How Racism Tainted Women's Fight to Vote“I am in Great Britain today because I believe that the silent indifference with which she has received the charge that human beings are burned alive in Christian Anglo- Saxon communities is born of ignorance of the true situation. America cannot and will not ignore the voice of a nation that is her superior in civilization.” In 1. Ida B. Wells crossed the Atlantic for the first time to deliver that sobering message to Great Britain. She had hoped to sway public opinion about the racial violence that plagued the U. S. The lynching of black men and women seemed to have become a sport among Southern white mobs — reaching a peak of 1. That included the hanging of three black businessmen, one a close friend of Wells, during that year in her former home of Memphis, Tenn. She called for blacks to leave the city “which will neither protect our lives and property.” More than 6,0. How Racism Tainted Women’s Fight to Vote An 1894 showdown between anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and temperance leader Frances E. Willard revealed the grip that racial resentment had over the American suffrage movement.Wells was exiled. But the Memphis murders sparked the beginning of Wells’ anti- lynching crusade. Combing through statistics and interviewing eyewitnesses, she conducted the first in- depth investigation into the real reasons behind the lynching of these black men — and many others who were mostly accused of allegedly raping a white woman. She wrote about her tragic findings in a column for the New York Age newspaper and forged the modern- day civil rights movement. If something needed to be said or done, she just goes and does it,” said Paula Giddings, the Elizabeth A. Woodson 1. 92. 2 Professor in Afro- American Studies at Smith College, in an interview with The Root. That challenged the nation’s moralistic Victorian attitudes at the time.
Such a grounded stance also pitted her against one of the most formidable American leaders within the movement to gain women the vote, or suffrage: Frances E. Willard, national president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Throughout much of the 1. Meanwhile, many suffrage leaders — such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton — had also championed black equality. Yet in 1. 87. 0, the suffragists found themselves on opposing ends of the equal- rights battle when Congress passed the 1. Amendment, enabling black men to vote (at least, in theory) — and not women. That measure engendered resentment among some white suffragists, especially in the South. To affect or associate with something undesirable or reprehensible: a reputation that was tainted by allegations of.
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