Part II: Stand Aside for the ‘Negro’s Hour’

Mary Church Terrell

Frederick Douglass

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

The fifteenth amendment’s exclusion of sex brought out the worst in all the parties. Claiming still to espouse female suffrage, Wendell Phillips and Stephen Foster pleaded with Stanton and Susan Anthony to stand aside for the “Negro’s hour.” Lincoln had said, “One war at a time, so I say one, ‘One question at a time,” Phillips rationalized. To which Stanton, speaking for the new feminist American Equal Rights Association (AERA), famously objected that her movement would never stand aside “and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first.”

Siding with Phillips at the memorable 1869 AERA convention in New York City, Frederick Douglass swung his immense authority behind the Republicans and their radical allies who envisaged a permanent GOP majority based on black votes. White suffragists would long remember his impassioned argument for black men obtaining the vote before women in order to defend themselves and their women:

When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement … then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.

Lucy Stone’s heartfelt caveat foretold the unfriendly future of feminism and civil rights. “We are lost if we turn away from the middle principle and argue for one class,” she cried from the convention floor.

To be sure, many suffragists heeded Lucy Stone’s admonition. Julia Ward Howe and Thomas Wentworth Higginson spoke for those in the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) who gamely conceded the primacy of the black male franchise and pledged themselves to achieving the ratification of a sixteenth amendment for black and white women.

But the suffragist mainstream represented by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) veered into an angry strategy of blatant racism. Anthony, Stanton, and their disciples Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt, saw the collapse of Reconstruction and the onset of Redemption as a golden opportunity to placate opponents and mobilize supporters in the new South. “Unless you bring in the South,” a prominent Kentucky suffragist lectured Anthony, votes for women might never happen.

The white South’s determination to eliminate its Negro voters was restrained for a time by the protections under the fifteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In several southern states (especially in South Carolina, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Texas), black voters were still courted or corralled in contests for local political power.

Interestingly, the key elements of NAWSA’s so-called southern “statistical” strategy were first proposed by Lucy Stone’s husband, Henry Blackwell. Rather than risk the reduction of their congressional representation under the fifteenth amendment’s enforcement clause, Blackwell offered southern lawmakers millions of enfranchised white women as a constitutionally secure solution. To objections that not all southern women were white, he added literacy and property qualifications.

Although a few accomplished members like Frances Ellen Harper, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell periodically appeared at conventions, black suffragists all but disappeared from NAWSA’s ranks. Meanwhile, Mississippi’s redeemer politicians seriously considered the NAWSA solution at their 1890 constitutional convention that led the way to black disfranchisement.

The joke making the rounds of southern statehouses was that no constitutional convention’s business could proceed before some lone, insistent suffragist made her appeal. Historian Marjorie Spruill quotes a typical suffragist effusion of the day: “The South, true to its tradition will trust its women, and thus placing in their hands the balance of power, the negro [sic] as a disturbing element in politics will disappear.”

NAWSA’s “Southern Committee” dispatched platoons of speakers to southern capitals. It first national convention outside New York met in Atlanta in 1895. At NAWSA’s national convention in 1903 in New Orleans, Anna Howard Shaw rebuked white men for making black men “the political superiors of your white women.” By that time, the work of the southern constitutional conventions was substantially completed: Louisiana would have less than 6,000 registered black voters, where before there had been more than 130,000; Alabama would list 3,000 after 1900 of a previous registered total of some 181,000. Unfortunately for NAWSA, the cynical statistical agenda had turned out to be an embarrassing miscalculation. The South’s white men had preferred the risk of Supreme Court and congressional sanctions to giving their women the vote. A minor victory was the right to vote on tax matters for female taxpayers. When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote the letter cited at the beginning of this talk, Carrie Chapman Catt, Anthony’s pragmatic successor, had significantly reduced NAWSA’s investment in the southern strategy.

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