of the race forming groups to assist and uplift their communities could be traced back as far as 1793 when the lady parishioners of Philadelphia’s Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, the first Black Episcopal church in the nation, formed the Female Benevolent Society of St. Thomas. In the years since, women of color nationwide built on that tradition by coming together to support everything from abolition to literacy to the caring of the sick, elderly, and the destitute in their neighborhoods, and since the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, female suffrage.
