characteristics of morality and intelligence. She condemned the damaging effects of tobacco, alcohol, and morphine, not because of their moral consequences but because of their “evil results upon our bodies.” These results, she believed, could be inherited by future generations. Davidson explained to the teachers, “The drunken parent destroys or weakens not alone the body God gave him for the temple of his own soul, but transmits to the child a heritage of suffering, perhaps observable in general organic weaknesses or in fearful deformities or painful diseases.” Placing gender at the center of her analysis, she asserted that girls were more susceptible to “inherited weakness” due to their “delicate organizations,” and for this reason it was imperative to invest in the health and physical development of Black girls.
Davidson believed that Black women teachers could have a meaningful influence on the physical habits of young Black people. She urged educators to teach “physiology and hygiene” to prevent the spread of disease and slow the physical deterioration of the youth. At her own Tuskegee Institute, while a robust physical education program had not yet been formed, administrators by 1886 had incorporated “physiology and hygiene” into the curriculum. Davidson also encouraged the teachers to show their female students “in every way possible how to care for their bodies.” As someone who struggled with balancing her work at Tuskegee with managing her own illness, her invocation of bodily care may have stemmed from unfulfilled desires for herself. As she crafted her speech, Davidson may have pondered how she could transform her individual longing for vigor into a larger campaign for Black women’s health.
In a prescient statement that resonated with Black women reformers in the twentieth century, Davidson reminded her audience that “the young women and girls are the hope for the race.” For Davidson, the future of the race literally rested within the bodies of Black girls. She described Black women’s bodies as “beautiful temples” that were “defiled” by improper diets, alcohol, snuff, and “sheer physical exhaustion.”
Almost a decade after Davidson’s speech, Mary P. Evans, editor and writer of the Black women’s magazine the Woman’s Era, introduced exercise into the conversation on enhancing Black women’s bodies. Evans’ work with the Woman’s Era preceded her other important activist work, including helping to establish the Boston branch of the NAACP, growing the organization’s membership, forging an anti-lynching campaign, and challenging segregation in Washington, DC. In 1894 she authored a three-part series titled “Health and Beauty from Exercise” that, like Davidson’s speech, urged Black women to prioritize their physical development. Evans listed numerous benefits of exercise:
Faithful, earnest, and painstaking physical exercise, such as has been indicated under intelligent direction, rewards the girl who keeps it up with health, youth, and beauty. It keeps the body in the best condition for throwing off disease. It enables you to keep in the best condition for work with the hands or with the brain. It is a wholesome and powerful preventive of morbid, sickly, and injurious brooding and thinking. It helps you to see things, to know people, and to judge them in a broad instead of a narrow spirit. It prepares you to meet disappointment, sorrow, ill treatment, and great suffering as the strong, courageous and splendid woman meets them. It is a great aid to clear, quick, and right thinking.
Evidently, exercise helped with disease resistance, made one a better worker, inspired positive and capacious thinking, and strengthened body, mind, and spirit. Evans averred that these qualities encouraged “right living and right acting” and, as mentioned above, “right thinking.” Without stating the point explicitly, Evans linked “faithful, earnest, and painstaking physical exercise” to desirable civic and moral qualities such as diligence, good judgment, and intelligence. Her arguments represented the foundational ideological and discursive work that Black women did to bind physical fitness to civic fitness.
Advice literature provided African Americans with explicit exercise guidance consistent with racial uplift imperatives. Also referred to as “conduct literature,” this media outlet literally instructed Black readers how to behave. Advice literature avoided contentious electoral politics and instead emphasized how individual behaviors could affect the destiny of the entire race. Michele Mitchell notes that “the genre concocted idealized versions of womanhood and manhood for a people anxious to prove their fitness for national citizenship and the franchise.” In this way, advice literature served as behavioral guides on citizenship, and its writers conceived of citizenship as “desirable activity.”
Historians often credit advice literature with propagating respectability politics through directives in temperance, chastity, cleanliness, and other polite behaviors. But conduct literature also advocated exercise as beneficial to Black individuals, families, and racial futures. In College of Life or Practical Self-Educator: A Manual of Self-Improvement for the Colored Race, published in 1895, the authors blended typical prescriptive advice with exercise instruction. As indicated in the title, the book claimed to provide methods of “self-improvement for the colored race” and highlighted “examples and achievements of successful men and women of the race as an incentive and inspiration to the rising generation.”
The authors, Henry Davenport Northrop, Joseph R. Gay (both white), and Irvine Garland Penn (African American), included the topics of health and physical fitness in many chapters of the 656-page advice book. Penn, like Olivia Davidson, was a staunch advocate of Black education, and he particularly championed “self-development and self-evaluation.” By the time College of Life was published, Penn had edited a Black newspaper in Virginia, written a book about other Black journalists and editors, and had coauthored the influential pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition with Ida B. Wells, F.L. Barnett, and Frederick Douglass. He specifically authored the pamphlet section titled “The Progress of the Afro-American since Emancipation.” Penn also helped organize the African American exhibits at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895 and worked closely with Booker T. Washington on the exposition. Although it is difficult to distinguish the individual authors’ voices, this biographical information suggests that Penn may have perceived his role in College of Life as part of his larger political imperative to display Black achievement, argue for African Americans’ worthiness as citizens, and continue to struggle for Black self-determination.
The authors argued for Black fitness in the plainly titled chapter “The Importance of Exercise.” The chapter began by describing the “weak, dyspeptic, nerveless, draggy, pale, [and] puny” man as “a dismal failure from the start.” Although the book noted the importance of cultivating a life of the mind and practicing diligent study, Northrop, Gay, and Penn recognized that “the ‘perfectibility’ of the human race depends much more on physical than mental culture, for intellect, energy of will, and strength of moral fiber are largely dependent on sound bodily health.” As Evans and Davidson had explained before, Black people benefited greatly from prioritizing physical and not just intellectual development. The authors acknowledged that in the United States, “physical culture is also beginning to be made part of the ordinary school curriculum,” and the book heralded this trend to a specifically Black audience.
From Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women’s Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America by Ava Purkiss. Copyright © 2023 by Ava Purkiss. Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press.
