Black social workers: Identity, racism, invisibility/hypervisibility at work

Summary This article provides a reflexive account of qualitative research with Black female social workers in the North of England. It uses ‘Africanist Sista-hood in Britain’ as the theoretical framework guiding the research. The data are gathered from six semi-structured interviews and two focus groups. Data were analysed via thematic analysis. Participant data are used to discuss issues of identity, race and racism as they contribute to positions of visibility, invisibility and hypervisibility within the social work spaces discussed. The article challenges Western forms of knowledge production as the dominant discourse in social work research, practice, education and training and links this to wider issues of power, privilege and suppression of marginalised voices. Findings The findings section reveals examples of racism, marginality, invisibility and hypervisibility as part of the lived experiences of Black female social workers in the study. It includes discussions of ‘collective strategic projection’ as a consequence of the development of the ‘race taboo’ often present in these work environments. Applications The article calls for social work educators, practitioners and the wider academic field to do more to centralise anti-racist approaches in an attempt to challenge racism in social work.

The National Association of Black Social Workers

Founded in May 1968, in San Francisco, California, the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) is the premiere organization of Black social service and social welfare workers devoted exclusively to the development of professional social workers in the Black community. Committed to a philosophy of self-help and self-determination, the mission of the NABSW is to prepare workers to assume responsibility as advocates of social change and social justice, and to actively engage in the fight for racial equality and social liberation for the African ascendant community. The organization is open to all members of the African diasporic community, regardless of educational achievement, occupational status or political, religious, institutional or social affiliations.

Willie Gertrude Brown and the Unsettling of Black Settlements: Lessons for Community-Engaged Practice and Social Work Education

Social work values require its educators to teach a history that represents diversity and inclusion, yet its history routinely omits the contributions of pioneering social workers of color. This omission promotes White hegemony as characterized by the emphasis on White reformers in the American settlement movement and the exclusion of Black social workers and activists. Using critical race theory, this article posits the need to dismantle White hegemony by examining the American settlement movement and the parallel settlement movement as a counter response by Black social workers, specifically, an unrecognized Black social worker of the 1930s, W. Gertrude Brown. This recognition portends the need for social work to critique its ahistorical perspective and perchance to rewrite its history.

Karl Linn and the Foundations of Community Design: From Progressive Models to the War on Poverty

This article focuses on landscape architect Karl Linn’s role in founding the Community Design movement. Acknowledged by his contemporaries as one of the first and most influential community designers, Linn used students to pilot techniques for hands-on, local, and empathetic engagement. Beginning in the early 1960s, the article follows Linn’s first experiment building neighborhood “Commons” in North Philadelphia. In Linn’s conception, Commons were parks and playgrounds that reused materials and incorporated volunteer labor. Initially, Linn felt that the Commons’ primary purpose was to produce positive self-identification within community members and design students. Encounters with Settlement Houses, black social workers, and volunteers challenged his original thinking. As a result, he shifted tactics to focus on work-training programs and the establishment of “process institutions.” Through War on Poverty legislation, workshops, and consultancies, Linn helped translate Progressive Era social work into a new model of advocacy and professional practice.

Between New York and Washington

This chapter covers Eugene Kinckle Jones's involvement with the federal government, as he had political ties to the two presidents in office during his tenure with the NUL, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose administrations sought and received advice and active participation from Jones and the NUL. The late 1920s ushered in a new day in national reform policies, after all, and Jones had proven himself as a progressive reformer. Thus the chapter examines how black social workers responded to “relief” efforts and the ways they facilitated institution building and community development during the 1930s. It also examines Jones's fund-raising activities, his relations with white philanthropists, and his position within the Department of Commerce during the New Deal era..

Building Alliances

This chapter traces the history of the National Urban League with a specific focus on Eugene Kinckle Jones's leadership. It covers the decade of the 1920s and the many issues that Jones and his contemporaries confronted, as social workers faced the dual challenge of adjusting their tactics to meet the growing needs of a black migrant population and establishing themselves as professionals. Ultimately, the duties of black social workers and the aims of the NUL included evaluating and reviewing settlement houses, in addition to other specific concerns of migrating blacks. Here, Jones made headway for the social-work movement by establishing professional training for black social workers, tackling the problem of housing to cope with the influx of black migrants from the South—among many other efforts on behalf of black social workers, which eventually made him one of the prominent social workers in America..