In Davida Siwisa James’s new book “Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill,” she takes a deep and impressive dive into two important and historic communities in Harlem. Illuminating her engaging prose is a veritable gallery of photos, none more interesting than one of Elizabeth Ross Haynes. The life and legacy of Mrs. Haynes fits quite nicely into the often unheralded that are the focus of this column.
Haynes was born on July 13, 1883, or 1878, or 1879, (according to several accounts) in Mount Willing, Alabama, a small crossroads community in Lowndes County. Her parents were formerly enslaved but were industrious and frugal enough to save money to purchase land and begin a plantation. A good portion of their savings was set aside to pay for their daughter to attend State Normal School in Montgomery, where she was valedictorian at her graduation.
In 1903, about the same time that W.E.B. Du Bois published his landmark book “The Souls of Black Folk,” she graduated from Fisk University where she met her future husband, George Edmund Haynes, the legendary sociologist and progenitor of the National Urban League. Both were active in campus affairs, she as the editor of the Fisk Herald. Her career in the improvement of women’s education began with her position as a special worker with the Young Women’s Christian Association. On behalf of young women striving for educational opportunities, Haynes traveled across the country lecturing and advising them on how to pursue higher goals.
A crucial year in her life occurred in 1908 when she moved to New York City, as Francille Rusan Wilson mentioned in her introduction to Haynes’s book, “Unsung Heroes.” Haynes joined the National Board of YWCA as their organizer of student chapters at Negro colleges. “This began a quarter century of involvement with the YWCA and other interracial organizations and governmental agencies with programs designed to assist Black women workers,” Wilson wrote. “At the time of her appointment, Elizabeth Ross was among a handful of Black women who were college-educated, social service administrators or social workers. As National Student Secretary for Colored Women, Ross set up about thirty-eight new student branches at southern colleges, dramatically increasing the number of accredited black student YWCAs to over fifty. She also tried to assist Black women who had begun their independent organizations in their efforts to become formally affiliated with the National Board.”
Haynes took a militant stance advocated by the Black women at the National Association of Black Women to pressure white women on the YWCA board into establishing more urban branches for Black women. This was the beginning of Ross Haynes’s skillful mediation. During one of her reports to the national board of YWCA in 1909, she wrote, “To get a fair and true idea of the girls themselves, the ones in whom we are most deeply interested, it is very necessary to see them in and through their conditions and surroundings to know what they think and what they do.” In 1910, when the YWCA sent her to the biennial meeting of the National Association of Colored Women in Louisville, Kentucky to explain YWCA policies and to win greater support from Black women, Haynes encountered suspicion and criticism, Wilson noted. “Despite Ross’s presentation, the NACW passed a declaration of non-support of the National Board of the YWCA’s racial policies.”
Haynes’s master’s thesis “Two Million Negro Women at Work” was praised for decades as the “most comprehensive study of Black women in the United States,” according to James.
James’s book also recounts the Haynes couple’s marriage and the purchase of their home in Sugar Hill. They were an incomparable couple both playing pivotal roles in the welfare and progress of Black Americans. Haynes’s study and analysis of the lack of training for Black women and being forced to take jobs at lower wages was useful for her husband’s monumental work and research at the National Urban League.
Haynes’s final book “Unsung Heroes; The Black Boy of Atlanta,” in 1952, mainly chronicled the life of Richard Robert Wright, Sr. a former slave who became a college president and bank president. In Wilson’s words, the book was a fitting last work of a woman whose own life had been dedicated to the principles she celebrated in Major Wright’s: hard work, race pride, and economic self-help. “While there is ample evidence of her working and public life, surprisingly little is known about Haynes’s personal life. Very few letters to or from Elizabeth Ross Haynes have survived. Glimpses of her sunny yet strong personality and its effect on others may be found in collections of the papers of her husband, George Edmund Haynes, at Fisk and Yale Universities. Her children’s books remain of interest to the historian of juvenile fiction because they offer resilient Black heroes and heroines for Black children, and for their ability to represent a vivid, if not always factual portrait of an African-American child.”
She died in New York City on October 26, 1953.