Higher ed.
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 @<a href="https://twitter.com/oberlincollege" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">oberlincollege</a> in 1884. 🧵 <br /><br />They weren’t the first Black women at Oberlin - Mary Jane Patterson 👇ðŸ¾graduated in 1862. Oberlin was founded by abolitionists in 1833; by the 1880s 5-6% of students were African American. <br /><br />Anna Julia Cooper fought to study with men at Oberlin, not segregated into a “ladies’ course.†She won, and graduated with a master's in math. 40 years later she earned her PhD at the University of Paris. She was 66. <br /><br />Lucy Stone was one of the only women in the founding suffragist generation to go to college; she graduated from Oberlin in 1847. She didn’t leave with fond feelings, though. See 👇🾠<br /><br />Stone was younger than Lucretia Mott, a grandmother of the movement. When she was born in 1793, a university education was out of the question for a girl. In 1864 Mott helped start @<a href="https://twitter.com/swarthmore" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">swarthmore</a>. Alice Paul graduated Swarthmore class of 1905. Suffragist Mabel Vernon was '06. <br /><br />Alice went on to the London School of Economics, but dropped her courses to train with UK suffragettes. After imprisonment & force-feeding, she came home to recuperate. Her idea of rest was a PhD at @<a href="https://twitter.com/Penn" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Penn</a>. Her dissertation was “The Legal Position of Women in Pennsylvania.†<br /><br />In 2004 Swarthmore students voted to name a new dorm Alice Paul Hall. In 2018 Oberlin named its main library in honor of Mary Church Terrell. @<a href="https://twitter.com/ObieLib" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">obielib</a> I couldn’t find anything significant named for Anna Julia Cooper, Ida Gibbs-Hunt or Lucy Stone. #Suffrage100 #BlackSuffragists
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1276319926639362053" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
25/07/2020
<a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/152" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">More Lucy Stone</a>
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
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1254226936542494723" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
04/25/2020