500 years of women's work
My first surprise of the exhibit #500yearsofwomenswork @<a href="https://twitter.com/GrolierClub" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">grolierclub</a> today was that it was packed. About 100 people came to hear the #lisaungerbaskincollection described by Lisa herself. So many gems: - <br /><br />The pamphlet Ida B Wells wrote with Frederick Douglass & Ferdinand Barnett, sitting at a desk in the Haitian Pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1873. Ida wanted to explain what visitors to the fair were not seeing, so they wrote "The Reason Why The Colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition." It was thrilling to see an original. <br /><br />Wonderful suffrage items from the US and UK, including a gorgeous certificate of honor made by the Pankhursts for Rosa May Billinghurst, a radical disabled suffragette I can’t wait to learn more about. <br /><br />Emma Goldman is a particular interest of the collection, and some choice items are on display. Emma & Alex. Berkman wrote Deportation: Its Meaning and Menace while jailed at Ellis Island, awaiting deportation 100 years ago. <br /><br />If you’re in NYC before Feb 8, the exhibit is free and open most days. <a href="https://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/baskin/introduction" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The collection is gloriously presented online,</a> item by item:<br /><br />Enjoy! #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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23/01/2020
Founding of the NACW
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">In 1893, inspired by Ida B Wells' call to do something to fight lynching, Josephine St Pierre Ruffin founded the Woman's Era Club in Boston. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Two years later she invited dozens of other Black women's clubs that had sprung up around the country to gather for a 3-day meeting. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">The result was a watershed: in July 1895, the National Conference of Colored Women united 36 clubs in 12 states. Mary Church Terrell simultaneously organized the National League of Colored Women in DC. By 1896 they had merged to create the National Association of Colored Women. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">30+ years after emancipation, NACW was an idea whose time had come. It quickly grew to represent 50,000 women in more than 1,000 clubs. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">(For the record, IdaBWells thought it should have been "Afro-American" instead of "Colored.") </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">NACW was unique, Paula Giddings explains, for being independent: not a women's auxiliary of a Black men's group nor a minority chapter of a white women's group. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">@<a href="https://twitter.com/marthasjones_"><span class="s2">MarthaSJones_</span></a> describes the clubs as "spaces that encouraged black women's leadership, independent thought and activism." </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">They were also crucibles for voter engagement. In Chicago, for example, women won the right to vote for school board in 1891. The Great Migration had begun & the Black population of Chicago was skyrocketing. "As black men in the South were being turned away from polling places, black women in the North were gearing up to vote." @marthasjones_ </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">In women's clubs and church groups, black women were "rallying, marching, vetting candidates, electioneering, voting, and even running for local office."</span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Where Black women could vote in the 1890s, they voted Republican. (The slightly-less-racist party at the time.) </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">As Prof. Jones said recently @<a href="https://twitter.com/bwln_nyu"><span class="s2">bwln_nyu</span></a>, "One group of women in America has voted as a block from the beginning - Black women." #BlackSuffragists #Suffrage100</span></p>
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1232801115231703041" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
26/2/2020
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, part II
I am particularly fond of Josephine St Pierre Ruffin because she was an avid defender of Ida B Wells. Josephine moved among society women both white and Black and wasn’t afraid to disagree with them, especially in defense of unpopular or uncomfortable ideas. Thread. <br /><br />Ida B. Wells was often the source of those unpopular ideas. Josephine was already a prominent publisher when she heard Ida speak in front of 400 New Yorkers. The 1892 speech launched Ida’s anti-lynching campaign and galvanized Af-Am women to become more explicitly political. A Memphis newspaper, furious that Ida was exposing lynchings, called her a “wench” and a “black harlot.” Nasty still, in 1892 those words were calculated to exploit stereotypes Black women faced constantly, and to undermine Ida’s credibility within the Black community. <br /><br />Josephine wasn’t having it. She defended Ida unconditionally, and made clear that the Woman’s Era Club of Boston believed in Ida Wells’ “purity of purpose and character.” She defended her again when Ida picked a fight with a very powerful woman. Ida pointed out that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union wasn’t doing much to fight lynching. (They weren’t - they believed the lie that lynchings punished Black men for raping white women.) In criticizing WCTU, she took on Frances Willard, its powerful leader. Wealthy British supporters of American reform were devoted to Willard, and insisted Ida was lying. Even Frederick Douglass defended the powerful Willard, but Josephine sided with Ida. <br /><br />“Doubtless Miss Willard is a good friend to colored people,” said Josephine’s paper, “...but we have failed to hear from her and the WCTU any flat-footed denunciation of lynching and lynchers.” <a href="http://womenwriters.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/advocacy/content.php?level=div&id=era2_04.15.02&document=era2" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Read the whole editorial here:</a><br /><br />Josephine stood by Ida in internal battles among the clubwomen through the years, and against Booker T. Washington. I don’t think they were close friends. I like to imagine she was loyal because Ida stood for the brutal truth, and Josephine respected that. #BlackSuffragists
Daily Suffragist
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27/02/2020
IdaB in Brooklyn
When Ida B Wells arrived in Brooklyn, it was still its own city. (The 5 boros consolidated in 1898.) How imposing the massive metropolis must have felt to Ida, forced to flee Memphis in 1892 after publishing “The Truth About Lynching.” <br /><br />Ida’s life-long crusade against lynching began to take shape while living on Gold Street. She eventually settled in Chicago, but Brooklyn was where she learned to be a public speaker - in part by asking Maritcha Remond Lyons, who had bested her in a debate, to coach her. <br /><br />Today Brooklyn thanked her for her service to the nation by naming Gold Street “Ida B Wells Place.” It was cold, but 100 people stayed to hear Ida’s biographer Paula Giddings, and her greatest contemporary inheritor, @<a href="https://twitter.com/nhannahjones" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">nhannahjones</a>. <br /><br />Ida’s great-grandson Benjamin Duster and 2 of her great-great-daughters were there too, plus @<a href="https://twitter.com/ljoywilliams" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ljoywilliams</a> and many more. Prof. Giddings was polite enough not to mention the rivalry between Brooklyn & Manhattan women that she describes in her book...but Manhattan should be feeling competitive! The (now demolished) hall where Ida gave her very 1st public speech was right by Bryant Park. Isn't it time for a plaque? #BlackSuffragists #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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07/03/2020
Ida vs. Frances Willard
The belief that “women†would vote as a block about alcohol animated support and opposition re: suffrage. (It wasn’t ever really true.) The liquor industry lobbied against women’s votes at many junctures, though historians debate how much influence they had. 🧵 <br /><br />The Women’s Christian Temperance Union had massive influence among women, especially very conservative women who were skeptical about suffrage. Frances Willard, leader of WCTU, was one of the most powerful women in the country.<br /><br />She persuaded her 200,000 members (equiv. to 1.2 million today) that they needed the vote to influence domestic issues. She called it a “Home Protection†ballot. WCTU was a very white, very Christian organization. They did organize Black women, often in segregated chapters.<br /><br />Leading activists like Frances Watkins Harper & Sarah Woodson Early played national roles, and urged WCTU’s white women to recognize their privilege. Ida B Wells wasn’t a change-from-the-inside kind of activist. She was frustrated at WCTU’s silence about lynching. <br /><br />WCTU had huge clout among white Southern women, and had they spoken out, it would have been powerful. But they didn’t. <br /><br />Ida, never hesitating to criticize the powerful when they were being cowardly, publicized racist statements by Frances Willard. Willard responded by patronizing Ida [“If Miss Wells is not careful she will kill her cause…â€], and insisting on her own abolitionist bona fides. As you can imagine, the feud went on a long time. <br /><br />The @<a href="https://twitter.com/FrancesWillard" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FrancesWillard</a> House Museum in Evanston, Ill. & the WCTU Archives @<a href="https://twitter.com/ArchivesWillard" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ArchivesWillard</a> collaborated on a really spectacular exhibit & website on the conflict, <a href="https://scalar.usc.edu/works/willard-and-wells/index" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Truth-Telling: Frances Willard & Ida B. Wells.</a><br />It’s got a detailed timeline, short pieces on the era and context, thoughtful personal essays inc. by @MLDWrites, and it’s handsome and easy to navigate. Most importantly, it delivers on its promise. <br /><br />It’s a model of how to tell the truth about racism and conflict in movements. In refusing to lie for their namesake, @FrancesWillard & @ArchivesWillard make her story more relevant. #Suffrage100 <br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">were there any brazen female wine-drinkers who thought respectable women should be able to drink in public (and vote)?</p>
— Dr. Mary Dockray-Miller (@MDockrayMiller) <a href="https://twitter.com/MDockrayMiller/status/1242423075783802881?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 24, 2020</a></blockquote>
<br /><br />@MDockrayMiller Ooh, good question! Apparently one of the reasons Ida B didn't embrace temperance as a cause is that she enjoyed a social drink - and Ida wd never do anything hypocritical. But I bet @<a href="https://twitter.com/LOsborne615" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">LOsborne615</a> would know more.
Daily Suffragist
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23/03/2020
Passing the torch
The founding of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 gathered two generations of prominent African-American women in the nation's capital: Josephine Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, now in her 70s; and Harriet Tubman, living legend. <br /><br />Ida, now Wells-Barnett, was there with her 4 month old son Charles. Ida’s relentlessness didn’t always make her popular, but the prominent women admired her. They moved to introduce the baby to the whole convention. The motion passed. <br /><br />Then Harriet Tubman took Ida B. Wells’ firstborn and raised him over her head before hundreds of African-American women, organized for power. #BlackSuffragists #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1233519336415014913" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
28/02/2020
Founding of the NAACP
The building where @<a href="https://twitter.com/NAACP" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">NAACP</a> and The Crisis were founded, and where W.E.B.DuBois wrote editorials supporting voting rights for women, still stands. 20 Vesey Street was built in 1907 as the headquarters of the New York Evening Post and the Nation. 🧵 <br /><br />The paper and the magazine were owned by Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of WmLloydGarrison and heir to a railroad fortune. <br /><br />Villard wrote “The Call†- a manifesto published on Abraham Lincoln’s 100th birthday that led to the founding of the NAACP. Villard was white, as were most of the luminaries that signed The Call and convened the conference from which NAACP grew. They envisioned an interracial organization fighting lynching and segregation. <br /><br />White people had created the problem, Villard believed, and they should help fix it. <br /><br />The conveners were sure they were doing a good thing, and they were people unused to being challenged. So they were startled when #IdaBWells and Monroe Trotter questioned them about their motives, their sincerity, and their desire to placate Booker T Washington. <br /><br />For Ida’s willingness - as ever - to say the uncomfortable thing, disrupt the pleasant proceedings, demand accountability, she ended up on the outs. No one had done more to fight lynching, one of NAACP’s key issues, but Ida was only grudgingly added to the founders' roster. <br /><br />From the very beginning, NAACP had detractors to its left and to its right, but it grew steadily from the two-room office in the Post building where DuBois worked, and Oswald Garrison Villard & Mary White Ovington fundraised. <a href="https://forgotten-ny.com/2013/09/20-vesey-street-downtown/">Take a look 👇</a>#Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1261858963651465219" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
16/02/2020
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1261858963651465219" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">More on Vesey Street building</a>
White women lie
Ida B Wells’ crusade against lynching succeeded for many reasons: her investigative rigor, her talent as a writer and speaker, her relentlessness. But her first, crucial insight was recognizing that white women were lying. Thread. <br /><br />Until Ida published her exposés, most people - including African-Americans - believed that men who were lynched had done _something_ wrong. Allegations they had raped a white woman or child were assumed to contain a grain of truth, though the punishment was disproportionate. <br /><br />When Ida B Wells’ <a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/166" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">close friend was lynched,</a> she was struck by a lightning bolt - that moment we know what we’ve been told is a lie. She set out to prove the real circumstances of Thomas Moss’ murder and the murders of so many other lynching victims. <br /><br />She documented that most of the accusations were invented out of whole cloth by white men. Others were cover-ups for consensual interracial relationships that white women were hiding, or both parties were terrified to reveal. <br /><br />Catching <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/nyregion/amy-cooper-false-report-charge.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">#AmyCooper,</a> the white woman in Central Park, lying in real time is both confirming and crushing. We see her untouched, unmenaced, breathlessly crying to 911, “I am being threatened!” I imagine Ida looking down, satisfied: “See, I told you white women lie.” <br /><br />Crushing because even now, when white women are free to fuck whomever we want - when we can work and vote and run for office and marry whomever we choose - we are still so quick to exploit the power of racism when we don’t get our way.
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1198750025196752896" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
26/05/2020
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Oh, when Karens take a walk with their dogs off leash in the famous Bramble in NY’s Central Park, where it is clearly posted on signs that dogs MUST be leashed at all times, and someone like my brother (an avid birder) politely asks her to put her dog on the leash. <a href="https://t.co/3YnzuATsDm">pic.twitter.com/3YnzuATsDm</a></p>
— Melody Cooper (@melodyMcooper) <a href="https://twitter.com/melodyMcooper/status/1264965252866641920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 25, 2020</a></blockquote>
Nobody gave us anything [live-tweet]
Janice Ruth opens by reminding that we weren't _given_ the vote, we fought for it. #Suffrage100 #WomensVote #CenturyofStruggle
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Library of Congress: Shall Not Be Denied - Curator: Janice Ruth <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WomensVote100?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WomensVote100</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TOHOdc?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#TOHOdc</a> <a href="https://t.co/cGyNZYraIR">pic.twitter.com/cGyNZYraIR</a></p>
— A Tour Of Her Own (@atourofherown) <a href="https://twitter.com/atourofherown/status/1265784023076438020?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 27, 2020</a></blockquote>
<br /><br />.8% of our National Portraits at @<a href="https://twitter.com/smithsoniannpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">smithsoniannpg</a> are images of women - that was @<a href="https://twitter.com/kate_c_lemay" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">kate_c_lemay's</a> starting point. So she borrowed from other institutions, to great effect! <br /><br />Folks who are obsessed can <a href="https://crowd.loc.gov/topics/suffrage-women-fight-for-the-vote/">transcribe suffrage mater</a>ial for inclusion in the @<a href="https://twitter.com/librarycongress" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">librarycongress</a>! Maybe when my year of @DailySuffragist is over... <br /><br />Favorite items from each curator's exhibit: @kate_c_lemay picks this gorgeous portrait of #IdaBWells and shares the intention behind Ida's choice of a female photographer. <br /><br />How many times have you been in a major exhibition that was all about women? Even half about women? @kate_c_lemay <br /><br />Thank you @<a href="https://twitter.com/BerksConference" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BerksConference</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/WomensVote100" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">WomensVote100</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/marthasjones_" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">marthasjones_</a> and Senator Mikulski for tonight's panel.
Daily Suffragist
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27/05/2020
Alpha Suffrage Club arrives in Washington
<strong>Black women at the Inaugural March, part II</strong><br /><br />A large Illinois delegation--some accounts say 62 people, others 65--came to Washington for the 1913 inauguration suffrage march. #IdaBWells was the only African American in the group. She represented the new Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. Thread.<br /><br />Two months before, Ida had co-founded Alpha with two white women, Virginia Brooks & Belle Squires. It differed from the Women’s Second Ward Republican Club, which Ida organized in 1910. The Republicans' star was dimming, and being tied to the party was no longer an asset. <br /><br />Alpha was non-partisan, city-wide, and suffrage-focused. Some Black women were skeptical about about the movement, given discrimination by white suffragists and a fear that suffrage➡️more votes for white supremacy. But Ida was determined to engage Black women to win the fight. <br /><br />Alpha Suffrage Club’s first order of business was to send the women to Washington for the march. When they all arrived, the Illinois delegation went to parade headquarters. A Chicago Tribune reporter accompanied the group for the whole trip and reported on what transpired. <br /><br />Grace Trout, leader of the Illinois delegation, burst into the room and announced that Ida couldn’t march with them. She said it wasn’t up to her, it was the decision of NAWSA, Alice Paul, and Alice Stone Blackwell. She claimed they had no choice.<br /><br />A Georgia-born woman from Oak Park agreed: “You are right, it will prejudice southern people against suffrage if we take colored women into our ranks.” Ida was standing right there, and had been a prominent Illinois suffragist longer than most of the women in the room. <br /><br />Absolutely not, said Ida's colleague Virginia Brooks. “We have come down here to march for equal rights. If the women of other states lack moral courage...we are not afraid of public opinion. If the women didn't stand by their principles, the parade will be a farce.” <br /><br />Ida's voice trembled as she spoke about the harm to the cause, not the personal insult. “If the Illinois women do not take a stand now in this great democratic parade then the colored women are lost.” <br /><br />Grace Trout said she’d try, then left to negotiate. Returning, she said that if it were up to her, Ida would march with them, but NAWSA said no. <br /><br />Do you think IdaBWells accepted this? Have you met her? <br /><br />Tune in tomorrow . . .
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1277774457885597696" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
29/06/2020