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Throughout the 1920s Daisy continued to make herself a force in state-wide politics and the local community—crisscrossing the state helping to raise funds and drive membership for the State Federation of Negro Women’s Clubs, remaining active in the state Republican party, the Lucy Stone League, and the local Urban League. She would continue this work for the rest of her life. Beginning in 1929, however, she would leverage the relationships she had built into work of enduring national significance. She became an executive with the leading black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, and a national official with the most important organization of black political influence, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  Daisy Lampkin, probably in the offices of the Pittsburgh Courier.
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 Despite the fact that at least one historian has described organizer, activist, and community builder Daisy Lampkin as “legendary,” not much is known about her. No full-scale biography has been published, though there have been two abortive attempts by contemporaries of Lampkin. Their unfinished manuscripts now lay untouched in archives. Several short biographical chapters have been published in various places, but these are often under sourced, elide large sections of her career, and get details wrong. I’ll be sharing elements of Lampkin’s life, along with my own research journey, here on this blog. I hope readers will become as fascinated by this admirable and endlessly energetic lady as I am.
I've been running a series over on Bluesky, a photo album of the people in Daisy Lampkin's life. The breadth of her social connections, her activist allies, and her political networks is breathtaking. The following give some sense of that scope, and how she (and others) overlapped their community and national networks, enriching both. Follow along for more on my Daisy Lampkin biography project.  The lady herself, Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin (1883-1965). Lampkin was instrumental in the western PA suffrage movement, in the Pittsburgh Courier, and in national NAACP organizing. A fundraiser, organizer, and activist, she was also a mentor, here surrounded by the young ladies of the Courier. In the early days of a project, all is new, all directions possible, no conclusions are fixed. It’s an exciting time of discovery, to formulate hypothesis, test them against the evidence, change course as needed, and see where the research takes you. When I started the project on Daisy Lampkin I knew that I would be learning new things about race and gender and class in America, about how the suffrage movement influenced the civil rights movement, and about how African American women such as Daisy made their entrée into such networks. I also expected to learn, and am learning, a great deal about how local communities, including cultural and political powerbases, related to larger patterns of national influence. What I didn’t realize at the beginning was the role that technology would be playing in the narrative:  |
AuthorI am an editor and historian of US history, diplomacy, and international relations. Archives
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Why empire?This blog presents new scholarship on American empire, places the American experience in a broader and global imperial context, explores imperial habits throughout American society and culture, uncovers the imperial connections between the foreign and the domestic, and develops “empire” as a critical perspective.
At least two features in the American experience are clarified through the lens of American empire: First, we better understand persistent social inequities in a nation professing a fundamental commitment to equality. Second, even a cursory glance at American history makes plain the chronic violence at the center of US foreign policy, which frequently mounts or supports bloody military conflict abroad. Empire helps us recognize how and why the United States seems to be constantly at war--including often with itself--with all the foreign and domestic consequences thereof. |
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