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sciencespies · 4 years

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The Thorny Road to the 19th Amendment

https://sciencespies.com/history/the-thorny-road-to-the-19th-amendment/

The Thorny Road to the 19th Amendment

When the 19th Amendment became law in August 1920, it constituted the largest simultaneous enfranchisement in American history—women nationwide had finally obtained, at least on paper, the right to vote. But it’s the struggle for suffrage, which stretched more than 75 years prior, and not just the movement’s eventual victory that UCLA historian Ellen Carol DuBois recounts in her new book, aptly titled Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote.

Suffrage history is thistly and complicated. The movement got its start in abolitionist circles during the mid-19th century when most married women lacked basic property rights. Even among the progressive-minded women and men gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848, the notion that “it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise” proved radical. “One of my intentions,” DuBois told Smithsonian, “is to integrate the history of the women’s suffrage movement into American history…At every stage, the larger political atmosphere, the reform energies of the 1840s and ’50s, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the period of Jim Crow, the Progressive Era and then World War I, each of those periods creates the environment in which suffragists have to work.” To that end, DuBois traces the ways in which Reconstruction fueled calls for “universal suffrage” as well as a racial schism among suffragists. We learn how the women’s rights advocates became (sometimes uneasy) allies with different political parties, Temperance advocates and the labor movement and how outside political turmoil, like World War I, complicated their quest for the vote. Centuries before social media and the internet, reformers turned to newspapers, speaking tours, and eventually advocacy that ranged from signature-gathering to hunger strikes to convince voters and legislators alike how imperative it was that women gain the franchise.

DuBois’ richly detailed account also doesn’t shy from examining the bitter divides that fissured the suffrage movement over methods, race and class as it struggled to piece together a coalition that would vote to let women vote too. In the 1870s, after a schism between prominent suffrage leaders over supporting the 15th Amendment, the movement split into several camps, one with more moderate tactics and Republican Party allegiance than the other; in the 1910s, a similar split emerged between the more militant NWP and conciliatory NAWSA. And despite the contributions of women of color like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell to their cause, NAWSA adopted an “explicitly racist policy” to appeal to Southern states around the turn of the 20th century, DuBois writes.

Intermixed in all this political history are the miniature profiles of the remarkable, determined women (and choice male allies) who propelled the suffragist movement. Susan B. Anthony ranks among the best known, but DuBois also adds the lesser-known facets like that Anthony was formally tried and found guilty of casting a ballot “without having the lawful right” to do so in New York? DuBois also highlights the stories of suffragists with less name recognition, like the firebrand and Equal Rights party presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull, Woman’s Christian Temperance Union leader Frances Willard and millionaire benefactress Alva Belmont. DuBois spoke by phone with Smithsonian about her book:

This book covers a long history, and I’m curious about the evolution of the movement. What are some of the twists and turns the fight for suffrage took that were not part of the original vision?

First, what really makes the suffrage movement the foremost demand of the women’s rights movement are the consequences of the Civil War. The U.S. Constitution has almost nothing to say about who votes until the 15th Amendment, [which enfranchised African American men]. In the early postwar years, the assumption was that, like economic rights, voting rights would have to be won state by state.

Then with the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which virtually rewrite the U.S. Constitution [to abolish slavery and give formerly enslaved people legal and civil rights], the suffrage movement focuses on getting the right for women to vote acknowledged in the Constitution. When efforts to get women included in the 15th Amendment failed, suffragists actually returned to the state level for the next many decades.

The suffragists go back to the states, almost all of them west of the Mississippi, and convince male voters to amend their state constitution to either remove the word “male” or put the right of women to vote in those constitutions. Here is the crucial thing to acknowledge: When that happened, first in Colorado, then in California and ultimately crossing the Mississippi to New York in 1917, those women who were enfranchised by actions of the state constitution had comprehensive voting rights, including for president. So for instance, the women of Colorado gained the right to vote in 1893; they voted for president five times before the 19th Amendment is passed. By the time that the suffrage movement moves into high gear, in the midst of the first World War and then immediately afterwards, four million American women have the right to vote for president.

The way that the right to vote moves back and forth from the state to the federal level is something that could not have been anticipated. Especially since those first suffragists really thought that in the sort of revolutionary change of emancipation and black male enfranchisement, surely women would also be included. The failure of the 15th Amendment to extend the franchise to women so enraged a wing of the women’s suffrage movement that it broke open the alliance between black rights and women’s rights groups with serious and negative consequences for the next half century.

The second thing I’d say is that when women’s suffrage started, the political parties were quite infant. Indeed, the women’s suffrage movement begins before the Republican Party comes into being. I don’t think that suffragist reformers really anticipated how powerful the major political parties would be over American politics. One of the things I discovered in my work was how determined the controlling forces in the major parties, first the Republican and then the Democratic Party, were to keep women from gaining the right to vote.

Why was that?

When the Republican Party enfranchised African-American, formerly enslaved men, almost all of whom lived in the South, they anticipated correctly that those men would vote for their party. The enfranchisement of women was so much greater in magnitude, so there was no way to predict how women would vote. Really up almost till the end of the suffrage movement, American women had a reputation, gained or not, for being above partisan concerns and sort of concerned with the character of the candidate or the nature of the policies, which meant that they could not be corralled into supporting a partisan force. So the only parties that really ever supported women’s suffrage were these sort of insurgent third parties who had nothing to lose and everything to gain by attaching themselves to a new electorate. The most important of these was what was called the People’s, or Populist, Party of the 1890s. Those first victories in the West can be credited to the dramatic rise of the People’s Party.

Suffragists wearing the names of some of the Western states that had already granted women the right to vote process down Fifth Avenue during a 1915 march.

(Bettmann via Getty Images)

How did the women’s suffrage movement move from being very closely tied to abolitionism to largely excluding women of color?

So there were a couple things. First, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the dominating figures in the first half century of the movement, when she’s really enraged not just that women are excluded from the right to vote but women like herself are excluded from the right to vote, she expresses herself in ways that are…she’s charged with being racist. I think it’s more accurate to say she’s an elitist, because she’s as dismissive of European immigrants as she is of the formerly enslaved.

Stanton made really, really terrible comments about people a generation removed from slavery—she called them the sons and daughters of “bootblacks” or sometimes she called them “Sambo.” Sometimes that charge of racism flows over to her partner Susan B. Anthony. That’s not really fair. Anthony’s abolitionism was much deeper and more consistent. When you follow her career, until the day she died, she was always, wherever she went, she would make sure that she went to black churches, black universities, black societies.

Second, by the turn of century we’re moving into a whole different generation of leaders, none of whom have any roots in the abolition movement, who come of age during the period in which Reconstruction is portrayed as a terrible disaster for the nation and who are part and parcel of the white supremacist atmosphere of the early 20th century.

In those final eight years, 1912 to 1920, when the suffrage movement breaks through for a variety of reasons, to a real chance to win a constitutional amendment, the U.S. government is controlled by the Democratic Party. The president is a Southern Democrat. Washington, D.C., the home of the federal government, is a southern city. So the political atmosphere is radically hostile, at the national level, to anything that will help to return the African American vote.

In all the research you did for this book, was there anything that surprised you?

I was incredibly impressed by the congressional lobbying. I don’t think I appreciated, until I wrote this book, the quiet importance of Frances Willard and the WCTU, which doesn’t really fit into our normal story of suffrage radicalism. This sort of conventional women’s organization was important in bringing mainstream women, and not just the kind of radicals who had fought for the abolition of slavery, to recognize the importance of votes for women to achieve their goals, not just because these were high principles of equal rights, but because they couldn’t get what they wanted done. Whether it was the prohibition on alcohol or the end of child labor, they couldn’t do those things without the vote.

One of the lessons of the book is that the notion that women’s suffrage was a single-issue movement is just wrong. All of them had other goals. Carrie Chapman Catt was interested in world peace. Alice Paul was interested in equal rights for women beyond the right to vote. Anthony was interested in women’s right to earn a living. Stanton was interested in what we would call reproductive rights for women. Each of them had a larger vision of social change in which women’s suffrage was fundamental as a tool.

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cutsliceddiced · 4 years

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New top story from Time: I Feared My Enslaved Ancestors Had Been Dishonored in Death—But the African Burial Ground in New York City Tells a Different Story

The oral history of my family says that President James Madison, a Founding Father of our nation, was also a Founding Father of my African American family. In 1992, when I realized I knew a lot about how the president had lived his life but little about how his slaves had lived theirs, I took my first trip to Montpelier, Madison’s former Virginia plantation. I toured the mansion, the Madison family cemetery, and an excavated kitchen where it is likely one my enslaved ancestors once worked. But I elected not to see the slave cemetery. I was afraid my forebears had in death, as in life, been dishonored.

“Next time,” I promised myself.

It was just a few months later that I heard an NPR report about the recently discovered African Burial Ground in New York City. As the city and the nation processed that news, I began to follow and research the story—discovering that, while slave owners abolished many African customs, the sense of community as extended family, the importance of oral history, and the beliefs that guided the enslaved as they buried their deceased held strong.

In October 1991, the excavation crew for a new $275 million federal building on lower Broadway unearthed more than 400 human skeletons. These bones turned out to be the remains of a small fraction of the slaves who had built much of the city’s infrastructure, including the wall that once defined Wall Street. A review of 17th- and 18th-century land surveys revealed the site had been part of a 6.6-acre cemetery where the bodies of more than 15,000 black people rested, making it the oldest and largest known colonial burial site for Africans in North America.

Until the excavation, few New Yorkers, and even fewer visitors, knew that from 1711 to 1762, just two streets away from the current New York Stock Exchange, there had been an open-air market where African men, women and children were bought and sold. This busy and profitable market, second only to another in Charleston, S.C., helped spawn American capitalism and became pivotal to how money flowed throughout the world.

For varying periods throughout colonial history, every American colony had slaves. Stolen Africans were brought not only to grow cotton, sugar and tobacco in the South, but also to perform much of the hard labor needed to build towns, cities and railways. Raw crops produced in the South were transported to the North, or to Europe, to be turned into finished products, the sale of which was used to fund more trips to Africa for the capture and purchase of more slaves who were then trafficked to America to further its economic growth. This triangular trade route was astonishingly lucrative.

Through its burgeoning shipping businesses, insurance companies, sugar refiners and clothing manufacturers and retailers—supported by its equally burgeoning banking, accounting and investment firms—New York garnered some 40% of all the cotton revenue generated in the American colonies. And by investing in Southern plantations and military suppliers, New York City became so rich through the “peculiar institution” that in January 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Mayor Fernando Wood proposed secession from the Union rather than lose cotton trade with the South.

In 1697, three centuries before the 1991 excavation, Trinity Church, located a few blocks away, banned the burial of “Negro’s” [sic] in its graveyard, thereby forcing the enslaved to find another place to inter their deceased. It was upon this second site, “the African Burial Ground,” the new federal building was to be constructed. When planning the structure, the United States General Services Administration assumed time and unrelenting massive urban development since the burial ground’s closure in 1794 had destroyed the human remains.

Early in 1992, when the city’s African American community learned of the discovery and the damage to skeletal remains caused by the excavation, the group mobilized and chose Trinity Church as the venue for a televised meeting. Among other community leaders who spoke, Rev. Herbert Daughtry reminded America: “Had it not been for the bodies and the bone, the body and the labor of those people who rest yonder—our ancestors—there would not have been a United States of America…”

Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter

Newspapers and television newscasts around the globe reported on the night vigils, the organized rallies, the spontaneous demonstrations, and the petitions and meetings. Many of the nation’s black citizens were enraged that their government would construct a building on top of their ancestors’ final resting place. Spiritual leaders of many faiths came to the sacred site, and the cause became a cry for human rights worldwide.

In October 1992, Congress passed a resolution to alter the building’s design in order to preserve the archeological site. The legislature then appropriated three million dollars for a museum and research center. That year, the African Burial Ground was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in April 1993, it became a National Historic Landmark.

Yielding to indefatigable protests, the House Subcommittee on Public Works agreed to transfer the 419 exhumed skeletons to Howard University in Washington, D.C. Under the direction of Michael Blakey, an African American physical anthropologist, the bones were painstakingly labeled, catalogued and packaged. In November 1993, at a nighttime ceremony at the burial site, with hundreds of participants and on lookers, Blakey, wearing traditional formal African attire, accepted a small box. Wrapped in African fabric, it contained the last of the remains to be transferred.

At Howard’s Montague Cobb Biological Anthropology Laboratory, Blakey and his team analyzed the remains to learn the nature and extent of the brutality suffered by the black people who had been brought to New York from Angola, the Congo and the Caribbean. For nearly ten years, until the corpses were ceremonially reinterred in the Burial Ground, the researchers studied the bones, teeth and hair of the buried individuals and discovered almost half had been less than 12 years old when they died and more than half of these children had not reached their second birthdays. The children, like the adults, had suffered from malnutrition, injury, infectious disease, lead poisoning and overwork.

The remains, collected from a subterranean refuge under Wall Street, also told another story. Denied in life the chance to gain power, influence and dignity, the deceased were found meticulously swaddled in winding sheets secured with shroud pins and lying supine in individual coffins. Among the bones were many artifacts, including coins, buttons, bracelets, cufflinks and beads, to be used in the next world. A boy under the age of 5 lay silent with a clamshell above his left collarbone. In another photograph, a woman lay with her newborn infant nestled in the bend of her elbow.

In October 2007, the African Burial Ground was officially dedicated as a National Monument. Eight years later, in July 2015, the city itself made an effort to recognize the existence of its slaves and their descendants. New Yorkers and visitors walking along Wall Street might notice a free-standing 16-by-24-inch plaque installed a short walk away from where the 18th-century slave market once stood. The imagery of the city’s, and the nation’s, vast and powerful financial center sitting on top of the burial sites of its enslaved inhabitants projects an ironic view of the persistent racial inequalities in wealth and legal rights. The plaque will not make visible the invisible black people who, through their forced labor and self-sacrifice, carried New York City and the whole of America to prosperity and world eminence.

After learning about the burial practices of New York City’s enslaved people, I returned to Montpelier. As I walked along the dirt road that curved down from the mansion, I didn’t know what to expect. So, when I reached the slave cemetery, the bright blue periwinkles covering the floor of a small woods took me by surprise. I stepped in, and the ground, blanketed with fallen leaves and cradling the hidden remains, was soft underfoot. Crude quartz headstones had been placed on the west end of the graves, allowing, according to ancient West African beliefs, the souls resting below to follow the sun as it rose on the morning of life beyond death.

Standing in a kingdom of many trees, I felt one of them call to me. A stone the color of raw flesh, its uneven surface shiny and smooth, nestled at the base. I envisioned one of my enslaved ancestors lying there, wrapped in white muslin secured with a shroud pin. I knelt down and placed my hand on the rock, assured my ancestor had been buried with dignity.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Bettye Kearse is the author of The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President’s Black Family, available now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

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keywestlou · 4 years

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REPUBLICAN IMMORALITY

Politics is dirty. Both sides. However the past few years have shown the Republicans to far exceed the Democrats when it comes to immoral activities.

Maybe it’s Trump’s leadership. I don’t know. Whatever, the Republicans have been flagrant in their abuse of propriety.

Kentucky an example. Bad.

Today is primary day in Kentucky. What I am about to share applies both to primary and election days.

Note that black hearted Mitch McConnell is one of the U.S. Senators representing Kentucky. He has opposition in the primary today. Expected to win, however. McConnell leads in 2 polls as to election day itself. He is projected the winner by 14 and 20 points respectively.

Maybe McConnell was worried, maybe Trump.

Kentucky Republicans wanted neither the blacks nor Democratic whites to have it easy when voting.

There had been 3,700 election places. Kentucky recently reduced them to less than 200. Especially where black districts were concerned.

The reduction a 95 percent one.

A clear example of the wrong is Jefferson County. Its population 767,000. Now has only one place to vote.

The purpose of the reduction in voting places is to make it difficult and to discourage Democratic voters.

LeBron James faced a similar situation recently in Georgia. He said, “This is systematic racism and oppression.”

Sure is!

The November election has clearly developed into a referendum on Trump. No question about it.

He deserves to lose big time.

Trump worries not about coronavirus. Strange because he is a germaphobic. Always washing his hands even before being elected President.

As of yesterday, the count is 8. Eight Trump advance persons to the Tulsa Rally have come down with coronavirus.

In addition, some White House personnel were discovered to be afflicted 2 weeks ago.

Hope some day the experts will be able to tell us how many of the 6,200 attending the Tulsa Rally also became infected. Extremely few wearing masks. No social distancing.

Now Andrew Jackson. Demonstrators sought to topple a large statue of him in the park near the White House.

The demonstrators chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Andrew Jackson’s got to go.”

One hundred fifty to two hundred U.S. Park Police arrived. They swung batons and released pepper spray.

Jackson still stands.

The protesters wanted Jackson to come down because he was cruel to Native Americans and an enslaver.

The group had encamped on H Street. Seven or eight tents set up on the street itself. They were moved off the street.

The tented area is near St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Beside trying to topple Jackson, the demonstrators also desecrated St. John’s Episcopal Church which was nearby. The Church of the Presidents.

BHAZ was painted on 2 columns holding up the Church. BHAZ short for the Black Home Autonomous Zone. The group’s intent to do what CHOP has done in Settle.

Florida shooting for the skies with its coronavirus numbers. Up and up, not flattening.

The Mayors of he 7 major cities in Miami-Dade County now require masks to be worn by all persons in public. Inside or out.

Palm Beach County is planning a reopening. Intends that masks be worn in public. Whether voluntary or mandatory not yet decided nor has a date been set to begin.

Coronavirus traveling at different speeds in various areas of the U.S. Some states still in the first wave. Others in the second.

A major problem is moving from one state to another. Easily done. Crossing state borders commonplace. Ergo, the virus is frequently spread and respread easily.

It’s going to be a long hot summer and autumn will not be any better.

Coronavirus from another angle.

The U.S. has the most new cases of Covid-19 in the world. We’re NUMBER ONE. AMERICA FIRST…..We can do this! We are doing it!

Nothing to be proud of.

Florida and California battling it out for the most new cases. Both over 4,000 a day. Florida’s inept Governor DeSantis says California has more people. Makes it sound like he is disappointed Florida may end up second.

I told you he is not too bright.

Florida reopened certain areas too soon. Beaches especially. Masks not required. The word was they were for wimps and Biden voters. Social distancing? No way.

I was proud how Key West initially handled the coronavirus problem. Imposed rules, followed rules.

Unfortunately, some merchants won out in the end. They created a furor. Reopening was permitted. Tourists from the mainland made Duval alive again on weekends. Especially young visitors. No masks, no social distancing, hugging and kissing ok. The numbers are creeping up again.

Key West City Commissioners are trying to take the bull by the horns again. Hopefully soon enough. The 200 and 300 blocks of Duval will be closed to traffic weekend evenings. Such should make social distancing easy. Masks will be required everywhere, inside and out.

No decision yet how to punish violators.

The plan is flexible. The blocks will be expanded as needed. Each weekend new decisions will be made.

Not enough from my perspective. Arrest violators. A stiff fine or jail. People will then understand. If the violation occurs inside a bar or restaurant, arrest the owner and hit him with a stiff fine as they do in Greece.

Coronavirus is nothing to screw around with.

Housing prices are plunging across the U.S. The most since 2008.

Condos down the most. Forty one percent. Homes 24.8 percent.The average of homes and condos for the past year May to May down 29 percent.

April-May is a red hot selling season. Not this year.

The May to May percentages all down. The north east 29.9 percent, mid west 20.2 percent, south 25.1 percent, west 35.1 percent.

One problem. I do not see prices dropping in Key West. Still the highest ever.

I suspect the numbers stay high because of manipulation. No other way could they not be consistent with the national figures set forth.

I listen to local realtor talk. They insist the epidemic will not affect real estate market prices. I think they fool themselves.

This day a big one in 1960. Changed life for women and in so doing for men also.

Today the anniversary of the day when contraceptive pills were made available for purchase in the U.S.

Feminism grew. Women considered themselves equal to men. Sex without the danger of pregnancy was available to them. The women’s movement grew from that day forward.

Sex without danger of pregnancy the enabling factor.

A criticism of today’s protest movement. I am for equality. I am for everyone to have available the same advantages.

What I cannot understand and what I cannot agree with is punishing the memories of people who lived 100, 150 and 200 years ago.

Note that we live a certain way today. What is acceptable today was not a couple of hundred years ago. People lived differently back then. Different rules, standards and customs.

Today’s movement does not take that into account. It should. We are holding yesterday’s heroes to today’s standards. Wrong!

One exception. Civil War Confederates. Traitors. Can understand their not being honored. However as to all others, leave their statues and memories alone. They broke no rules as existed back in their times.

Join me tonight as I share my thoughts on blog talk radio. The show Tuesday Talk with Key West Lou. Nine my time. Some ranting and raving. Guaranteed you will enjoy the half hour. www.blogtalkradio.com/key-west-lou.

Enjoy your day!

REPUBLICAN IMMORALITY was originally published on Key West Lou

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