February 15, 1820 – March 13, 1906

Raised with six siblings, Susan B. Anthony was born in North Adams, MA before moving to Rochester in 1845 via the Erie Canal. Steeped in Quaker tradition which held equality for men and women in meeting, Susan found herself among kinship with others engaged in reform activities that were deeply entrenched in the region. Susan did not attend the women’s rights conventions in Seneca Falls and Rochester in 1848. She was teaching in nearby Canajoharie and lecturing against alcohol use at the time.

Susan did become engaged in abolition and suffrage activities with other notable individuals, including Frederick Douglass whom she met in 1849. She joined the suffrage movement in 1851 when she was introduced to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention. The two became lifelong friends and reform partners for more than 50 years. 

Susan founded a newspaper, The Reporter in 1868, which held the slogan “Men, their rights and nothing more. Women, their rights and nothing less.” The passage of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution offered an opportunity to test the limits of the rule: Susan believed the amendments, giving political rights to all citizens, applied to women as well as men. To test  this  theory, in 1872, she and 15 other women registered and voted in the United States presidential election. Her arrest and trial led to a guilty conviction for which she never paid the fine. After a trip to Baltimore and Washington, DC where she delivered her “Failure Is Impossible” speech to the young women carrying on her work, Susan returned to Rochester ill and died on March 13, 1906, at the age of 86.

Susan B. Anthony’s life work was conducted from her home and headquarters on Madison Street in Rochester, NY. She is buried just a few miles away, in Mt. Hope Cemetery.

July 10, 1875 - May 18, 1955

Descended from enslaved persons, educator-activist Mary McLeod Bethune dedicated her life to empowerment of men and women and service to her community and nation. In 1904, she established a physical school (Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls) that saw arts as a means of empowering young black women. That institution grew and, over many iterations, became Bethune-Cookman University, a co-educational academic institution of renown for its programs in teaching and music performance, among other disciplines. Beyond her roles at the university, including its presidency, Mary championed women’s reform as a member of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), where she served as Florida Chapter president from 1917-1925, seeing the fruits of her labor win the ease of the ballot for some women in 1920. Even so, voter suppression in the form of poll taxes and literacy tests moved Mary to another level of action. She rode a bicycle door-to-door raising money to pay the poll tax and conducted literacy classes to teach voting-age citizens how to read and strategies to pass the literacy tests.

Afterward, Mary continued her efforts to empower black women by serving in leadership roles for regional Colored Women’s Clubs and eventually took the helm of the NACW in 1924, which also positioned her to serve in leadership roles for Presidents Coolidge, Hoover, and Roosevelt. For instance, from 1936 until its discontinuation in 1943, she led the National Youth Administration, a New Deal initiative that aimed to provide opportunities for young men and women between the ages of 16-25. Mary never stopped thinking of ways that her access to the executive office could serve others. She formed a coalition (the Federal Council of Negro Affairs) which became known as the “Black Cabinet” and helped to establish the United Negro College Fund in 1944, an empowerment organization that helps to support individuals in their educational journeys. Acknowledging the ways in which democracy remained a dream for 12 million black Americans were “rising out of the darkness of slavery into the light of freedom,” Mary’s radio address on November 23, 1939 encouraged her community, stating, “Yes, we have fought for America with all her imperfections, not so much for what she is, but for what we know she can be.”

Mary McLeod Bethune’s birthplace is commemorated by a historical marker in Mayesville, SC. She died on May 18, 1955, following a heart attack, in Daytona Beach, FL.

January 9, 1859 – March 9, 1947

The disenfranchisement of women made an impression on Carrie Clinton when she was just a teenager. On Election Day in 1872—the same year that Susan B. Anthony and others courageously cast their ballots illegally—Carrie witnessed her father go off to vote, without her mother. She questioned why this was the case and, upon learning that women were not permitted to vote, she further sought to question inequities between men and women. Carrie graduated as the sole woman in the class of 1880 at what is now Iowa State University and became involved, in 1887, in the statewide suffrage movement there before taking her efforts elsewhere, eventually landing on the national stage. She worked at suffrage campaigns in South Dakota and Colorado in the early 1890s and witnessed first-hand the organizational and logistical challenges. By 1895, she put forth a plan at the national convention to re-structure and, in turn, to invigorate and embolden the movement through the work of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). She traveled across the United States as one of the leading forces for women’s suffrage.

Carrie rose to leadership in NAWSA, she served as president from 1900-1904 (during which she sought to expand suffrage worldwide by helping to create the International Woman Suffrage Alliance) and again from 1915 to 1920. During this second stint, she adopted a “Winning Plan” to pursue campaigns at the state and national levels simultaneously. The goal was to coordinate and convince rival suffrage organizations to band together throughout a single state to collect signatures on pro-suffrage petitions, organize marches, and directly lobby their representatives at the State level and in the Senate.

Building upon this statewide tide, by 1918 President Wilson backed the movement. Still strategizing for a unified front, Carrie and others from NAWSA established the League of Women Voters on February 14, 1920 in Chicago, as an effort support, encourage, and mobilize the 20 million women carry out their new responsibilities as voters. The 19^th Amendment was passed by the House and Senate of the US Congress and ratified in Tennessee and officially made law on August 26, 1920.

Known for her organizational skill and energy, Carrie was known also for her elocution. She penned an open letter to the members of Congress that she delivered as a stump speech on several occasions in late 1917 and 1918. In it, she argued for the inevitability of suffrage and posited three reasons as such, relating to theory, practice, and leadership of the United States. In her address (which, incidentally, she only wrote but did not deliver to Congress), she sought support by acknowledging how the past informs present action and, in turn, would lead to support and honor of the US, even in this time of war: “The framers of the Constitution gave unquestioned authority to Congress to act upon women suffrage. Why not use that authority and use it now to do the big, noble, just thing of catching pace with other nations on this question of democracy? The world and posterity will honor you for it.”

In addition to her commitment to suffrage, following the passage of the 19^th Amendment, Carrie was active in anti-war causes until her death in 1947.
 

Born in Ripon, WI, Carrie moved at age seven to Iowa. She died of a heart attack on March 9, 1947, and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, NY.

August 10, 1858 – February 27, 1964

Born the daughter of her enslaved mother Hanna Stanley and Hanna's owner, George Washington Haywood, Anna Julia Haywood sought literacy and education from a young age. Recounting in her autobiography “The Third Step,” Anna explained that her position as a nursemaid to a prominent lawyer, Charles Busbee, surrounded her with books and knowledge that would fuel her work as an advocate for education for black men and women, the status of black women, and anti-racism. She attended St. Augustine Normal and Collegiate Institute (now St. Augustine College), became a student teacher at the young age of 11, wife at 19, and widow by age 21. Over these years, she protested the exclusion of women from higher education and rose through the ranks of teaching before enrolling as a student at Oberlin College where she earned a BA in 1884 and an MA in 1887. She then joined the faculty of the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth in Washington, DC, where she taught math and science. She became principal in 1902 and served in that role until 1906 and again from 1911-30.

While teaching in DC, Anna published a compendium of essays and lectures in 1892 titled “A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South.” In it, she articulates the responsibility of black women who were essential to uplifting the entire black race, conjoining the burden of responsibility with a vision of empowerment to support women’s rights, racial progress, and the dismantling segregation, which she witnessed first-hand as a teacher and administrator. Drawing attention to the struggles black women faced due to overlapping racism and sexism (long before the term “intersectionality” had been coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, in the 1980s), Anna made the case for education of black women, specifically citing them as critical to “the regeneration and progress” of her race (p. 21). She also argued that women’s suffrage was deserved (p. 123) and its circumstance would result in “the supremacy of moral forces of reason and justice” (p. 126). The book garnered national attention, for which Anna attended conferences and gave speeches on subjects of her reform efforts focused on abolition, women’s rights, and education.

In addition to working to advance black educational opportunities, Anna also established and co-founded several organizations to promote black civil rights causes. She served on the executive committee of the Pan-African Conference, for whom she offered a speech in London in 1900, on the topic of “The Negro Problem in America.” To support the influx of black children from the South as part of the “Great Migration,” Anna created branches of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in the DC area for black children who were denied membership to the organization. 

As president of Frelinghuysen University, a consortium of schools named after a New Jersey Senator aimed at providing secondary and college prep education to those in the DC area who lacked access to higher education, Anna supported the school through her leadership and financial assets over those years. Courses and programs for this mobile evening school/adult education program were run in private homes and businesses, eventually being offered in Anna’s home during her presidency of the institution (1930-41). The institution also offered university-level curriculum.

Nearly forty years after earning her graduate degree from Oberlin, Anna earned a Ph.D. in 1925 from University of Paris-Sorbonne with her dissertation “The Attitude of France on the Question of Slavery Between 1789 and 1848.” She was the 4^th black woman in all of the United States to have earned a Ph.D. by this date—a testament to her ambition as well as her consummate belief in empowerment through reading, learning, and pursuit of knowledge. As a scholar, educator, author, and activist, Anna Cooper demonstrates the ripple effects of women’s education and reform in the fight for suffrage.

Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was born in Raleigh, NC in 1858. She studied at Oberlin College in Ohio, where she earned Bachelor and Master’s degrees, before settling in Washington, DC, where she died in 1964. She is buried in City Cemetery in Raleigh.

November 16, 1862 - December 19, 1957

Born to free parents Mifflin Wistar Gibbs and Maria Alexander, who had moved north to escape the discriminatory practices of the California Gold Rush before settling east in Oberlin, Ohio, Ida Alexander Gibbs grew up surrounded by music. She studies in the Oberlin Conservator from 1872-76 before returning to Oberlin for her undergraduate degree. She earned her BA and MA in English from Oberlin in 1884 and 1892, respectively. After short stints in Alabama and Florida, Ida moved to Washington, DC, in 1895 to take a teaching position at the same institution where Anna Cooper was employed. She left education in 1904 not because of lack of ambition or interest but because married women were unable to teach in the public school system in DC.

For the following two decades, Ida’s service shifted to civil rights and diplomacy. To support the influx of black children from the South as part of the “Great Migration,” Ida helped to create Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) centers in the DC area. She also contributed to the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, and the Red Cross. She lived in France for 20 years as the wife of an American consul and assisted him with diplomatic assignments in Liberia, France, Madagascar, and Guadeloupe, before returning to Washington, DC.

Ida used her voice to reach members of teacher associations and social organizations that supported peace, human justice, civil rights, and women’s suffrage. Like Anna and Mary Terrell, Ida Hunt was part of an emergent generation of women Pan-African intellectuals who published essays on black history and became involved in international organizations, such as the Pan-African Congress. Ida which she attended the first and second meetings (in 1919 and 1921) which were held in Paris. She traveled to London to deliver her paper entitled “The Coloured Races and the League of Nations” (the full contents of which do not survive) for the 3^rd convention in 1923. Ida also raised funds for the Washington Conservatory of Music, founded for young blacks by her sister, Hattie Gibbs Marshall, in DC.

A scholar, educator, and political agent, Ida Gibbs Hunt built a legacy fusing together her advocacy for black education, civil rights, and woman's suffrage.

Ida Alexander Gibbs was born in Victoria, British Columbia (Canada) in 1862. She moved, at a young age, to Oberlin, OH, where she undertook post-secondary education. She died in Washington, DC on December 19, 1957.

October 24, 1830 – May 19, 1917

Lawyer, politician, and equal pay advocate, Belva Anne Bennett Lockwood held a strong commitment to women’s equal education as a means of supporting herself and her daughter. She attended Genesee Wesleyan Seminary to learn foundational studies to prepare her for undertaking the study of law, which she attempted twice. After being refused admission to Columbian Law School, on the general basis that women students would distract the men students, Belva applied, and was accepted, to the National University School of Law (now George Washington University Law School). She completed her coursework in May 1873, although she did not receive her diploma because women were not permitted to earn the degree, even after the completion of coursework. Finding this egregious, she made an appeal on September 3, to President Ulysses Grant, who served as president ex officio of the school. Using her skills of legal questioning, as well as admonition, Belva asserted her right to the diploma, writing: “I desire to say to you that I have passed through the curriculum of study in this school, and am entitled to, and demand, my diploma.” A week after sending the letter, she received her diploma.

The next step was to pass the District bar, where Belva won admission to practice before the Federal Court of Claims. Throughout her legal practice in the short term, and long, Belva established a name for herself by specializing in wage-related claims, including back-pay, retirement, and pensions. In 1879, she became the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court. Notable instance in cases include the 1906 representation of the Eastern and Emigrant Cherokees’ claim against the federal government resulting from a 1835 treaty for relocation. The result was an affirmation of the Court of Claims ruling, thereby awarding more than $1M to the Cherokee.  

Beyond the bench, Belva continued to argue the cause of equal rights for women, especially suffrage. Even without this right herself, Belva became engaged in politics. As the candidate of the of the National Equal Rights Party, Belva Lockwood was the second woman to run for President of the United States in 1884, and again in 1888. Her platform supported equal opportunity, uniform marriage and divorce laws among the states, and temperance, among other causes.

By her actions and encouragement to women to pursue legal careers, Belva helped to open the legal profession to women. Beyond this, she worked to secure woman suffrage, writing essays about suffrage and the related needs for property law reforms and equal pay for equal work. Her pieces appeared in the 1880s and 1890s in “Harper’s Weekly” and “Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine” among other magazines. Her service extended beyond the National American Woman Suffrage Association to include her political affiliation with the NERP and the National Women’s Press Association.

Belva was also engaged in peace work and served as a delegate to the International Peace Congresses in London, Milan, and other cities. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in law from Syracuse University in 1908.

Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood was born in 1830 in Royalton, NY and spent her early training and career in western New York before settling in Washington, DC, where she died on May 19, 1917. She is buried in the Congressional Cemetery in DC.

June 11, 1880 – May 18, 1973

The eldest daughter of a rancher and a schoolteacher, politician Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to the US Congress and quipped when anyone commented on this that while she may be the first “I won’t be the last.”

Jeannette graduated from Montana State University (now the University of Montana) in 1902 and subsequently embarked on a brief career in social work—undertaking courses at the New York School of Philanthropy and then serving as a social worker in Washington state, where she joined the women’s suffrage movement. Jeannette lobbied for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and through these efforts helped Montana women gain the vote in 1914.

She began service in the House of Representatives  in 1916 for her home state of Montana. Later that year, on April 26, she, Mary Ritter Beard, and Dudley Field Malone speak before the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage.

Jeannette's political service was impacted by her pacifist views. As Congress met on the evening of April 2, 1917 to hear President Woodrow Wilson ask for a declaration of war against Germany. Even though the declaration was supported, her refusal to vote for war caused the national suffrage movement to distance itself from her, acknowledging that she represented one state, Montana, not the views of the entire nation of suffragists. Her arguments against war were fed by the nonviolent protest work of Gandhi. Later, she protested the Vietnam War, leading a protest march in Washington in 1968 that came to be known as the Jeannette Rankin Brigade.

Jeannette served the trenches of a different sort: the political fight for women’s suffrage whereby she advocated for the creation of the Committee on Woman Suffrage and, once formed, served on it. In calling for an amendment to support women’s suffrage, on January 10, 1918,  Jeannette challenged her peers by opening the House debate on the suffrage amendment by boldly acknowledging the country’s hardships during war. She then went on to point out the work women had done in various parts of society, pointing to the role of women past and future. She questioned if it were up to women, only, to fight in the struggle for democracy, concluding with a key question: “How shall we explain to them the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted for war to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?” While the resolution narrowly passed the House, it did not pass the Senate.

After a two-year term, Jeannette was defeated in her bid for re-election. She went on to serve her community by working to support pacifist efforts, by attending international conferences, such as the Women’s International Conference for Permanent Peace (1919, Switzerland). After purchasing property in Georgia, she founded the Georgia Peace Society. The looming political crisis brought her back to politics. She returned to Montana and was elected to her second term —separated from her first by two decades and two wars (1917-1919; 1941-1943) When Congress was called to session by President Roosevelt to consider the declaration of War in 1941, following the attack by the Japanese of Pearl Harbor, Jeannette Rankin cast the sole opposing vote.

Twice elected to Congress to represent her home state of Monata, Jeannette Pickering Rankin was born in 1880 and died in Carmel, CA in 1973. She is buried in Missoula Cemetery.

November 12, 1815 - October 26, 1902

Author, orator, and among the chief architects of the women’s suffrage movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in Johnston, NY to Margaret Livingston and Daniel Cady, a lawyer and state assemblyman. She was educated at the academy in her hometown before moving to the Troy Female Seminary, established by Emma Willard. Her life’s work may be summarized by a statement she made in a letter in 1868: “Our 'pathway' is straight to the ballot box with no variableness nor shadow of turning.”

Elizabeth married Henry Stanton, an abolitionist lecturer, in 1840, and opened her home to leading abolitionists of the day, thereby becoming engaged in the anti-slavery movement. She met Lucretia Mott while in London that same year. By the end of that decade, the two women had joined forces organize the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Emboldened by political savvy as well as oratory and organizational skills that served many causes—property rights for married women, women suffrage, and abolition—Elizabeth authored “The Declaration of Sentiments” which re-visioned the Declaration of Independence by inserting “woman” or “women” throughout the document. Shortly thereafter, in 1851, she met Susan B. Anthony, with whom she had a life-long writing collaboration and administrative partnership to champion the women’s movement.

Elizabeth was among the early woman suffrage advocates who worked alongside abolitionists within the American Equal Rights Association to secure universal suffrage for all citizens. An advocate of the 13^th Amendment to the US Constitution (Emancipation), Elizabeth ultimately opposed the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, which gave voting rights to black men but did not extend the vote to women. Elizabeth’s position, which was shared by other white suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony, splintered the movement, thus prompting the formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869. Elizabeth edited and wrote for NWSA’s journal The Revolution, which was published in Susan’s home in Rochester, NY. The two white women’s suffrage groups united in 1890 as the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Elizabeth was elected president of the organization and served until 1892 before turning the reigns over to Susan, who served as the highest officer from 1892-1900. The office was assumed by Carrie Chapman Catt (1900-1904; 1915-20).

Recognizing the importance of documenting the efforts that built what became a movement, she  produced the first three volumes of a six volume History of Woman Suffrage in collaboration with Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1881-1922). One of the volumes is shown in the portrait of Elizabeth in this exhibit.

At the start of the 20^th century, the woman suffrage movement underwent a series of upheavals, including leadership vacuum following Elizabeth’s death in 1902 and Susan B. Anthony’s in 1906. As a new generation of suffragists assumed leadership, the movement re-organized again before ultimately securing the right to vote.

Engaged in social and political reform activism her life long, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in Johnston, NY in 1815. She died in New York, NY in 1902 and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

August 13, 1818 – October 18, 1893

Born West Brookfield, MA, Lucy Stone was born into a trade and farming family and faced obstacles to education, not the least of which was financial. She became a teacher and used her wages to begin courses at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (in 1839) and Wesleyan Academy before matriculating to Oberlin College. While there, she met Antoinette Brown, who became a lifelong friend. Together, they graduated in 1847, although Antoinette would continue on to complete the theological seminary in 1850. They were further connected by marriage. Lucy married Henry Blackwell in 1855, and Antoinette married his brother Samuel in 1856.

Lucy supported abolition and women’s suffrage and did so through her route as a public speaker, first at church (1847) and then as an lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (1848). Lucy helped to organize the first national women’s rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850. Touring in Cincinnati, in 1853, she met activist Henry Browne Blackwell, whom she married in 1855. When they married, she defied tradition by retaining her birth name. Together they composed a denunciation of marriage laws, arguing “that marriage should be an equal and permanent partnership, and so recognized by law; that until it is so recognized, married partners should provide against the radical injustice of present laws, by every means in their power.”

A longtime abolitionist and suffragist, Lucy became a founder of the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 and supported the 15th Amendment, which granted black men the right to vote. Following the ensuing division in the ranks of women’s rights work, in 1869, she, her husband, and friend Antoinette Brown Blackwell, worked alongside others to establish the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). In contrast to the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), AWSA was an organization that supported black suffrage and sought enfranchisement on a state-by-state measure. They and advocated a plan to win voting rights by changing state constitutions, one by one.

While the amendment was passed in 1870, the two competing national suffrage organizations splintered even further, driving away support from black women. This rift lasted over decades, at which time, in 1890 Lucy’s daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, led negotiations to merge the two groups.

Though she did not live to see the passage of the 19^th Amendment, Lucy’s impact may be measured through her organizational efforts, orations, and legacy to suffrage journalism. In 1870, she and her husband founded and promoted the “Woman’s Journal,” a women’s rights periodical based in Boston and produced as an 8-page weekly periodical. In circulation from 1870-1931, “Woman’s Journal” served as the official publication of at least one faction of the movement, and the joint organization NAWSA, from 1890 on. Its impact was so significant that Carrie Chapman Catt, writing in another national suffrage journal paid tribute calling it “…the great work in propagandist journalism initiated by Henry B. Blackwell and Lucy Stone….Pioneers in the field….There can be no overestimating the value to the suffrage cause of the ‘Woman’s Journal” in its long and vivid career. It has gone before and it has followed after; it has pointed the way and closed the gaps; it has been history-maker and history-recorder for the suffrage cause. The suffrage success of to-day is not conceivable without the ‘Woman’s Journal’s’ part in it.”

Lucy Stone was born in a suburb of Worcester, MA in 1818. She died in Boston in 1893 and is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plan, MA.

September 23, 1863 – July 24, 1954

Born to formerly enslaved parents in Memphis, TN during the year of Emancipation Proclamation, Mary Church Terrell left the South at a young age. She relocated to southern Ohio to enroll in elementary and secondary education at Antioch College in Yellow Springs from 1870-1874. She then traveled to the northern part of the state to undertake continued education and college at Oberlin. Mary—like Anna Julia Cooper and Ida Gibbs Hunt who are discussed in this exhibit as well—graduated from Oberlin College at a time when fewer than 50 black women across the country had earned a baccalaureate degree. Mary continued her studies to earn a graduate degree in Education in 1888.

Mary began her teaching career at Wilberforce University, the nation’s first HBCU in southern Ohio. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Washington, DC where she began teaching at the same institution where Anna Julia Cooper and Ida Gibbs Hunt were employed.

Having witnessed segregation in both public education and public accommodations, and an electoral process that did not permit women to vote, Mary used her education as a tool to fight the racism and sexism. In addition to teaching, Mary penned a number of articles to promote the black women’s clubs  using the pen name “Euphemia Kirk.” Under this name, her work appeared in a number of publications across the US.

She met Frederick Douglass in 1881, a friendship which encouraged her to use stay engaged in the work, even after her 1891 marriage to Robert Terrell, a lawyer who became the first black municipal court judge in Washington, DC.

In 1896, Mary was among the founding members of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and served as its first president. She was re-elected in 1897 and 1899, before assuming the role of honorary president for life in 1901. In her work with black women’s clubs, Mary worked with others to create avenues for care and education of black children, before such services were available for black through the Washington, DC school system. In 1904, Mary was invited to speak at the Berlin International Congress of Women. Aware that English would not be the dominant language and determined to make a good impression, as the sole black woman at the conference, Mary gave her speech, “The Progress and Problems of Colored Women” in English, French, and German. She returned to speak in Europe in 1919 when she attended the International League for Peace and Freedom’s meeting in Zurich.

Mary helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as a civil rights organization created to fight the ongoing violence against black people in the US in 1909. Mary also played a role in coordinating young black women’s efforts by helping to establish Delta Sigma Theta Sorority in 1913 at Howard University. Women from the sorority participated in the historic 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C.

Published in 1940, Mary’s autobiography “A Colored Woman in a White World,” provided a lens by which to understand her experiences. It also offered hope, as Mary wrote: “I have recorded what I have been able to accomplish in spite of the obstacles which I have had to surmount. I have done this, not because I want to tell the world how smart I am, but because both a sense of justice and a regard for truth prompt me to show what a colored women can achieve in spite of the difficulties by which race prejudice blocks her path if she fits herself to do a certain thing, works with all her might and main to do it and is given a chance.”

For her contributions to each university community, Mary received an honorary degree from her alma mater, Oberlin College, and from Wilberforce University and Howard University.

Mary Church Terrell was born September 23, 1863 in Memphis, TN and died July 24, 1954 in Annapolis, MD. She is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Prince George’s County, MD

1797 – November 26, 1883

Aid to the Union Army during the Civil War, social reformer, and humanitarian, Sojourner Truth was born enslaved in 1797 was secured freedom in 1827 by the New York Gradual Abolition Act. She was employed as a domestic before dedicating her life to fulfilling her calling from God to travel (to sojourn) and preach His word and to speak against slavery, beginning in 1843. Though illiterate, Truth had memorized portions of the Bible as a means of fulfilling her calling, and delivered speeches with eloquence and passion in Dutch, her first language which left its indelible imprint the reminder of her life.

Sojourner traveled thousands of miles to her cause, powerfully speaking and singing at meetings all over the Northeast and Midwest, often with fellow abolitionist Frederick Douglass. In 1850, she published an account of her life, “Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828.” In it, she recounts her journey from slavery to freedom. Her life story shows incremental growth of her status and influence by accretion, emphasizing the power of faith, family, friends, and fellowship.

At the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, OH in 1851, Truth proclaimed that “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right-side up again.” It was here, too, that she gave her most famous speech, entitled, “Ain't I a Woman?” which was adopted from the abolitionist image of a kneeling enslaved woman who pleads, “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” Though the speech was printed after the fact, with varying degrees of accuracy depending upon the version, it is undisputed that her commentary offered a critique of all who saw women and blacks as inferior.

Sojourner moved to Battle Creek, MI in 1857. The next decade saw her work from her home base during the Civil War, supplying Union soldiers with resources and to recruit black soldiers for the Union Army. After the Emancipation Proclamation, she also worked at the Freedman's Relief Association (Freedman’s Bureau) in Washington DC, helping to provide aid to recently-freed men.

Continuing her passionate call for the right of African American women to vote, she told an  audience at the 1878 National Woman Suffrage Association convention in Rochester, NY to “take their rights” rather than beg for them. This was to be her final appearance at a women’s rights meeting.

That year, also, her autobiography was re-published in 1878, to also include her Book of Life, a scrapbook of autographs and testimonies by influential persons that enabled Truth to assemble, in a systematic and meaningful way, her life and career engagement with emphasizing her anti-slavery and women's-rights activities. The book bore witness to her achievements and emphasized the power of faith, family, friends, and fellowship which, importantly, opened the door for her to engage others in society who also supported the causes she did.

To this end, Sojourner used photography, as Frederick Douglass did, to promote her causes. She sat for a portrait several times, creating and selling small inexpensive images such as the one shown here. These photographic calling cards (called “cartes-de-visite”) funded her activities. She copyrighted her own image, enabling her image to be sold for her profit, upending the circumstances into which she was born in the previous century. Her image is emblazoned with the statement “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance” which Sojourner offered as a riff on one of photography’s early slogans, “Secure the shadow ere the substance fade.” In each case, the “shadow” refers to the photographic image. While the framing of substance might vary. In each case, it could easily refer to the body incarnate. However, in addition, Sojourner could have intended the “substance” as doubly meaningful—as a reference to herself as well as her causes.

While she did not live to see the women gain the right to vote, her impact on the suffrage movement, broader reform causes, and empowerment movements cannot be overstated.

Sojourner Truth was born in 1797 in Ulster County, NY. She died on November 26, 1883 in Battle Creek, MI and is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery there.

July 16, 1862  – March 25, 1931

Born into slavery during the Civil War in Mississippi, Ida B. Wells grew into her family’s practice of Reconstruction Era politics and practice, including the importance of education, which provided a means of self-sufficiency. She accepted a position as a teacher in Memphis and moved there with her brothers and sister, whom she was called upon to support after her parents died of yellow fever.

Ida fought against segregation and discrimination valiantly. In September 1883, she purchased a first-class train ticket for travel within Tennessee on the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern rail line. She was asked by a conductor to move from the women’s car to the smoking car, a request which she resisted. Her forcible removal was prohibited: Ida filed a lawsuit focused on the statute preventing charging one fare and seating blacks in a lesser fare car and a second that required “separate but equal” accommodations for blacks and whites. These Tennessee statutes, in place prior to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision which constitutionalized racial segregation, were upheld and Ida won her case on the local level, though the ruling was overturned at the federal level.

Beyond discrimination she faced, Ida used her voice to examine circumstances surrounding lynchings in Memphis and the region. She authored several columns in newspapers that exposed these truths, after her press was burned and her life was threatened. Forced to leave her city, Ida went on the road, traveling to raise funds for her work in anti-lynching which brought her into contact and relation with suffrage advocates who championed education of blacks as a means to support issues and exercise their rights, including the right to vote—which black men had at that time, and for which all women longed.

In 1894, Ida married Ferdinand Barnett, founder of "The Conservator" which was the first black newspaper in Chicago. Continuing her own efforts as a journalist and author of note, Ida published “The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States” in 1895, which described the “butchery of blacks” and the indictment of white women, including Frances Willard and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union leadership, for their anemic efforts toward humanity, equality, and justice for blacks. The preface of Ida’s book includes Frederick Douglass’s articulation of Ida’s bravery and contributions, acknowledging Ida in this way: “Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured.”

Ida returned the compliment when speaking of Douglass' continuing legacy at the dedication of his monument in Rochester, NY in 1899, stating that Douglass "will be an inspiration to us in the many problems which [still] confront us.”

Ida’s involvement in the women’s suffrage movement was conjoined with her efforts to overcome the struggles black women faced due to overlapping racism and sexism and the horrors of lynching. She was a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW, though now known as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, NACWC). She also helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 as a civil rights organization created to fight the ongoing violence against black people in the US.

A fierce advocate for equal rights and against lynching, Ida’s many efforts to elevate black women and men were aligned with woman suffrage, though Ida resisted the color lines that played out in the public spectacles to secure support for the vote. For instance, she took part in the first suffragist parade in Washington, D.C., in 1913, which was organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) as the sole black woman in the Illinois delegation.

Ida Bell Wells was born into enslavement in Holly Springs, MS on July 16, 1862. She died on March 15, 1931, and is buried in Chicago’s Oak Woods Cemetery.