Browse Items (38 total)
Memphis Streetcar boycottWithin 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…
Mary Church TerrellThe 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…
Mary Ann Shadd Cary & the Centennial actionBy 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…
Law school by tweet: the 14th Amendment's Biggest FailureThe 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.…
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, part III 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…
Ida vs. Frances WillardThe belief that “women” would vote as a block about alcohol animated support and opposition re: suffrage. (It wasn’t ever really true.) The liquor…
Ida fights segregation on the railroadMemphis was rebuilding when Ida B. Wells arrived in the 1880s. After the yellow fever epidemic, the city levied a tax to build drainage systems &…
Ida B Takes on the Chicago TribuneIda B at work. Another glimpse of the master persuader, via the beautiful 2d edition of her autobiography. Great foreword by @eveewing & afterword…
Don't get in bed with racistsAt the turn of the century, leading white suffragists deluded themselves into thinking that colluding with racists would help their cause. Spoiler…
Doldrums/NadirBlack women & white women experiencing this country differently is nothing new. In the suffrage movement, what voting meant for white women was…