Dr. DuBois v. Dr. Shaw
Supporting women’s suffrage wasn’t an obvious political choice for African-American men in the 1910s. To convince readers of The Crisis to support the cause, W.E.B.DuBois had to first confront the racism of mainstream suffragists. Thread.
The mainstream movement - NAWSA, led by Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw - was composed of Southern white women who used white supremacy to advocate women’s enfranchisement, and Northern white women who insisted that women’s suffrage and Jim Crow had nothing to do with each other.
And that was just the present day. The shadows of the past loomed large for African-Americans: suffragists’ rejection of the 15th Amendment because it didn’t include women, and the racism that ElizCadyStanton & Susan B Anthony spewed at the time were both well-known stories.
In the Journal of Black Studies in 2000 Garth Pauley described DuBois’ rhetorical strategy for persuading African-American men to give suffrage a chance. First, he attacked the racism of white suffragists while expressing support for their cause.
That opened the door for him to then make both principled and pragmatic arguments for the merits of women’s suffrage. But the first step was the most necessary. DuBois used humor and gentle sarcasm to call out the white women on their racism.
Anna Howard Shaw had said that “all Negroes are opposed to woman suffrage,” which DuBois called a “barefaced falsehood.” But instead of dismissing the cause itself, he challenged the inadequacy of suffragists’ response. “They do not ask such silly questions of white folks:
"They go and see why they do not join. They teach, agitate, and proselyte; while among Negro Americans they have scarcely a single worker and are afraid to encourage such workers.” The magazine printed Dr. Shaw’s pathetic reply, written as if she intended to prove his point:
“There is not in the National Association any discrimination against colored people. If they do not belong to us it is merely because they have not organized and have not made application for membership.”
DuBois added an editorial wink: “The woman suffragists are wincing a bit under the plain speaking of Crisis.” But he didn’t demean the rightness of the cause. #Suffrage100 #CenturyofStruggle #BlackSuffragists
Daily Suffragist
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15/05/2020
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
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16/02/2020
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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
Daily Suffragist
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26/07/2020
The Martyr
Inez Milholland graduated from @<a href="https://twitter.com/Vassar" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Vassar</a> in 1909. She applied to law school, but @<a href="https://twitter.com/Harvard_Law" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Harvard_Law</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/ColumbiaLaw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ColumbiaLaw</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/UniofOxford" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">UniofOxford</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/Cambridge_Uni" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cambridge_Uni</a> refused her. She was accepted @<a href="https://twitter.com/nyulaw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">nyulaw</a>, which began admitting women in 1890. (By the time the others admitted women, Inez was dead.) 🧵 <br /><br />She practiced law and fought for labor rights, as one of the wealthy women who committed themselves to the NY Women’s Trade Union League. She supported strikes by shirtwaist makers and laundry workers, walking picket lines in 1910 & 1916. She was an early member of NAACP.<br /><br />She played a role in the exoneration of Charles Stielow, sentenced to the electric chair for a murder he did not commit. Inez Milholland isn’t named in the National Registry of Exonerations, <a href="https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetailpre1989.aspx?caseid=312" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">but the summary refers to pro bono attorneys taking up his case.</a> <br /><br />Suffrage was Inez's top priority. Alice Paul cast her as the cover girl of the 1913 Inauguration march, literally. The image of Inez on a white horse, in heraldic garb, graced the commemorative program the organizers sold to raise funds for the march. <br /><br />Inez, who took two semesters of medieval history at Vassar, designed her own costume to evoke a crusader, as @<a href="https://twitter.com/MDockrayMiller" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">MDockrayMiller</a> explains in her <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/why-did-the-suffragists-wear-medieval-costumes/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">great piece</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/JSTOR_Daily" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">JSTOR_daily</a> 👉ðŸ¾<br /><br />Alice Paul wanted a beautiful woman to rebut the stereotype of sexless, spinster suffragists. Inez’s romantic life was indeed busy: she had an intense fling with Max Eastman, radical editor & brother of Crystal; and was briefly engaged to G. Marconi, inventor of the radio!<br /><br />In 1913 Inez married a Dutchman named Eugen Boissevain - she proposed to him. He was proud of her leadership and wasn't intimidated by strong women; after Inez died he married Edna St. Vincent Millay. The image at the top of this thread comes from NYC, May 3, 1913.<br /><br />Inez would live only a few years more, dying at 30 of a bacterial infection while on a Western states suffrage tour. Her last public words, before collapsing onstage, were: “How long must women wait for liberty?†#Suffrage100 #CenturyofStruggle
Daily Suffragist
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21/06/2020
<a href="https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetailpre1989.aspx?caseid=312" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CHARLES STIELOW</a><br /><br /><a href="https://daily.jstor.org/why-did-the-suffragists-wear-medieval-costumes/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Why Did the Suffragists Wear Medieval Costumes?</a>