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Wells and the civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell became more deeply and publicly engaged.Īs in other instances, suffragists outside the South used the racism in the Jim Crow states as an excuse for their discriminatory treatment of their black suffragist sisters. African-American luminaries like the noted anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Racism intensified among suffragists as they neared their goals. Women would wait another 50 years for the 19th. The 15th Amendment was, of course, ratified. “When women, because they are women,” he said, “are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lampposts when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads when their children are not allowed to enter schools then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.”ĭouglass cut to the central fallacy of the white suffragist push - that African-American women could magically separate their blackness from their femaleness. Instead, he summarized in dramatic fashion the differences between the interests of black and white suffragists - and the case for federal protection of black voters.
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Library of Congressĭouglass was clearly wounded by what he described as the “employment of certain names, such as ‘Sambo,’ and the gardener, and the bootblack … and all the rest,” but gracefully declined to answer insult with insult. By contrast, the historian Lori Ginzberg argues persuasively that racism and elitism were enduring features of the great suffragist’s makeup and philosophy.įrederick Douglass Credit. Admiring historians have dismissed this as an unfortunate interlude in an exemplary life. She warned that white woman would be degraded if Negro men preceded them into the franchise. Stanton, instead, embarked on a Klan-like tirade against the amendment. Reasonable people could, of course, disagree on the merits of who should first be given the vote - women or black men. The tension escalated in the run-up to the 15th Amendment, a provision that ostensibly barred the states from denying Negro men the right to vote. Black women, most of whom lived in the South, were seeking the ballot for themselves and their men, as a means of empowering black communities besieged by the reign of racial terror that erupted after Emancipation. White women were seeking the vote as a symbol of parity with their husbands and brothers. It became clear after the Civil War that black and white women had different views of why the right to vote was essential. Were it not for Douglass’s oratory, the historian Lisa Tetrault tells us in “The Myth of Seneca Falls,” the “controversial” resolution demanding the vote for women might actually have failed. The famous suffrage convention convened in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 featured Stanton and her partner-in-arms, Lucretia Mott, in addition to the towering figure of Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and dyed-in-the-wool supporter of women’s rights who was on his way to becoming one of the most famous speakers of the century.