Women and Adversity,
Saluting 23 Faithful Suffragists
Not all of the early suffragists in America believed in equal rights for Black women. When they held meetings, rallies and marches, they didn’t invite their Black allies. They didn’t allow them to march shoulder-to-shoulder with White women. Instead, Black women had to have their own contingent at the end of the parade or at the end of the march.
Black women, though, played key roles in fighting for equal footing. Some of them are featured in Women and Adversity, Saluting 23 Faithful Suffragists.
- Septima Poinsette Clark set up Citizenship Schools in South Carolina and taught Black men and women to read so they could learn what their rights were.
- Marie Foster provided citizenship classes in Selma, Alabama.
- Sarah J.S. Garnet and her sister, Susan, founded the Colored Women’s Equal Suffrage League of Brooklyn.
- Amelia Boynton Robinson was the first Black woman to run for Congress in Alabama. She is pictured in her wheelchair next to President Barack Obama on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday where she had been beaten unconscious by police.
- Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, the child of an interracial marriage in Massachusetts, wrote, “If laws are unjust, they must be continually broken until they are altered.”
- Mary Burnett Talbert, originally from Ohio and later from Buffalo, New York, was the first woman to receive the NAACP Spingarn Medal, awarded for outstanding achievement by an African American.
This third ebook, meant to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution which gives women the right to vote, follows the same format as my two previous books: Honoring 23 Black Women and Recognizing 23 Notable Mothers. The entries in all three books are brief sketches not biographies. They are meant to motivate readers to learn more about these women. Students may want to write a research paper on one of them, and teachers may recommend students get a copy to prompt them to learn more about these women. Book lovers can be fascinated by the achievements of these women.
All three books are available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, apple.books.com, kobo.com, and goodreads.com.
August 13 – Judith Hall, Modern Suffragist
