In this edition of The Drinking Gourd, I’ve invited my mentor, Dr. David Levering-Lewis, Professor of History at New York University and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W.E.B. DuBois, to share his thoughts on the meaning of the Obama presidency.

In late October, Lewis spoke at Northwestern University’s Center for Historical Studies. His speech, “On Triangulating Seneca Falls, The Niagara Movement, and Reverend Wright: America in the Obama Era,” reviewed the tensions between white women and African-American activists as they both struggled for civil rights during the early 20th century. The groups had a fitful relationship, one in which sharp differences sometimes undermined their progress.

In these remarks, Lewis points out that the meaning of the categories of race and gender have never been static, but shift over time. Their continued complexity was underscored by both the bitter presidential primary contest between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and their post-primary collaboration. That resolution indicates that the relationship, while still complex, can also undoubtedly produce positive outcomes.

–Stacey Patton, Senior Editor

• Part I: Without Distinction of Race or Sex
• Part II: Stand Aside for the ‘Negro’s Hour’
• Part III: Demands for Full Citizenship
• Part IV: Radical Rights and Sex Rights

On Triangulating Seneca Falls, The Niagara Movement, and Reverend Wright: America in the Obama Era

By David Levering Lewis

Part I: Without Distinction of Race or Sex

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

W.E.B. DuBois

William Edward Burghardt was one of the 20th century’s most ardent supporters of women’s rights. Among African-American men of his time, he was singular in this regard. Surprising, then, to find in his immense correspondence, this 1907 reply to a white suffragist’s inquiry about his advocacy of equality for racial minorities and women. He believed in “full rights for human beings without distinction of race or sex,” Du Bois wrote, adding that he hesitated to say anything concerning women’s rights “because most women in the United States are so narrow that anything I should say would be misinterpreted.” Moreover, he stated that the “Negro race has suffered more from the antipathy and narrowness of women both South and North than from any other single source. . . . I do not see at present that there is much chance for me to help in your cause. I wish it, however, the greatest success.”

In fact, although Du Bois soon found himself not merely offering advice but actively participating in the women’s movement for the franchise and economic empowerment, his rather aspersive letter had much fraught history behind it – indeed, nearly 40 years of it. Despite the women’s rights advocacy of Du Bois and a number of black men prominent in the civil rights movement, the relations between the two movements have continued to be strained by reciprocally undermining competition and reproach, incomprehension and wounded feelings.

The modest effort of this talk is to review some of the scars that these two struggles – for for women ’s rights and race rights – have inflicted upon each other during their long history of mutuality, competition, and parallelism. To those possessing up-to-the semester currency with the immense bibliography of feminism and civil rights, such an effort might seem superfluous. For bare essentials, Nancy Cott’s indispensable Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987) or Jean Baker’s recent edition, Votes for Women (2001), cover the history of the women’s movement as a largely white phenomenon.

[Historians] Rosalind Terborg-Penn, Belinda Robnett, and Deborah Gray White complement the mainstream narrative through the lens of women of color. The black civil rights bibliography, from John Hope Franklin to Harvard Sitkoff and Charles Payne or Taylor Branch and onward, sustains a mountain of titles. That said, must it not be conceded that these two movements have suffered from a compartmentalized treatment detrimental to a fuller understanding of their symbiosis in much the same way that the larger American society long existed as cognitively dissonant and incomplete parts that were putatively separate and equal?

I would insist that an interpretation looping the pivotal points of interaction and opposition between the women’s movement and those of the black civil rights struggle can present a more holistic history of the ongoing progress of women and men in black and white.

A necessary precondition of clarity about these issues is, I believe, to stipulate that gender and race rights historically entail not two groups, but three; that, furthermore, this third group – black women – has existed until fairly recently only in elided, marginalized, or oppositional importance, even when formally acknowledged in the literature of both mainstream feminism and civil rights. In the life of both movements, she has been too often victimized by the racial presumptions of white women and the patriarchal presumptions of black men.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s rhetorical question to Wendell Phillips, a dogmatic exponent of votes for the Negro, reminds us of the black woman’s civil invisibility: “Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?” The black woman has been a perennial challenge to categorize, as much for her awesome strengths as for her putative easy virtue. Glenda Gilmore’s exemplary depiction in Gender and Jim Crow of middle-class black North Carolina women as political surrogates for their oppressed men would have been regarded as one of racial apartheid’s cruelest exactions by most Edwardian black males.

Invited to speak to Atlanta black clubwomen, Deborah Gray White [Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University] reports that the accomplished John Hope, president of Morehouse College [from 1906 to 1929] and Du Bois intimate, shattered their helpmate intentions with the reprimand that “it is a great calamity for our women to act as substitutes.” Black people, Hope sternly repeated, “are in need of men.”

As Du Bois’s 1907 letter suggests, the rights conversation has been one largely between black men and white women. Had Susan B. Anthony not gone to a venerated rest one year earlier, she could certainly have rebutted the letter’s indictment of unmatched racial antipathy on the part of white women. Anthony and her founding generation of women’s rights indicted black men for cynical opportunism in betraying the human rights principles that had united them in the nineteenth-century’s greatest causes: the emancipation of the Negro slave and the empowerment of women.

Theirs had been a grand coalition that carried the day with Garrison’s immediatist Liberator, the newspaper funded by free people of color; the Tappan brothers’ financing of Oberlin College and the National Era newspaper serializing Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Frederick Douglass’s powerful orations and inspired North Star newsweekly; and Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Stanton‘s suffragist vanguard transformed by the momentous Seneca Falls experience.

At New York’s Seneca Falls, 70 women and 30 men signed “The Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” in [1848] the same year as the Communist Manifesto [by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels] appeared. In audacious mimicry of Jeffersonian prose proclaiming the “self-evident truth” that “all men and women are created equal,” the declaration’s ninth resolution announced that American women had the duty to secure “their sacred right to the elective franchise,” a proposition then so radical that Stanton’s husband left town rather than face ridicule.

Of great future importance, “ridiculous” resolution number nine was ratified by a single vote only after Frederick Douglass’s eloquent speech in its behalf from the floor, the substance of which Douglass published a few days afterward in The North Star. “All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being,” he reiterated, “is equally true of woman, and if that government only is just that governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise.”

Stanton and Douglass would speak the same language until politics separated their movements. “Our doctrine is that ‘right is of no sex,’” Douglass broadcast from platforms. “The prejudice against color . . . is no stronger than against sex,” Stanton informed the New York State Legislature. “It is produced by the same cause.” Unity of principles was subject, nevertheless, to a readily discernible consciousness of class among many suffragists who embraced the principal of universal suffrage yet held their noses over Negroes, Irish immigrants, and the poor.

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