Browse Items (52 total)

Black Boston in the 1870s was thriving. In Massachusetts, unlike NY & PA, Black men voted before the war. After, 6 Af-Am men served in the state legislature (and all supported woman suffrage). One, George Ruffin, Harvard Law Class of 1869,…

Massachusetts wasn’t a surprising place for Black women to participate in the American Woman Suffrage Assoc. - but South Carolina is less obvious. But Black men voted in the state even before the 15th Amdt, and as a result Black women had access to…

Soon after the US Centennial, teenage Ida B. Wells’ family was decimated by a yellow fever epidemic. Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne virus, fatal 10-15% of the time. Her father James and her mother Lizzie, who had survived slavery, died along with…

Ida B Wells didn’t love being a teacher, but as she built an adult life in Memphis, she began working as a reporter. Realizing that owning & editing her own paper was the only way to make a living as a journalist, Wells invested in The Memphis…

Within weeks of the murders, so much of Black Memphis had left town that the streetcar ridership collapsed. Men from the City Railway Co came to Ida B Wells' office, seeking to understand why Black riders had disappeared. Quotes from IBW's book…

Thomas Moss’s murder changed #IdaBWells’ life. Moss was a close friend & fellow business leader, and his death demonstrated that Black self-defense in Memphis was futile. Ida👇with Betty Moss and her children Maurine & Thomas Moss, Jr.,…

In New York it is said that activists come to Albany, not from it. True or not, in the 1850s and today Albany has produced some truly marvelous people. Among them: Lucretia Mott’s cousin by marriage Lydia Mott, and an African-American businessman…

Did ya see @LittleWomen yet? Note that it is not the first adaptation directed by a woman - Gillian Armstrong directed the 1994 version. A few items of interest to @DailySuffragist readers re: voting, clothing, and African-Americans in Concord. Short…

Memphis in the 1880s was still rebuilding from the war and the yellow fever epidemics. It wasn’t a very big place. The two women discussed yesterday - Julia Hooks & Elizabeth Meriwether - were each elites in their own circles. Did they ever meet?…

Sharing this gem that @AlbanyMuskrat found: C. Mary Douge Williams of Albany. A teacher, both in Albany and for 4 years in Freedmen’s schools in South Carolina & Virginia. A women’s suffrage leader in 1880s - when NY women could at last vote…