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When the Council Spoke: Mabel Hull, Wheeling’s Women, and a National Movement for Change

Writer: Terrill Gosa
Terrill Gosa
4 days ago
17 min read

Updated: 14 hours ago


On a December Sunday in 1954, Wheeling readers could open their newspaper and shop for the American dream.


There were new houses to consider, rooms to furnish, building materials to buy, and financing arrangements that promised to bring homeownership within reach. In the same stretch of newsprint, Mabel M. Hull offered a reminder that the dream came with barriers many of those advertisements never mentioned.


Her column carried a striking headline: “Negro Women Suffer Double Discrimination.”


Hull was reporting the resolutions of the National Council of Negro Women. The council wanted broader employment opportunities, training for new occupations, and action against discrimination based on both sex and color. It also challenged racial exclusion in housing supported by the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration.


The placement feels almost too revealing. Here was America selling the promise of a better home. Here were Black women asking who could actually get through the front door.


For readers who know Hull through the weddings, church suppers, graduations, and neighborhood personalities she preserved, these columns reveal another dimension of her work. She brought the concerns of a national Black women’s movement into Wheeling’s homes—and made clear that those concerns belonged in the local conversation.


The National Council of Negro Women was a subject she returned to with purpose. Through her reporting, and through the women whose work appeared in the newspaper long afterward, we can follow a remarkable connection between Wheeling, the Upper Ohio Valley, and a movement determined to make American citizenship mean something in everyday life.


A Council Big Enough for the Work Ahead

Mary McLeod Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in Washington, D.C., on December 5, 1935. Her idea drew strength from generations of Black women’s organizing through churches, clubs, professional associations, and mutual aid societies.


These women already knew how to build institutions. They raised money, educated children, cared for neighbors, and pressed for rights. Bethune wanted their separate efforts to carry greater weight together.


The council became an “organization of organizations,” bringing different groups into a common forum while allowing them to retain their own identities. Education, employment, health, voting, and protection from racial violence belonged on its agenda. So did the question of whether Black women would have a meaningful voice in decisions affecting their families and communities.


Bethune understood the distance between being useful to a country and being heard by its leaders. NCNW would help women cross that distance.


For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, this organizing tradition is familiar territory. In Wheeling’s fraternal orders, churches, social clubs, and educational institutions, we repeatedly encounter people pooling resources to accomplish what exclusion made difficult for individuals. The council brought that practice to a national scale.


The Woman Who Had Already Built a School

Bethune’s confidence in collective effort grew from experience.


Born in South Carolina in 1875 to parents who had been enslaved, she became an educator and institution builder. In 1904, she opened a school for Black girls in Daytona Beach, Florida. That undertaking helped lay the foundation for what became Bethune-Cookman.


Her public work eventually carried her into Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, where she directed the National Youth Administration’s Division of Negro Affairs. She also helped bring Black federal officials together in the advisory network remembered as the Black Cabinet.


The woman calling for a stronger national voice had spent years creating opportunities where few existed.


To a Wheeling audience familiar with Lincoln School and the importance of an education secured against formidable odds, Bethune’s life offered a powerful point of recognition. A classroom could change a child’s prospects. An organization could change the conditions surrounding that classroom.


From Simpson Church to the White House

One of the collection’s earliest local connections appears in an easily overlooked newspaper notice from October 18, 1941.


The Wheeling Intelligencer reported that Mrs. M. Hayling of Simpson Methodist Church was in Washington attending sessions of the National Council of Negro Women. With other council members, she had attended tea at the White House as a guest of Mrs. Roosevelt.


A few lines in a personals column placed a woman from Wheeling’s Black church community inside a national gathering—and inside the White House.


That brief notice deserves to linger.


The journey joined two worlds often treated separately in local history: the congregation down the street and the people moving through the nation’s centers of influence. Mrs. Hayling’s presence reminds us that the women of Black Wheeling participated in networks reaching well beyond the city’s boundaries.


Their world included Washington. Their concerns traveled there with them.


The notice also gives us something indispensable: a name.


Even an incomplete name can reopen a history that an institutional timeline would miss.


Who was Mrs. Hayling?

What did she bring home from the conference?

Whom did she tell about her visit?


A small item becomes the beginning of a much larger search.


Mabel Hull Made the Council Local Reading

By the 1950s, Hull was giving the council sustained attention in the Wheeling News-Register.


Her own community work helps explain why its activities would command her interest. Hull taught sewing at the YWCA’s Blue Triangle Branch and served on its management, executive, and interracial committees. She knew the practical work behind the meeting notices: the preparation, the fundraising, the young people needing encouragement, and the effort required to keep an organization moving.


In her columns, national affairs shared space with local church dinners and community announcements. The effect was quietly powerful. Readers could encounter a congressional reception and a Wheeling fundraiser within the same column, each part of the public life Black women helped sustain.


On January 16, 1955, Hull described a reception at council headquarters honoring three Black congressmen: William Dawson of Illinois, Adam Clayton Powell of New York, and Charles C. Diggs Jr. of Michigan.


Bethune and the council’s president, Vivian Carter Mason, identified in the newspaper by her married name, Mrs. William Thomas Mason, received the guests. Hull reported the lawmakers’ commitment to education, economic opportunity, health, and welfare, and their recognition of Bethune’s role in opening political possibilities.


Then Hull explained why she was sharing the occasion with Wheeling:

“The guest list is too long to include in this column but the above is given so that the readers of the column may know of the interest that American women have in the government of these United States of America.”

There is a wonderful firmness in that sentence.


Hull wanted her readers to see women as participants in government and public affairs.


Their interest deserved space in the newspaper. Their organizing deserved attention. Their presence in those rooms mattered.


Before the Headlines Caught Up

The council’s national leadership helps explain the range of subjects Hull brought to her readers.


Bethune was succeeded in 1949 by Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, a physician whose public service included bringing medical care to Black sharecropping families through the Mississippi Health Project. As council president, Ferebee linked health education with campaigns against discrimination in housing, employment, voting, and the armed services.


That combination will sound familiar to readers following our research on Dr. J. Katherine Pronty Davis. Black women physicians understood how closely a community’s health was tied to its opportunities and treatment.


Ferebee’s advocacy reached the front page of the Wheeling News-Register on December 20, 1949. Reporting from Washington described her clash with Senator John Sparkman over fair employment practices and anti-lynching legislation during a hearing on low-income families.


The setting matters. An inquiry into economic hardship also became an argument about racial protection and access to work. The council’s position recognized that families could hardly build security while discrimination narrowed employment and racial violence remained a threat.


Under Vivian Carter Mason, who became president in 1953, Hull’s coverage continued to show an organization looking far beyond a narrow definition of women’s concerns.


Its business included the institutions governing American life.


Brown Was a Beginning, and Women Had Work to Do

On November 28, 1954, Hull reported on the council’s nineteenth annual convention under the headline “Negro Women’s Council Meets in Washington.”


The resolutions ranged across school desegregation, the NAACP, the armed forces, housing, employment, international relations, and atomic energy.


The breadth is striking. These women claimed a place in discussions about their neighborhoods and the world beyond them.


Their response to Brown v. Board of Education was especially direct. The Supreme Court had rejected racial segregation in public schools that May. The council called for action to make the decision effective, recognizing that implementation would depend on school authorities and citizens in communities across the country.


A ruling could establish a principle. People still had to make that principle live.


Hull’s readers in Wheeling stood on the threshold of just such a transition. Lincoln School had long served Black children within a segregated public system. Desegregation would open access to other schools while also changing the future of an institution that held generations of community memory.


Those questions had faces: parents, teachers, children, and graduates whose lives were bound to Lincoln.


Hull returned to the work of implementation in her January 2, 1955, column. She described the organization of a Peninsula Council in Milford, Delaware, under Dorothy Banton’s leadership. The new council would serve Kent and Sussex counties, bringing women together in an area troubled by conflict over school desegregation.


For Wheeling readers, this was a view into another community wrestling with the consequences of the same national decision. Women were organizing themselves to influence what happened next.


Double Discrimination, Plainly Stated

Hull’s December 5, 1954, follow-up brought the discussion into the workplace.


The council’s resolutions explicitly recognized that Black women faced discrimination based on both sex and color. That understanding shaped a practical program: investigate employment practices, prepare women for new opportunities, encourage entrepreneurship, and support legislation against discriminatory hiring.


It was an ambitious response to a familiar trap. Education and training mattered enormously, but preparation alone could not guarantee that an employer would open the door.


Hull herself worked while writing her columns and serving her community. Her readers included women who knew how much effort earning a living required, and how little security hard work could sometimes purchase.


These resolutions offered a larger explanation for difficulties too often treated as personal shortcomings. They also offered a course of action.


The council wanted women equipped for opportunity—and wanted opportunity made real.


The Housing Fight Was Already Here

In that same December column, Hull published the council’s challenge to discrimination in federally supported housing.


The resolutions called for regulations prohibiting racial exclusion in the programs of the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration, including properties developed with federal credit assistance.


That demand belongs beside the housing history our Foundation has been uncovering in Wheeling.


We have followed families living in unacceptable conditions, the struggle to provide affordable homes, and the institutions entrusted with improving those circumstances. Hull’s column adds another voice to that story: Black women insisting that public resources should not reinforce the boundaries keeping their families out.


The contrast on the newspaper page gives that argument unusual force. Advertisements invited readers to imagine modern rooms, convenient financing, and a home of their own. The council asked whether the machinery supporting those promises served Black Americans fairly.


For a family needing a decent place to live, that was a deeply practical question.


Tea, Diplomacy, and a Wider World

The council’s receptions and teas also carried purposes larger than their polished surroundings might suggest.


In February 1954, Hull announced a Brotherhood Week tea honoring Pat Nixon, then the vice president’s wife. The gathering would bring women together at Washington’s Willard Hotel. A July column followed the story outward: proceeds approaching $1,100 had been sent through CARE to assist children in Korea.


Black women confronting exclusion in their own country were raising money for children an ocean away.


Hull’s March 13, 1955, column described another Brotherhood luncheon, this time featuring Eleanor Roosevelt. Among those recognized was Jane Morrow Spaulding, the council’s national treasurer. Bethune’s remarks urged fellowship and the removal of the spirit of segregation.


Such gatherings brought public figures into contact with an organized constituency of women. They provided occasions to speak, build relationships, raise money, and make demands harder to ignore.


Hull gave that work a Wheeling audience. Her columns allowed readers to follow Black women exercising influence across political, racial, and national boundaries.


Margaret Johns, Winnie Thomas, and the Work Close to Home

The council’s presence in Wheeling becomes particularly tangible in newspaper reports from April 1965.


Women gathered at the YWCA to establish a local organization of Women in Community Service, usually called WICS. The effort brought together representatives of the National Council of Negro Women, the National Council of Catholic Women, the National Council of Jewish Women, and United Church Women.


Its purpose was to help disadvantaged young women obtain training and employment opportunities through the federal War on Poverty.


The News-Register named Margaret E. Johns and Winnie Thomas as NCNW representatives at the organizational meeting.


Here are two women we should remember when we tell this history.


Their names place the council inside a specific room, working with specific partners, on a problem affecting young women in the valley. They give local substance to Bethune’s belief in bringing different organizations together.


The next day’s report identified Margaret Johns as the local WICS director of transportation and its liaison to NCNW.


Transportation may sound like an administrative detail. To a young woman trying to reach an interview or begin a training program, it could determine whether an opportunity was usable at all.


A program could have funding, offices, and an impressive statement of purpose. Someone still had to help a participant get where she needed to go.


Margaret Johns’s assignment belongs in the history of how change actually happened.


Six Young Women and a Chance to Begin

By July 29, 1965, the newspaper could report results: six young women from the Wheeling area had been selected for training in Cleveland.


They were Pat Meeker of North Wheeling; Edna Bowers and Catherine Myers of Benwood; Madelyn Hodgson of Vineyard Hill; Ellen Shaw of Wellsburg; and Carla Cunningham of Moundsville.


The report described training for work including nursing assistance, office occupations, and beautician assistance. Participants would receive a monthly allowance and money set aside toward the start of their working lives.


The local project was headed by Mrs. Gregory Cole, while Mrs. Donald Levenson, its publicity director, explained that the aim was to break the chain of poverty. The volunteers intended to offer advice and assistance even to young women who did not qualify for the training program.


That last detail says a great deal about their understanding of service. An application could be declined without the person being abandoned.


The partnership also spread beyond Wheeling. In Weirton, newspaper reports identified Mrs. P. H. Johnson and Elizabeth Young as NCNW representatives on the coordinating committee. Johnson served as assistant coordinator.


The council’s work moved through the same interconnected valley our Foundation studies: across municipal boundaries, through churches and community institutions, and into the lives of people whose opportunities depended on more than their own determination.


Across the River, a Section Takes Shape

A later chapter of this history centers on the Ohio Valley Section, based in Steubenville.


A substantial Intelligencer report of March 10, 1975, described a group chartered in May 1974 with assistance from the Pittsburgh section. Henrietta Arrington had headed its temporary slate of officers. Bessie Cruse, a charter member and its president, spoke about the work ahead.


The membership reached into communities including Steubenville, Weirton, Adena, Cadiz, Tiltonsville, and Smithfield. Meetings took place at the Phillis Wheatley Association on South Fourth Street in Steubenville.


Cruse’s priorities were concrete: better employment opportunities, practical preparation for work, voter education, and fuller participation by Black women in community life.


She wanted women to be able to obtain decent jobs. She also looked toward the possibility of helping a Black woman seek political office.


It was a regional expression of the council’s longstanding conviction that women should help shape public decisions, economic opportunities, and the futures available to their children.


The Women Who Kept It Moving

The May 8, 1975, election report preserves a fuller picture of the section’s leadership.


Bessie Cruse returned as president. Beatrice Williams served as first vice president and Shirley Byrd as second vice president. Alberta Dixon became recording secretary, with Connie Vinson as assistant recording secretary. Mildred Jeter handled corresponding secretary duties. Mae Byrum served as treasurer, Josephine Collins as financial secretary, and Bernice Hawkins as chaplain. Grace Gillison served as election officer.


These names give the institution its human dimensions.


They tell us who kept the records, handled the money, maintained correspondence, and helped sustain the fellowship necessary to continue. Behind a public program stood the ordinary, recurring work of making an organization dependable.


Another important voice was Lil Hampton, identified alongside Cruse in an October 30, 1974, letter to the Intelligencer. Writing on behalf of the Steubenville NCNW, they praised the Progressive Black Social Club’s community efforts and emphasized training women for participation in community action.


Their message drew on Bethune’s legacy of economic cooperation, dignity, and responsibility to the young.


The correspondence makes a connection our readers have encountered repeatedly: Black social organizations helped support a broader civic life. Relationships formed through fellowship could become resources for public service.


Pride Had a Place on the Program

Service also made room for celebration.


In September 1974, the Ohio Valley Section advertised a Miss Ebony Pageant at the Sheraton near St. Clairsville. Mary Collins of Yorkville chaired the event, and Pittsburgh disc jockey Brother Matt was to serve as master of ceremonies.


Contestants came from communities on both sides of the river, including Wheeling. The newspaper identified the previous year’s winner, Kathy Gordon of Wheeling, as a scholarship student at Case Western Reserve.


For the young women taking part, the program offered a public stage for talent, presentation, and recognition. For the audience, it was an occasion to celebrate possibility close to home.


The following spring brought a Bethune commemoration at Steubenville’s Second Baptist Church. The Rev. C. Leroy Hacker, who had known Bethune, spoke. Paula Hampton discussed her legacy. Patricia Fletcher chaired the occasion, Georgianna Broadus served as master of ceremonies, and Carrie Edwards headed the refreshment committee.


Among the guests was Pam Galloway of Wheeling, Miss Black West Virginia, who received a pendant of the organization.


At that same gathering, the council endorsed renewal of a Steubenville school levy.


A celebration of Black achievement and a position on school funding shared the program. The combination captures the council’s understanding of community life: pride needed occasions to flourish, and children needed institutions capable of supporting their futures.


The Work Reached Bookshelves, Classrooms, and Campuses

Later reports show the range of the section’s activities.


In 1976, it purchased copies of Little Kid’s Football Book, written by Zachary Horston and illustrated by George Hopkins, both of Steubenville, for placement in public and school libraries.


The purchase supported local Black creative work while putting reading material into children’s hands. A child interested in football might discover a book—and perhaps recognize that authors and artists could come from the same community.


A January 1982 report offers another glimpse through Anna D. Lee of Mingo Junction, appointed counselor for evening-division students at the University of Steubenville.


Lee had served as second vice president of the local NCNW chapter and as president of the Jefferson County Sickle Cell Anemia Association. Her public service joined health advocacy with educational opportunity. As a former evening student herself, she understood the pressures facing adults pursuing an education.


Her story carries the council’s work into another setting: a college office where someone balancing responsibilities could find guidance from a woman who understood the struggle.


Dorothy Height and the Long Campaign

Nationally, Dorothy Irene Height, elected council president in 1957, led NCNW through four decades of profound change.


She helped organize the civil rights movement while pressing for women’s leadership within it. Although she played an important role in preparations for the 1963 March on Washington, women leading national organizations were denied a speaking role in its principal program. NCNW convened a discussion afterward about women’s treatment within the movement.


Height also helped launch Wednesdays in Mississippi in 1964, bringing interracial groups of women into communities confronting segregation and voter suppression.


The work continued after the best-known marches. Council programs addressed economic opportunity, families, and community needs. Its Black Family Reunion celebrations later brought history and cultural pride to large public audiences.


Wheeling’s newspapers carried pieces of that continuing story. The collection includes reporting on the council’s participation in school-meal advocacy, opposition to involuntary sterilization of minors, and objections to proposed parental-notification rules for teenagers seeking contraceptive care. Other reports show its role in debates about affirmative action, voting rights, and opportunities for young people.


The range echoes the subjects Hull had brought to local readers decades earlier. The council kept returning to the conditions shaping people’s ability to live securely and participate fully.


They Were Preserving History, Too

There is one more connection especially meaningful to our Foundation.


NCNW made preserving Black women’s history part of its work early on. An archives committee established in 1941 sought documents recording women’s achievements. Dorothy Porter and Sue Bailey Thurman were among the people who helped develop that effort.


The council called for photographs, documents, and mementos from women in many walks of life. In 1946, it promoted a National Archives Day. In 1979, the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Museum and the National Archives for Black Women’s History opened.


These women recognized that accomplishment could disappear from public memory when nobody preserved its evidence.


Reading Hull’s columns today brings their concern close to home. A meeting notice restores Margaret Johns to the story of local job training. A roster gives us Alberta Dixon and Josephine Collins. A church item places Mrs. Hayling in Washington in 1941.


Those fragments allow a community to recover the people behind its institutions.


When Wheeling’s Women Enter the Story

The National Council of Negro Women helps us see Wheeling through a wider lens.


Black women here read about national campaigns, traveled to gatherings, represented organizations, and worked with neighbors to create opportunities. Across the valley, they kept records, raised funds, arranged transportation, celebrated young people, and urged communities to invest in education.


Mabel Hull gave much of that world a place in the newspaper. Her attention helped preserve a movement’s ideas alongside the daily life of the community she knew.


That is why this history belongs in the work of the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation. We want our readers to encounter the women whose service made civic life possible, including those whose contributions survive in only a few lines of print.


Imagine the young woman arriving for a training interview. The secretary recording a decision. The reader pausing over Hull’s account of Black women meeting with members of Congress. Each encounter offered a glimpse of something larger—and a possible place within it.


Bethune had believed that women’s combined voices could carry power. In Wheeling and the Upper Ohio Valley, the surviving newspaper pages let us hear some of those voices again.


-T


Historical Terminology Note

This article includes historical terms such as “colored” and “Negro” when quoting original sources or identifying organizations as they were known at the time. These terms reflect the language and racial conditions of their era; their inclusion is not an endorsement of their use today.


In our own narrative, we use Black and African American, as appropriate. We preserve historical wording to document the past faithfully while honoring the dignity, humanity, and experiences of the people whose stories we share.


Sources and Notes


  • Wheeling Intelligencer, October 18, 1941, “Personals,” notice of Mrs. M. Hayling of Simpson Methodist Church attending NCNW sessions in Washington and a White House tea. The clipping supplies an initial rather than a full first name.

  • Wheeling News-Register, December 20, 1949, “Sen. Sparkman, Negro Leader Clash on FEPC,” reporting Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee’s testimony concerning fair employment and anti-lynching legislation.

  • Mabel Hull, Wheeling News-Register, February 14, 1954, “Negro Women Will Honor Mrs. Nixon”; July 11, 1954, “Korea Thanks” portion of her column; November 28, 1954, “Negro Women’s Council Meets in Washington”; and December 5, 1954, “Negro Women Suffer Double Discrimination.” The November and December columns reproduce national council resolutions rather than minutes of a Wheeling chapter meeting.

  • Mabel Hull, Wheeling News-Register, January 2, 1955, “Negro Women” portion concerning the Peninsula Council in Delaware; January 16, 1955, “Reception Held for Negro Congressmen at Capital”; and March 13, 1955, “Mrs. Roosevelt Lauds Negro Women’s Group.” The January 16 column supplies Hull’s quotation about American women’s interest in government. The newspaper’s Mrs. William Thomas Mason is NCNW president Vivian Carter Mason.

  • Wheeling News-Register, April 29 and April 30, 1965, reports on the organization and officers of Women in Community Service in Wheeling; July 29, 1965, “Area Girls Picked For Training,” including the six participants’ names. Their inclusion does not establish that they were NCNW members or identify their races. WICS was a coalition, and its work is attributed here to that coalition.

  • The Intelligencer, June 18, 1965, and Wheeling News-Register, June 20, 1965, reports on WICS organization in Weirton and its coordinating committee.

  • The Intelligencer, March 10, 1975, “Black Women’s Group Gaining Momentum,” describing the Ohio Valley organization, its May 1974 charter, leadership, membership area, meeting location, and goals; May 8, 1975, “Negro Women Inc. Elect New Officers”; and October 30, 1974, “Reader Outlines Goals of NCNW,” signed by Bessie Cruse and Lil Hampton.

  • The Intelligencer and Wheeling News-Register, September 3, 1974, “Miss Ebony Pageant” notice; Sunday News-Register, September 22, 1974, pageant announcement; and The Intelligencer, May 29, 1975, “Reverend Addresses Black Unit,” on the Bethune commemoration. The 1974 announcement identifies Kathy Gordon as the previous year’s winner; it does not establish that the newly chartered section sponsored the preceding contest.

  • The Intelligencer, August 12 and August 28, 1976, reports concerning Little Kid’s Football Book and its purchase for libraries; The Intelligencer and Wheeling News-Register, January 28, 1982, “University Selects Evening Counselor,” concerning Anna D. Lee.

  • Additional national reporting consulted includes Wheeling News-Register, April 17, 1968, school-meal advocacy; July 9, 1973, a coalition response to sterilization of minors; February 10, 1992, Alex Haley and Black Family Reunion celebrations; March 8, 1995, affirmative action and the international women’s conference; and July 27, 2006, voting-rights renewal. Also The Intelligencer, March 3, 1982, “New Law Under Fire,” concerning proposed parental-notification rules; and Wheeling News-Register, December 8, 1997, “85-Year-Old Civil Rights Leader Will Continue Work,” on Dorothy Height.



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