locusimperium:

This is a woman named Callie House (b. 1861 in slavery, d. 1928), the leader of the largest-ever — and possibly least-known — African-American freedom organization, the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension association. A washer-woman from Nashville with five children, who received only a rudimentary education, House worked with several Primitive Baptist ministers to establish a network of 350-400,000 ex-slaves and family members of ex-slaves across the South. Their constituency was generally destitute, but their operations were totally run by membership dues, which both helped with the cost of lobbying Washington for pensions for ex-slaves and served as a mutual aid fund to cover the costs of life events like burials.

This massive network of poor black men and women was seen as a direct threat to the political powers, which worried that her agitation would turn African-Americans into “anarchists” by organizing them around a cause that could not possibly succeed. Rather than acceding to the demand of a monthly pension and a lump “bounty” for every ex-slave and legal guardian of ex-slaves, the State instead slapped the organization with faulty charges of mail fraud, imprisoning House for 10 months. The campaign for pensions did not survive her imprisonment, but individual chapters functioned as mutual aid societies until the 1950s.

The growing black middle-class and black elite mostly shunned House’s efforts, as did newspapers black and white. House died of uterine cancer, and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her story was remembered only by the descendents of her ex-slave comrades, until Mary Frances Berry published My Face Is Black Is True in 2005.