black suffrage что это
5 Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th Amendment—And Much More
Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images
Obtaining the vote was just one item on a long civil rights agenda.
When Congress ratified the 19th Amendment on August 18,1920, giving American women the right to vote, it reflected the culmination of generations’ worth of work by resolute suffragists of all races and backgrounds. Historically, attention has focused on the efforts of white movement leaders like Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But they worked alongside many lesser-known suffragists, such as Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee and Nina Otero-Warren, who made crucial contributions to the cause—while also battling racism and discrimination.
For their part, “Black suffragists came to the suffrage movement from a different perspective,” said Earnestine Jenkins, who teaches Black history and culture at the University of Memphis. Their movement, she says, grew out of the broader struggle for basic human and civil rights during the oppressive Jim Crow era.
But while many 19th-century women’s rights advocates got their political start in the anti-slavery movement, not all were keen on seeing Black men leapfrog women for voting rights with the 15th Amendment. Viewing the issues competitively, some leading white suffragists aggressively sidelined Black women—and their broader civil rights issues, like segregation and racial violence—from the movement. One strategy? Using their platforms to perpetuate stereotypes that women of color were uneducated or promiscuous.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, circa 1898.
Library of Congress
At a time in America when the majority of Black people were enslaved and women were rarely encouraged to have political opinions—much less share them in public—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper became a genuine celebrity as an orator. Second only to abolitionist Frederick Douglass in terms of prominent African American writers of her era, the poet, essayist and novelist frequently went on speaking tours to discuss slavery, civil rights and suffrage—and donated many of the proceeds from her books to the Underground Railroad.
Born in 1825 in Baltimore to free Black parents, Harper received a rigorous education at the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, founded by her uncle Rev. William Watkins, an abolitionist and educator. As a teenager, she began sending her poems—which explored abolition, enslavement and her Christian faith—to local African American newspapers and published her first poetry collection “Autumn Leaves” around 1845. Decades later, her novel, Iola Leroy, one of the first to be published by a Black woman in the U.S., told the story of a mixed-race woman raised as white, then sold into slavery—addressing themes of race, gender and class.
Harper moved North in 1850 to teach, during which time she lived in a home that served as an Underground Railroad station. Hearing the stories of escaped slaves cemented her activism, along with the passage of an 1854 law that forced free Blacks who entered her home state of Maryland from the North into slavery. Unable to return home, she channeled her thoughts into activist writing and speaking.
When it came to the cause of women’s suffrage, Harper was convinced it would not be achieved unless Black and white women worked together. But while Harper initially worked with leaders like Stanton and Anthony, “she was also one of the first women to call them out in terms of their racism,” notes Jenkins. Harper’s most famous confrontation came when she spoke at the 1866 National Women’s Rights Convention. “You white women speak here of rights,” Harper told the crowd, calling them out for their lack of female solidarity across racial divides. “I speak of wrongs.”
Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823–1893)
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
Library and Archives, Canada
Mary Ann Shadd Cary, whose parents used her childhood home as a refuge for fugitive slaves, became the first black woman in North America to publish a newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, in which she fearlessly advocated for abolition. After helping recruit Black soldiers for the Civil War and founding a school for the children of freed slaves, she taught school by day while attending law school at night, becoming one of the first Black female law graduates in the United States in 1883. When the suffrage movement gained steam in the 1870s, after the 15th Amendment granted the vote to Black men, she became an outspoken activist for women’s rights, including the right to cast a ballot.
suffrage
Смотреть что такое «suffrage» в других словарях:
suffrage — Suffrage … Thresor de la langue françoyse
suffrage — [ syfraʒ ] n. m. • 1355; suffrages d oraison « prières » 1289; lat. suffragium « tesson avec lequel on votait », de frangere « briser » 1 ♦ Acte par lequel on déclare sa volonté, son opinion (favorable), dans un choix, une délibération, une… … Encyclopédie Universelle
suffrage — suf·frage / sə frij/ n [Latin suffragium vote, political support, from suffragari to support with one s vote] 1: a vote in deciding a controverted question or the choice of a person for an office or trust no State. shall be deprived of its equal … Law dictionary
suffrage — n Suffrage, franchise, vote, ballot mean the right, privilege, or power of expressing one s choice or wish (as in an election or in the determination of policy). Suffrage is the usual term when the emphasis is upon the extent to which this… … New Dictionary of Synonyms
Suffrage — Suf frage, n. [F., fr. L. suffragium; perhaps originally, a broken piece, a potsherd, used in voting, and fr. sub under + the root of frangere to break. See
suffrage — Suffrage. s. m. Declaration qu on fait de son sentiment, de sa volonté, & qu on donne, soit de vive voix, soit par escrit ou autrement, dans l occasion d une eslection, d une deliberation. Je luy ay donné mon suffrage. il a eu tous les suffrages … Dictionnaire de l’Académie française
suffrage — late 14c., prayers or pleas on behalf of another, from O.Fr. suffrage (13c.), from M.L. suffragium, from L. suffragium support, vote, right of voting, from suffragari lend support, vote for someone, from sub under (see SUB (Cf. sub )) + fragor… … Etymology dictionary
Suffrage — Suf frage, v. t. To vote for; to elect. [Obs.] Milton. [1913 Webster] … The Collaborative International Dictionary of English
suffrage — ► NOUN ▪ the right to vote in political elections. ORIGIN originally in the sense «intercessory prayers», also «assistance»: from Latin suffragium … English terms dictionary
Black suffrage
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Black suffrage refers to black people’s right to vote and has long been an issue in countries established under conditions of black minorities.
Contents
United States [ edit ]
Suffrage in the United States has had many advances and setbacks. Prior to the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution some free Black men in the United States were given the right to vote, however, this right was often abridged, or taken away. Following Emancipation, Black people were theoretically equal before the law, including theoretical suffrage for Black women from 1920. However, in reality, most Black men and women were effectively barred from voting from around 1870 until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
When the United States Constitution was ratified (1789), a very small number of free blacks were among the voting citizens (male property owners) in some states. [1] Most black men in the United States did not gain the right to vote until after the American Civil War. In 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified to prohibit states from denying a male citizen the right to vote based on “race, color or previous condition of servitude.» However, ironically, this was the same period in which intense backlash against Black suffrage and regular voting succeeded in implementing almost universal «Jim Crow» regulations that had the effect of denying the vote to the overwhelming majority of Blacks, both South and North.
«Black suffrage» in the United States in the aftermath of the American Civil War explicitly referred to the voting rights of only black men. All women still had many hurdles to face before obtaining this right.
The passage of the 19th Amendment, which was ratified by the United States Congress on August 18 and certified as law on August 26, 1920 technically granted women the right to vote. However, the 19th Amendment did not initially extend to most women of African American, Asian American, Hispanic American and American indian heritage because of widespread voter suppression enacted against women of color. It was only after the Voting Rights Act was passed nearly a half century later, on August 6, 1965, that black women could vote.
Australia [ edit ]
The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 restricted the right of Aboriginal Australians to vote in Australian federal elections. This Act was changed in 1962, when the Commonwealth Electoral Act was amended. [2]
How the Suffrage Movement Betrayed Black Women
Susan B. Anthony during a portrait session circa 1891. Credit. Library of Congress
Mr. Staples is a member of the editorial board.
The suffragist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony seized control of the feminist narrative of the 19th century. Their influential history of the movement still governs popular understanding of the struggle for women’s rights and will no doubt serve as a touchstone for commemorations that will unfold across the United States around the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020.
Historians who are not inclined to hero worship — including Elsa Barkley Brown, Lori Ginzberg and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn — have recently provided an unsparing portrait of this once-neglected period. Stripped of her halo, Stanton, the campaign’s principal philosopher, is exposed as a classic liberal racist who embraced fairness in the abstract while publicly enunciating bigoted views of African-American men, whom she characterized as “Sambos” and incipient rapists in the period just after the war. The suffrage struggle itself took on a similar flavor, acquiescing to white supremacy — and selling out the interests of African-American women — when it became politically expedient to do so. This betrayal of trust opened a rift between black and white feminists that persists to this day.
This toxic legacy looms especially large as cities, including New York, prepare monuments and educational programs to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, which barred the states from denying voting rights based on gender. Black feminists in particular are eager to see if these remembrances own up to the real history of the fight for the vote — and whether black suffragists appear in them.
It became clear after the Civil War that black and white women had different views of why the right to vote was essential. White women were seeking the vote as a symbol of parity with their husbands and brothers. Black women, most of whom lived in the South, were seeking the ballot for themselves and their men, as a means of empowering black communities besieged by the reign of racial terror that erupted after Emancipation.
The tension escalated in the run-up to the 15th Amendment, a provision that ostensibly barred the states from denying Negro men the right to vote. Reasonable people could, of course, disagree on the merits of who should first be given the vote — women or black men. Stanton, instead, embarked on a Klan-like tirade against the amendment. She warned that white woman would be degraded if Negro men preceded them into the franchise. Admiring historians have dismissed this as an unfortunate interlude in an exemplary life. By contrast, the historian Lori Ginzberg argues persuasively that racism and elitism were enduring features of the great suffragist’s makeup and philosophy.
Similarly, the historian Faye Dudden wrote that Stanton “dipped her pen into a tincture of white racism and sketched a reference to a nightmarish figure, the black rapist,” and lashed out from the pages of the suffragist paper that she and Anthony published. Her message — that passage of the 15th Amendment would mean only degradation for women at the hands of Negro men — must have cheered the Ku Klux Klan as it terrorized the black South.
Douglass was clearly wounded by what he described as the “employment of certain names, such as ‘Sambo,’ and the gardener, and the bootblack … and all the r est,” but gracefully declined to answer insult with insult. Instead, he summarized in dramatic fashion the differences between the interests of black and white suffragist s — and the case for federal protection of black voters.
Douglass cut to the central fallacy of the white suffragist push — that African-American women could magically separate their blackness from their femaleness.
The 15th Amendment was, of course, ratified. Women would wait another 50 years for the 19th. Racism intensified among suffragists as they neared their goals. African-American luminaries like the noted anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and the civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell became more deeply and publicly engaged.
As in other instances, suffragists outside the South used the racism in the Jim Crow states as an excuse for their discriminatory treatment of their black suffragist sisters. Black women’s suffrage clubs that sought formal affiliation with the national white suffrage movement were discouraged from doing so on the grounds that admitting them might anger white Southerners. It has since become clear that this was a rus e Northern whites used to obscure their own discriminatory policies.
Historians are rightly warning groups involved in suffrage commemorations not to overstate the significance of the 19th Amendment. It covered the needs of middle-class white women quite nicely. But it meant very little to black women in the South, where most lived at the time and where elect ion officials were well practiced in the art of obstructing black access to the ballot box. As African-American women streamed in to register, Southern officials merely stepped up the level of fraud and intimidation.
The recent uproar over the monuments to white supremacy that dominate public spaces in the South has put civic groups on notice that memorials often convey pernicious messages and perpetuate historical wrongs. Organizers need to keep that in mind as they commemorate a movement in which racism clearly played a central role.