Browse Items (38 total)

Ida B at work. Another glimpse of the master persuader, via the beautiful 2d edition of her autobiography. Great foreword by @eveewing & afterword by @MichelleDuster about preserving the legacy. 🧵 In 1900 the Chicago Tribune runs stories…

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:…

The belief that “women” would vote as a block about alcohol animated support and opposition re: suffrage. (It wasn’t ever really true.) The liquor industry lobbied against women’s votes at many junctures, though historians debate how much…

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…

The 14th Amdt’s Biggest Failure, or Women Excluded for Naught: a long thread. Two decades after the Civil War, it was as though it had never happened. Instead of the safety to work their land and vote, Black families were re-enslaved as sharecroppers…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Annual conventions belong in the nation’s capital--at least as far as the National Woman Suffrage Assoc was concerned. But the American WSA had always rotated among states, so a few years after the merger, NAWSA began to alternate: even years in…