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Beginning
The National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) is a non-profit organization founded in 1935 with the mission to advance the opportunities and the quality of life for African American women, their families, and communities. Mary McLeod Bethune was the founder of NCNW and wanted to encourage the participation of Negro Women in civic, political, economic and educational activities and institutions. The organization was considered as a cleaning house for the dissemination of activities concerning women but wanted to work alongside a group who supported civil rights rather than go to actual protests. Women on the council fought more towards political and economic successes of black women to uplift them in society. NCNW fulfills this mission through research, advocacy, and national and community-based programs in the United States and Africa. NCNW serves as a super organization which acts as a cohesive umbrella for the other African American groups that already existed. With its' 28 national affiliate organizations and its more than 200 community-based sections, NCNW has an outreach to nearly four million women, all contributing to the peaceful solutions to the problems of human welfare and rights. The national headquarters that act as a central source for program planning, is based in Washington, D.C., on Pennsylvania Avenue, located between the White House and the U.S. Capitol. NCNW also has two field offices.

History
The NCNW was founded on December 5th, 1935 by Mary McLeod Bethune, a distinguished educator, and government consultant whose parents were born into slavery. Mary McLeod Bethune saw the need for harnessing the power and extending the leadership of African-American women through a national organization. The organization comes to after a couple of years after World War I and stems from the National Association of Colored Women, which also saw a purpose in supporting black women's rights in political and economical say. During the 1930's there were many organizations formed for the rights of African Africans, but few specifically for African American women. Mary branched off the ideas of the NACW and began the start of the NCNW to help African American women and their families. She felt that the programs were ineffective to the main problems that women faced every day, and wanted NCNW to have deep solid roots. The first four decades of the organization was spent fulfilling Bethune’s ideas of a unified women’s movement capable of addressing economic, political, and social issues affecting women and their families. In the early years of NCNW, the small volunteer staff operated out of Bethune's living room in Washington D.C. The support of the NCNW was considered to be so important to the women’s organizations as opposed to the amendment. The activism of Bethune and the NCNW in the area of women's rights was unusual for the time, as black female leaders were conspicuously absent from organizations fighting for female equality from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s. Part of the reason for their inactivity in this area was the racism of the white suffragists which black women had experienced during the struggle for the 19th Amendment.

Major Activites
Although Bethune and the NCNW were very much involved in the struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment, especially in the late 1940s, even she was careful to keep her organization on the conservative side of the issue and refused to support the amendment. In 1965 the NCNW recruited many northern women with professional backgrounds in such fields as psychology, social, work, and education as well as unskilled volunteers to aid the Freedom Schools and other developing programs under the Office of Economic Opportunity which the NCNW had held to establish in Mississippi.

Political Problems
How were they involved but didn't support the amendment

Mary McLeod Bethune
From 1936 to 1942, Bethune was simultaneously the president of Bethune-Cookman College (Founded by her for black students in Daytona, Florida), the first president and founder of the NCNW and the special Roosevelt as Director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration. Her plans were to plan, initiate, and carry out the dreams of African-American women who felt unheard and mistreated.

Other Founders
When Bethune stepped down from the presidency of the NCNW, in November 1949 at the age of seventy-four, her two successors, Dorothy B. Ferebee, who presided from 1949 to 1953, and Vivian C. Mason who presided from 1953 to 1957, carried on the tradition of “black first”. After 1958, under Height’s leadership, the NCNW began to move in new directions to come to terms with a number of old problems, and she works to bring the organization up to date with the times. In her first years as president Height concentrated on achieving concrete goals: the acquisition of tax-exempt status; the erection of the Bethune Memorial Statue; the professionalization of the NCNW; and the establishment of Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Museum and National Archives for Black Women's History.

Dorothy Height
Dorothy Height served as the NCNW's second president from 1957-1997 helping women feel empowered til the day she passed away. She marched with Martin Luther King at the civil rights marches and was invited to President Obama's inauguration. President Obama also spoke at her funeral along with many other women and men who cared deeply for her. In her memoir, One of Heights main concerns was with the problems many blacks faced as a result of their poverty. So she began a campaign in Mississippi that would make better food and shelter available for those at a disadvantage. The main project of this campaign was to establish a "pig bank" which would lend pigs to black families and charge interest equal to one pig per family. By 1957 the original "pig banks," of what was fifty-five had grown to over 2,000 pigs. Thus, the NCNW aided many poor families in the rural South by helping them to make many practical improvements in their daily lives.

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Towards the middle of the start of NCNW, the founders realized that more African Americans were falling below the poverty line and began focusing on projects geared to those in need. They created programs that helped families with food and partnered with the federal government to support Black women with getting houses built for their families.

Archives Project
Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder, worked to get African American women their own institution that contained records and history of other black women to support the uplift of women's empowerment. She used the NCNW to help create the National Archives of Negro Women's History by establishing a committee specifically to find information about different African American women so they could feel just as educated.

Freedom Schools
Bethune Cookman's College Bethune Cookman's College

TIMELINE 1872 - Cookman Institute was founded in Jacksonville, Florida 1904 - Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls was founded 1923 - Merger began between co-ed Cookman Institute and Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute 1931 - Receives full accreditation as a junior college 1941 - Four-year baccalaureate program for liberal arts and teacher education is approved by the Florida Department of Education 2007 - Achieves University status

National Programs -The Annual Black Family Reunion Program Celebration
In the early 1960s, the NCNW also work closely with civil rights organizations to advance black rights in the south, especially SNCC. SNCC stands for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee The NCNW and its affiliations had participated in the Women's Integrity Integrating Neighborhood Services (WINS) project in the New York metropolitan area.