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Julia Hooks bought a ticket at a downtown Memphis theater. It was 1881 and "Hermann the Magician" was a hit. She was making her way to her seat when two policemen grabbed her. They ripped her dress in the struggle, arresting her as she cried: “Let go…

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…

The end of legal slavery didn’t make a dent in white Americans’ racism. The opposite, really: after the Civil War Northern whites patted themselves on the back for being so virtuous, then turned around and passed laws making it harder for…

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…

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. Black women wrote the organizers to ask if they were welcome. If you have to ask…

Have you seen the PBS series Unladylike? It features suffragists like Mary Church Terrell, Rose Schneiderman, and Tye Leung Schulze alongside other notables (Gladys Bentley!) 1. Each 12-minute episode features a contemporary activist who mirrors the…

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. 🧵 26 essays by men and women took up almost…