Browse Items (52 total)

Second & third generation suffragists had much more access to formal education than the women who came before them. Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida Gibbs Hunt graduated from @oberlincollege in 1884. 🧵 They weren’t the first…

British suffragists got angry and impatient before the Americans did. Their breakaway radical faction became known as “suffragettes” - it was meant as a slur, until they adopted it proudly. [Protest history thread.] Emmeline Pankhurst and her…

Ida B at work. Another glimpse of the master persuader, via the beautiful 2d edition of her autobiography. Great foreword by @eveewing & afterword by @MichelleDuster about preserving the legacy. 🧵 In 1900 the Chicago Tribune runs stories…

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…

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.,…

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…

When exactly is the 19th Amendment anniversary? Was it ratified on August 18 or August 26? What’s the difference? Which should we observe?  Read on for answers. The 19th Amendment cleared Congress in June 1919, 41 years after it was introduced. This…

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was an incredible organizer of women. In 1879 she started the Boston Kansas Relief Assoc. to raise money to support Exodusters - the first African-Americans to leave the South en masse. She helped Lucy Stone & Julia…

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,…

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?…