Fannie Barrier Williams
Fannie Barrier Williams was so significant a thinker that though almost no Black women were invited to lecture at the Chicago World’s Fair, she spoke twice. She addressed the World Congress of Representative Women in May, and the World Parliament of Religions in September. 🧵<br /><br />Her first address, “The Intellectual Progress of Colored Women,†was a particular standout. @<a href="https://twitter.com/ProfessorCrunk" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ProfessorCrunk</a> Brittney Cooper describes it as “the most intellectually sophisticated and compelling narrative about race women’s progress and racial aspirations.†<br /><br />Fannie Barrier Williams was born and raised in Brockport, NY, a town on the Erie Canal. By her description her childhood was “sweet and delightful†- she did not experience racism until she graduated from what’s now SUNY @<a href="https://twitter.com/Brockport" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Brockport</a> and moved away. <br /><br />She married atty S. Laing Willliams and moved to Chicago. There she was well-positioned to pressure white society women to include African-Americans in the 1893 World’s Fair, a fight they all but lost. Fannie took the lone clerical job they offered, though it was beneath her. <br /><br />She became nationally known after her speeches at the World’s Fair, and was proposed for membership in the all-white Chicago Woman’s Club. After a year of dispute, she was admitted. Soon after, she was instrumental in creating the National Association of Colored Women. <br /><br />In 1907, NAWSA’s annual suffrage convention came to Chicago. Susan B Anthony had just died, and Fannie was asked to represent “the colored people†at the memorial. She generously hearkened back to Susan B’s abolitionist days. <br /><br />Williams emphasized Susan B's “unremitting struggle for liberty, more liberty, and complete liberty for negro men and women in chains,†plus, in a gentle tweak: “and for white women in their helpless subjection to man’s laws.†<br /><br />Fannie Barrier Williams was the first woman AND the first African-American to join the board of the Chicago Public Library @<a href="https://twitter.com/chipublib" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">chipublib</a> -- in 1924. 😣 She relentlessly critiqued the double burden of racism and sexism that Black women faced. <br /><br />For more on her intellectual work, including her critique of W.E.B.DuBois’ gender politics, read @ProfessorCrunk's book <a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/68emc6tz9780252040993.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Beyond Respectability</em></a>. After her husband died and her term on the Library Board ended, she returned to Brockport, where she died in 1944. #BlackSuffragistsÂ
Daily Suffragist
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22/05/2020
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
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26/2/2020
Mary Church Terrell
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 African-Americans to vote, live, work. 🧵 <br /><br />As the century turned, Black women’s clubs were growing rapidly across the country. Meanwhile the Natl American Woman Suffrage Assoc had effectively become a whites-only organization. Still, leading African-Americans came to NAWSA conventions seeking help in fighting segregation. <br /><br />In 1898, Mary Church Terrell addressed the NAWSA convention in Washington, DC. Terrell was the president of the National Association of Colored Women, and prominent in DC Black society. Her roots went back to Holly Springs, Miss. - coincidentally, the same town as Ida B Wells. <br /><br />Terrell’s father was one of the first Black millionaires in the South. She had advantages Wells could only dream of, including a degree from @<a href="https://twitter.com/oberlincollege" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">oberlincollege</a>. Terrell supported Booker T Washington’s ingratiating approach to Black survival, which her speech to NAWSA reflected. <br /><br />Rather than demanding equality based on human rights or the Constitution, Terrell described Black women’s educational attainment and industry. She closed with her signature phrase, the motto of NACW: “lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving.and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.†<br /><br />She was greeted politely, but her speech is given scant mention in the conference proceedings (which often excerpted notable speeches at length). <br /><br />(FWIW, two years later she spoke again, and her more universalist speech about the importance of the vote for all women got more attention in the NAWSA record.) Remember, Terrell lived in DC, where NAWSA conferences took place in even numbered years. In between, @ the 1899 convention in Grand Rapids, an African-American delegate named Lottie Wilson Jackson pushed NAWSA to condemn railroad segregation. After heated debate, NAWSA took the position that woman suffrage and African-American rights were completely separate causes. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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04/25/2020
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
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28/02/2020
Sarah Smith Garnet: Principal, Suffragist, Leader
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">So many talented African-American women became teachers when outlets for intellectual and managerial skill were few. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Sarah Smith Garnet began teaching when she was 14 years old, and in 1863 she became the first Black woman to be principal of a New York City school. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">She remained the principal for nearly 40 years, innovating pedagogy the whole time. Her year-end literary assemblies drew large crowds. Her obituary in Crisis @thecrisismag notes that: "It was her untiring efforts toward doing away with separate schools for colored children </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">"...and her zeal in the accomplishment of her purpose that has given her the highest rank among the teachers of New York…" </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">W.E.B.DuBois spoke at Sarah Smith Garnet's funeral. Her obituary was written by Addie Waites Hunton, another NACW leader and anti-lynching activist. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">It gives us a flavor of Sarah as an activist and as an educator: "Among her beautiful gifts recalled was that of drawing her pupils close to her...."Her boys always knew she would give them another chance.'" </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">After she retired from the public schools, Sarah Garnet spent more than a decade on her other career: votes for women. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">She and her sister Dr. Susan McKinney-Steward had created the Equal Suffrage League in Brooklyn in the late 1880s. It was the first NYC Black women's club devoted to suffrage. (See Dr. Susan, yesterday!) </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">At first they met in the back of the seamstress shop that Sarah ran on the side when she was a principal. They eventually outgrew that space and moved to the (all Black) YMCA in Fort Greene that opened in 1902. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Around that time the Equal Suffrage League became affiliated with the National Association of Colored Women, and Sarah Garnet became superintendent of NACW's suffrage department. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Sarah Garnet was intellectually voracious - always seeking new ideas.</span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">In her early 70s she supported the founding of the Niagara Movement, which demanded unconditional equal rights for African-Americans. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">In her late 70s she went to England to meet radical suffragettes, and helped import their ideas to the US. </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Hallie Quinn Brown's <i>Homespun Heroines</i> describes Sarah Garnet's last days: </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">"Mrs. Garnett literally died in harness. While in London she gathered suffrage literature and 24 hours before her promotion to her Heavenly Home, was distributing the same among her club in Brooklyn." </span></p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1">PS9 in Brooklyn was recently named for her, thanks to Brooklyn historian/activist @<a href="https://twitter.com/rauldougou"><span class="s2">rauldougou</span></a> and the @<a href="https://twitter.com/PS9BklynPTO"><span class="s2">PS9BklynPTO</span></a>. #BlackSuffragists #CenturyofStruggle #Suffrage100</span></p>
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1265137331901693954" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
26/05/2020
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<div class="element-text"><a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/exhibits/show/black-suffragists/item/392" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Susan Smith-McKinney Steward of Weeksville</a></div>
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