In Honor of Susan B. Anthony, Persistent Agitator

Born 200 years ago, on February 15, 1820, for nearly sixty years before her death at the age of 86, Susan B. Anthony was an active agitator for change. In a letter she wrote in 1883, Anthony (SBA) said, 

SBA: Agitator for Temperance

Because of her concern for abused women and children, Anthony’s first public activity as an agitator was in the temperance movement, which was the effort to outlaw alcohol. (Many of you saw my related 2/9 blog article about Prohibition.)

In 1848 when she was 28 years old, Susan’s first public speech was given for temperance.

In her book Susan B. Anthony (2019), Teri Kanefield wrote about how Anthony “spoke passionately about ‘the day when our brothers and sons shall no longer be allured from the right by corrupting influence’ of alcohol so that ‘our sisters and daughters shall no longer be exposed to the half-inebriated seducer’” (p. 40).

In 1851 Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who became her lifelong friend and colleague, and the following year they founded the Women's New York State Temperance Society.

(In 1999, Ken Burns produced “Not For Ourselves Alone,” a splendid, 210-minute  documentary about Anthony and Stanton; June and I enjoyed watching it last year on PBS.)

The next year, 1853, after being denied the opportunity to speak at a temperance convention because she was a woman, Anthony realized that no one would take women in politics seriously unless they had the right to vote. Thus, the seeds of her most important work as an agitator for women’s rights were planted.

SBA: Agitator for Abolition

For the next twelve years, however, Anthony worked for the abolition of slavery. In 1849, while still in her 20s, Susan met Frederick Douglass, who was two years older than she, and they were friends and colleagues—and antagonists—in the fight for equality until his death in 1895.

As a Quaker, Anthony believed that all people were of equal worth and should be treated equally. That belief undergirded her work for the rights of women. But in the 1850s and early 1860s, she was focused primarily on eradicating slavery in the U.S.

In 1856 Anthony became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, which William Lloyd Garrison had co-founded in 1833. Drawing a small salary from the Society, Susan began touring the country and making speeches about the evils of slavery.

After Lincoln’s election as President in 1860, Anthony faced terrible opposition to her work against slavery—even in New York. But she didn’t give up or quit being an agitator.

In 1863 Anthony and Stanton formed the Women’s National Loyal League. In the largest petition drive in the nation's history up to that time, the League collected nearly 400,000 signatures on petitions to abolish slavery and presented them to Congress.

That indefatigable work by Anthony and Stanton significantly assisted the passage in 1865 of the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery in the U.S.

SBA: Agitator for Suffrage

The next fight was for the right for women, both black and white, to vote. In the early 1860s, white abolitionist men, such as William Lloyd Garrison, and black men, such as Frederick Douglass, were all for black men obtaining the right to vote. But they did not support the vote for women. Anthony and Stanton were outraged.

Anthony managed to register and even to vote in the election of 1872. She was subsequently arrested and convicted—but refused to pay her fine of $100 plus costs.

Even though she was a Quaker woman, in 1893 she exclaimed. “Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry!”

Anthony spent the last forty years of her long life working for women’s right to vote. Sadly, she never succeeded during her lifetime. But just a month before her death in 1906, she gave her last speech concluding with the rousing phrase, "Failure is impossible!”

Nicknamed the "Anthony Amendment" in honor of Susan, who had worked so long and so persistently, the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote was finally ratified on August 18, 1920.

Now, 100 years later, there will be far more women than men who will vote (and vote in the right way!) in the presidential election of 2020.

*****

In 2019, the city of Liberty (Mo.) where I live erected a life-size statue of Susan B. Anthony on the southeast corner of the historic square. Toward the end of their successful football season, she was sporting Chiefs’ apparel, as you see in the picture

.

Honoring the Memory of W.E.B. Du Bois

Last month one of my blog articles (see here) was about a brilliant French woman who died 75 years ago. This article is about a brilliant African-American man who died 20 years later, in August 1963. This remarkable man was born when Andrew Johnson was President and died the year Lyndon Johnson became President.

A Brief Bio

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, born 150 years ago in February 1868, was the great-grandson of James Du Bois, a white plantation owner in the Bahamas. But W.E.B. pronounced his name “doo boyz” rather than with the French pronunciation.

When he was only 20, Du Bois graduated from Fisk University. He went on to study at Harvard, at the University of Berlin, and then in 1895 became the first African-American to be awarded the Ph.D. degree by Harvard.

In 1903 Du Bois published his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of 14 essays—and now, 115 years later it is still in print and relevant. 

One central point made on the book’s very first page seems, unfortunately, still to be true: “the problem of the Twentieth Century [and now the Twenty-first Century] is the problem of the color line.”

In that book, and consistently through the following years, Du Bois adamantly opposed the idea of biological white superiority. Partly for that reason, in 1909 he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and long served as editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis.

Du Bois taught at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910, and then at the age of 66 he went back to that school and was chair of the department of sociology from 1934 to 1944.

During most of the 1950s, Du Bois was unable to travel outside the U.S. because of his alleged ties with Communist nations.

In 1961 Du Bois moved to Ghana—and later became a citizen of that country, where he died in 1963 at the age of 95.

A Critical Controversy

Although they were the two most important African-American leaders after Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, there was an ongoing controversy between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, who was twelve years his senior.

Du Bois’s criticism of Washington was eloquently voiced in the third essay in The Souls of Black Folk—and it lasted until Washington’s death in 1915. In what Du Bois called the “Atlanta Compromise,” Washington seemed to accept the view that blacks were inferior to whites.

Du Bois, however, strenuously objected to that idea and called for full equality of blacks and whites. He wanted complete rejection of all Jim Crow laws and ways of thinking. He favored confrontation rather than compromise in seeking to erase the problematic color line.

A Lasting Legacy

Through the years I never heard as much, or learned as much, about Du Bois as about other noted black leaders such as Douglass or Washington. Maybe that was partly because Du Bois leaned toward socialism, was prosecuted as a Red sympathizer in the 1950s, and did join the Communist Party in 1961.

Nevertheless, I have been deeply impressed by my recent reading of and about Du Bois, and I close with words Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke (and which can be read here) on the 100th anniversary of Du Bois’s birth.

King declared that Du Bois was “one of the most remarkable men of our time,” a scholar who “recognized that the keystone in the arch of oppression [of blacks] was the myth of inferiority” and who “dedicated his brilliant talents to demolish” that myth.

Du Bois’s legacy lives on—and his voice still needs to be heard today.

Frederick Douglass: Getting Recognized More and More

This Black History Month article is about Frederick Douglass, the African-American man who now seems to be getting recognized more and more—partly because of DJT’s somewhat puzzling comment to that effect on Feb. 1.

HISTORIC SITE

Last Thursday I flew to Washington, D.C., where son Keith picked me up. At my request we went straight from the airport to the Frederick Douglass Historic Site in southeast D.C. It was a wonderful visit of the Cedar Hill residence that Douglass purchased in 1877 and lived in until his death in 1895.

Douglass was able to purchase the splendid house in Anacostia because of his appointment as Federal Marshal of Washington, D.C. Soon after President Hayes’s inauguration in March 1877, he named Douglass to that position, partly in appreciation for his support during the heated presidential campaign of 1876.

Here is a picture I took of his spacious Cedar Hill home: 

HISTORICAL SKETCH

Statue of Douglass in Visitors Center

It is not certain that Douglass was born in February, but his birthday was celebrated at the Historic Site this week on Monday. Most sources now say he was born in 1818, although Charles Chesnutt’s 1899 biography of Douglass gives his birth year as 1817. There were not good historical records kept on slaves—and Douglass’s mother was a slave in Maryland at the time of his birth.

When he was about twenty years old, in 1838 Douglass escaped from slavery, fleeing to New York. That same year he married Anna Murray, who became the mother of his five children and was his wife until her death in 1882.

In 1841 Douglass became widely known as a public speaker, delivering speeches for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Seven years later, he attended the first women’s rights convention and also became an advocate of suffrage for women.

Then in 1858 John Brown stayed in the Douglass home (in Rochester, N.Y.) for a month, but Douglass never condoned Brown’s plan for the Harpers Ferry attack. He did, however, later recruit Black soldiers to fight for the Union. He also served as an adviser to President Lincoln during the Civil War.

(This link to Douglass’s timeline gives much more historical information.)

Douglass died in his Cedar Ridge home on Feb. 20, 1895. Since he had been a lifelong Methodist, his elaborate funeral was held at a large AME Church in D.C.

HISTORIC CRITICISM

In the appendix of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), the first of his three autobiographies, Douglass explained what he had written about religion in his book:

What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest, possible difference--so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.

Frederick Douglass was unquestionably a great man. I am glad his life and work, including this historic criticism of “slaveholding religion,” is now “getting recognized more and more.”