Browse Items (38 total)

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…

.@Stephen_A_West says we can celebrate the 15th Amdt sesquicentennial for two months, because that’s how long it took to shuffle the states into line for ratification.  Happy 150th birthday to the #15thAmendment!Feb. 3 is now recognized as its…

Most law schools accepted female students grudgingly, but @WashULaw in St. Louis sought them out. In 1868 the school went looking for white women to enroll; Phoebe Couzins started the following year and graduated with some fanfare. Couzins is known…

Don't miss 👇amazing graphic novel depiction of the destruction of Black Wall Street, Tulsa 1921. It's "sponsored content" by HBO in connection w/ @Watchmen series. So many white people on Twitter admit they've never heard of it or didn't know it…

I spent the whole week on Anna Dickinson because she was very, very famous in her day and is almost lost to history. I know a lot about suffrage for a non-academic, and I had never heard her name before the @smithsonianNPG exhibit. In “America’s Joan…

After the war, Dickinson toured nationally, delivering a repertoire of 22 different lectures on women’s suffrage & the rights of all African-Americans. At the height of her career, she made more money than Mark Twain: c. $400k/yr in today’s…

Within weeks of the murders, so much of Black Memphis had left town that the streetcar ridership collapsed. Men from the City Railway Co came to Ida B Wells' office, seeking to understand why Black riders had disappeared. Quotes from IBW's book…

By 1892, Ida B Wells’ Memphis paper was thriving. She traveled the Mississippi Delta selling subscriptions, tripling circulation. Free Speech was editorially fearless: Ida sharply called out any accommodation of white supremacy, even by Black…

Memphis was rebuilding when Ida B. Wells arrived in the 1880s. After the yellow fever epidemic, the city levied a tax to build drainage systems & fight mosquitoes. The city fathers were white, but a growing Black population garnered some power:…

By the 1876 US centennial, women had been demanding the vote for nearly 30 years. The light bulb was not yet invented. As the National and the American Woman Suffrage Assoc's developed their separate identities in the 1870s, more African-American…