"Doing a Great Thing for Our People in This Hemisphere": NCNW Tours and Travels to Latin America

Just five years after its founding, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) held its
first international seminar in Havana, Cuba. The 1940 “mission of contact and study” was influenced
by the previous sojourns of Councilwomen as well as by a broader desire among many African
Americans to fellowship with populations with similar experiences of enslavement and oppression.
Having achieved success at this first conference, NCNW leaders sprang into action planning their
next Pan-American voyage—this time “a significant tour of friendship to Haiti.” Like the Cuban trip,
it was to feature meetings and activities with women’s organizations, the nation’s intelligentsia, and
representatives of government and the diplomatic community. Differently, however, calls for the
Haitian trip advertised excursions into rural parts of the country.

Unfortunately, NCNW’s Haitian expedition as it was originally conceptualized never
materialized. Even so, in the 1940s Cuban and Haitian women traveled to the United States to
attend NCNW conventions and events. Several Councilwomen continued conducting tours of Latin
America on their own or as NCNW representatives in the initiatives of other organizations. This
presentation explores this travel, which frequently included sightseeing activities, alongside that
of NCNW's tours (both completed and proposed) in order to investigate the diverse outcomes not
only for NCNW travelers but populations in these host countries as well. It discusses NCNW’s
motivations for such alliances and trips, which included educating African American women about
the conditions of Blacks in this region and because NCNW felt that their work here would be
“doing a great thing for…people in this hemisphere.” Additionally, by collaborating with their Latin
American and Caribbean “sister organizations” as they so termed them, and by representing this
population’s interests before organizations in the United States, African American women’s own
power and prestige increased within some American circles.