Josphine St. Pierre Ruffin joins the American
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, married Josephine St. Pierre. <br /><br />Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin accomplished so much; you’ll hear more about her in months to come. Born in Boston in 1842, she was described by those who knew her as imposing and self-assured: “She always had the lead in the play.”<br /><br />In 1875 she joined the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Assoc., noting later how AWSA leaders Lucy Stone & Julia Ward Howe had welcomed her. It was one of many organizations she led and integrated, as an upper-class Black woman using her privilege to organize and advance other women.
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15/11/2019
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>
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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
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27/02/2020
The Crisis - Suffrage Special Issue 1915
With the New York referendum looming, The Crisis published its second special issue on women’s suffrage in August 1915. The cover was an arresting composite of Abraham Lincoln & Sojourner Truth. 🧵 <br /><br />26 essays by men and women took up almost the entire issue. Even regular features like “Men of the Month†were devoted to women. [<a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/exhibits/show/black-suffragists/item/382" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Read about @thecrisismag's first suffrage issue, in 1912 👉</a> ]<br /><br />The summer of 1915 was an optimistic moment for voting rights. The Supreme Court had just struck down grandfather clauses in a case from Oklahoma, and women in New York were still optimistic about their chances of winning the vote. (See yesterday’s post.)<br /><br />Later, the Supreme Court win would turn out to be toothless - Oklahoma grandfathered its grandfather clause, automatically adding all white men to the rolls while giving Black men 12 days to register. And women would lose the New York referendum, resoundingly. <br /><br />But the clarity of @<a href="https://twitter.com/thecrisismag" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">thecrisismag</a> special issue endures. It’s an artifact of how the nation’s most prominent Black men and women argued for the inextricability of race and sex at the ballot box. <br /><br />Highlights include: “Many colored men doubt the wisdom of women suffrage because they fear that it will increase the number of our political enemies.†She defends suffragists based on 40 years experience in the movement, asserting: “We can afford to follow those women.†<br /><br />Mary Church Terrell & her husband Judge Robert Terrell make overlapping arguments about the necessity of supporting voting rights for all. She points out sharply that anything less risks weakening the 15th Amendment. <br /><br />Judge Terrell quotes Senator Benjamin Wade, a radical Republican who supported universal suffrage: “I have a contempt I cannot name for the man who would demand rights for himself that he is not willing to grant to every one else.†<br /><br />Nannie Helen Burroughs, leader of the Women’s Convention of the Baptist Church, is blunt: “The Negro Church means the Negro woman. Without her, the race could not properly support five hundred churches in the whole world. Today they have 40,000 churches in the United States.â€<br /><br />Fittingly, poet/novelist/diplomat James Weldon Johnson has the most engagingly wry essay. He begins: “There is one thing very annoying about the cause of Woman Suffrage and that is the absurdity of the arguments against it which one is called upon to combat." <br /><br />The fight for the vote began so long before John Lewis, of blessed memory. We will continue it until every person’s vote counts, no matter how long that takes. We are up to the challenge. (Photo by @<a href="https://twitter.com/AlyssaNo_L" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AlyssaNo_L</a> via @<a href="https://twitter.com/ajc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AJC</a>) #BlackSuffragists #Suffrage100
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26/07/2020