"Dear white women: Black women can't save you"

[BumRushDaShow]

44. Hate to do this but

why were black women suffragettes and civil rights organizers told to got to the back of the Womens' Marches?

Ida Wells-Barnett confronts race and gender discrimination

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Perhaps one of Wells-Barnett's most important stands occurred at the March 3, 1913, National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) parade in the nation's capital. NAWSA was the national umbrella organization for state suffrage affiliates. Its history dated to 1890 when the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association merged their forces and resources. The primary goal was to enfranchise women. But, NAWSA did not always embrace all women. The southern white women encouraged to seek membership in NAWSA adhered to the same white supremacy ideology that their men championed. Dependence on southerners for the passage of full suffrage rights for women muffled any opposition that NAWSA might have harbored to the usurpation of the social, economic, and political rights that blacks gained during the Reconstruction years. NAWSA refused to publicly denounce racial segregation, adopted a policy of expediency, and accepted Jim Crow within its own ranks. This left the door open for state affiliates to discriminate against black women. But Illinois suffragists had always embraced African-American women like Wells-Barnett and encouraged their participation in the state movement. The Women's State Central Committee, for example, utilized Wells-Barnett's lecturing skills and enlisted her aid in canvassing the state to encourage women to organize and develop political knowledge.

Despite the progressive attitude of white female Illinois suffragists, they refused to support her in the historic suffrage march in Washington. Carrying banners representing almost every state in the Union, thousands of parade marchers underscored the demand for universal female enfranchisement. Wells-Barnett was one of sixty-five enthusiastic delegates from Illinois and one of many black women who participated in the march. But the African-American women were instructed to gather as one unit at the end of the procession because the NAWSA forbade the integration of state affiliates in the march. Wells-Barnett refused to comply with the NAWSA demand and instead lined up with her state contingent. Grace Wilbur Trout, president of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association and chairperson of the group, initially sanctioned the integrated group. But after meeting with a NAWSA official, she told the delegation that Wells-Barnett could not march with the state contingent. Further, if they failed to follow the instructions set forth by the NAWSA, the entire delegation would be denied participation in the march.

Angry at the blatant disregard for her rights as a woman and as an Illinois resident, Wells-Barnett refused to comply. It was time to confront racism within the suffrage movement. Southern women, she argued, had evaded the issues of race, and the NAWSA and its state affiliates had allowed it. She wanted the Illinois group to show the nation that it was progressive enough to stand against NAWSA's hypocrisy of oppressing women because of their race while embracing the idea of equality for all women at the ballot box. Her pleas, however, fell on deaf ears. So did the pleas of two white colleagues, Belle Squire and Virginia Brooks.

Deeply disturbed over the action that her comrades had taken, Wells-Barnett left the parade site. The delegates assumed that she had relented and decided to march with the black contingent. But as the delegates began marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, she quietly stepped out from the crowd of spectators and joined the only white Illinois colleagues sympathetic to her cause, Squire and Brooks. So important was the scene that a photograph of her flanked by the two white women appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune giving the event and its participants local and national exposure. Southern marchers did not defect, but perhaps in part because they did not learn of the incident until after the parade ended. The press coverage reassured many black women of their own place in the suffrage movement and probably convinced many whites that the question of race, gender, and enfranchisement were inextricably tied.

http://www.lib.niu.edu/1996/iht319630.html

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Adilah Barnes @Adilah_Barnes

#FBF w/ #AdilahBarnes in IRON JAWED ANGELS. I was elated to play IDA B. WELLS opposite #HillarySwank!
7:08 PM - Oct 20, 2017