Black women at the Inaugural March, part I
As 1913 began, planning was underway for a massive suffrage march and pageant to take place in Washington, DC on March 3, the day before #WoodrowWilson’s inauguration. <br /><br />Black women wrote the organizers to ask if they were welcome. If you have to ask . . . 🧵 <br /><br />Nellie Quander wrote Alice Paul on Feb 17, oozing politeness. “Fearing that a letter which I sent you has gone astray…†she begins, and then restates her question: Will the @<a href="https://twitter.com/HowardU">HowardU</a> AKA women march in the collegiate section? Or will they be segregated at the back of the march? <br /><br />Alice Paul, the lead organizer, had for weeks been ducking this and other questions about African American women’s participation. Throughout January she wrote Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of the largest suffrage publication, trying to keep the issue out of the paper. <br /><br />They didn’t succeed. Adella Hunt Logan, an African American suffragist who taught at @<a href="https://twitter.com/TuskegeeUniv" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TuskegeeUniv</a> in Alabama, noticed an item in the Woman’s Journal saying white women wouldn’t march if Black women participated. She tipped off Mary Church Terrell.<br /><br />Terrell was in DC, and able to rally local Black suffragists. Among them were the Alpha Kappa Alpha women. Nellie Quander was eager to get an assurance from the march organizers b/c a group of her members was threatening to break off & create a more politically engaged sorority. <br /><br />They did -- creating Delta Sigma Theta @<a href="https://twitter.com/dstinc1913" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dstinc1913</a> See illustration of the founders👇ðŸ¾The Deltas’ first public action was to march in the suffrage parade. Mary Church Terrell marched with them. Ironically, in the end the @<a href="https://twitter.com/akasorority1908" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">akasorority1908</a> didn’t march as a group. <br /><br />All the white northern women organizing the march insisted to one another that while THEY weren’t racist, they feared an integrated march would hurt the cause. Their letters make clear they all wished Black women wouldn’t show up. <br /><br />Tomorrow: Ida B Wells arrives from Chicago.
Daily Suffragist
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28/06/2020
Adella Hunt Logan
Years before W.E.B.DuBois devoted a special issue of The Crisis to women’s suffrage, Adella Hunt Logan published a comprehensive argument for the vote in <a href="http://coloredamerican.org/?page_id=70" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Colored American</a>, the most widely read African-American publication of the day. 🧵 <br /><br />Adella Hunt Logan was an active and influential suffragist for 20 years. She was the only African-American life member of NAWSA. When NAWSA barred Black women from conventions, she and Georgia Stewart, who could also pass, went and reported what transpired. <br /><br />Adella taught for years at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. She was a mainstay of the Tuskegee Woman’s Club, founded by Margaret Murray Washington. As both a clubwoman and a professor, Adella initiated extensive suffrage activities at Tuskegee. <br /><br />She gave lectures; she organized “lantern shows†about suffrage foremothers like Sojourner Truth; she coached the debate team, so suffrage was their topic. S<br /><br />he was training them to be emissaries, explains Rosalyn Terborg-Penn.<br /><br />Voting in Alabama couldn’t have felt imminent to Adella’s students at Tuskegee. But many of them would live and work outside the South, in places where women were winning some voting rights. She made sure they were prepared. <br /><br />Her 1905 essay in the Colored American asked bluntly: <br /><br />“If white American women, with all their natural and acquired advantages, need the ballot....how much more do Black Americans, male and female need the strong defense of a vote to help secure them their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?†<br /><br />Tragically, Adella died by suicide in 1915 at the age of 52. <br /><br />Historian Adele Logan Alexander is Adella’s granddaughter, and the source of much of the rich detail on her suffrage activity. We can read more in her new book, <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/princess-of-the-hither-isles-a-black-suffragist-s-story-from-the-jim-crow-south/9780300242607" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Princess of the Hither Isles.</a> <br /><br />The cover is a haunting portrait of Adella by the African-American painter William Edouard Scott, completed posthumously. #Suffrage100 #BlackSuffragists #CenturyofStruggleÂ
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17/05/2020