The Racism Among the Suffragists

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/letters/suffragists-women-racism.html

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To the Editor:

Re “When the Suffrage Movement Sold Out” (Sunday Review, Feb. 3):

I do not dispute the historical facts of Brent Staples’s essay, but I do question his outrage. Women, like men, are caught up in the politics of their time. Yes, many women’s rights advocates held views contrary to our political opinions today, but that does not diminish the work they did to move the expansion of civil rights to include women.

So when Mr. Staples points out the failure of 19th-century feminists to embrace black women’s suffrage, he is holding those women to a contemporary standard. And he expected these women to behave better than men of the time. Why?

True equality means not just reaching the heights of moral or political power, but also the freedom to make mistakes without shaming.

We are human beings and we strive and fail as other human beings do. But we get up, learn from our mistakes, embrace our sisters of all colors and fight again. That is the legacy of the suffrage movement.

Georgellen BurnettSanta Fe, N.M.The writer is a women’s historian.

To the Editor:

Brent Staples’s sweeping condemnation of our nation’s betrayal of African-American women who contributed so much to the women’s movement comes at a fortuitous time for New York City. As reported earlier this year, plans are close to final for the installation of a statue in Central Park that would be the first ever in the park to depict a nonfictional female.

The monument will show Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony perched high above while a scroll of the names of other women, many of them women of color, unfolds beneath them. We cannot let this monument to prejudice and discrimination and historical inaccuracy go forward. It’s time to right the wrong, to make the invisible contributions of black women visible.

Camilla JenkinsNew York

To the Editor:

Brent Staples’s thoughtful indictment of the failure of white leaders of the women’s suffrage movement to acknowledge the role that African-American women played in that campaign might have noted three incidents that help explain the motivation for that failure.

In 1895 Susan B. Anthony, the most important leader of the movement, asked her onetime friend, Frederick Douglass, not to attend a women’s suffrage meeting in Atlanta because white women there might be offended.

In 1899 Anthony successfully opposed an effort to have the National American Woman Suffrage Association go on record as favoring an end to racial segregation on interstate trains because white women in the South might withdraw from the movement.

In 1884 Anthony bullied her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton into not mailing a letter to a newspaper publicly congratulating Douglass on his marriage to Helen Pitts, a white woman. Anthony told Stanton the marriage of a black man to a white woman “has no place on our platform.”

Anthony was afraid that any open support of black rights would weaken the women’s rights movement.

Martin NaparsteckRochester The writer is the author of “The Trial of Susan B. Anthony.”