The St. Louis Phyllis Wheatley YWCA: A Pioneer of Informal Educational Opportunities for African American Women

At the turn of the century, St. Louis' Negro females faced an education desert. Opportunities for informal instruction were scarce, particularly for those in lower socio-economic brackets (Anderson 1988). The 1911 opening of the St. Louis Phyllis Wheatley-YWCA (PW-YWCA) became a beacon of hope and a center of educational respite for those young women as one of the organization's tenets was to uplift the masses of disenfranchised Negro women (Browder 2008). Vesper services were the initial focus, but in an effort to meet the community's needs, various activities through an informal public pedagogy became a major function of the institution (Weisenfeld 1994). The purpose of this paper is to examine African American women's informal educational journeys. Despite their initial entry into America as chattel slaves, black women excelled in exceptional educational gains post slavery through the early 20th century. Concurrently, a singular focus is on the informal educational agency that the PW-YWCA's COA exhibited to ameliorate the educational desert created after chattel slavery ended. Through a framework of Black Feminist Thought (BFT), this paper creates a counter-narrative that highlights the accomplishments of this unknown cadre of black women. Exploring the connection between the PW-COA and the Negro female community is significant as this relationship determined how the PW-COA would navigate the then unchartered territory of providing a public pedagogy of informal education to the working-class black women they serviced. The author proposes that PW-COA's deeds were significant to the field of the history of education based upon the knowledge that their programming paradigms are still utilized in today's junior colleges (YWCA Papers 1907). To support this paper, the author intends to use primary sources, historical archives, and secondary sources to validate research.