During the Jim Crow era, while blacks as a whole were treated by whites as inferior citizens, there were further divisions within the African-American community. Intraracial class divisions existed in Charlottesville and throughout the South. An example of this was in Charlotte, North Carolina. According to historian Jeannette Thomas Greenwood, in the 1880s there was a group of African-Americans who were "'the better class' of blacks, as they referred to themselves."
The history of African-American social clubs dates back to the turn of the century. According to a sociological survey of Charlottesville in the 1930s, one African-American woman started the trend of clubs. Apparently, she was tired of "just work, work. work from morning till night with no change except sleep." She got together other women who felt the same way, and they got together to form Charlottesville's first club.
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