Browse Items (38 total)

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…

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…

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 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…

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 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…

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:…

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…

At the turn of the century, leading white suffragists deluded themselves into thinking that colluding with racists would help their cause. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.Thread. The new generation of suffrage leaders - with the blessing of the old guard -…

Black women & white women experiencing this country differently is nothing new. In the suffrage movement, what voting meant for white women was different than what it meant for Black women. And not just because the fight was segregated, running…