Living Legacy of Suffrage
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/07/us/suffragists-descendants.html
100 Years Later, These Activists Continue Their Ancestors’ Work
By Elizabeth Williamson and Haruka Sakaguchi August 7, 2020
Black Lives Matter protesters violently cleared by federal forces from Lafayette Square this June were the latest Americans to bring their demand for justice to the doorstep of a sitting president. The first White House protesters were the suffragists, who amid a world war and a flu pandemic unfurled banners demanding of Woodrow Wilson, “MR. PRESIDENT, HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?” Shunned, imprisoned, beaten and tortured, the uneasy alliance of white, Black and brown, highly privileged and formerly enslaved women won passage of the 19th Amendment 100 years ago this month using tactics of protest and persuasion that activists still deploy. As Americans mark a century since that struggle, suffragists’ descendants reflect here on the movement’s legacy among Americans of all races, faiths and genders battling for what the suffragists — quoting the president at the time — described as “liberty: the fundamental demand of the human spirit.”
Michelle Duster
Great-granddaughter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Michelle Duster marvels at how her great-grandmother did it all, juggling research and writing, teaching and speaking. An educator turned journalist, Wells-Barnett’s illustrated accounts of lynchings as an instrument of terror jolted the nation and endangered her life. She was also a founder of the N.A.A.C.P. and a suffragist who demanded voting rights be inseparable from civil rights. Wells-Barnett refused to comply with Alice Paul’s segregation of the 8,000-strong Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington on March 3, 1913, edging into the Illinois contingent as it moved past and marching as the only Black woman in the state delegation. This year Wells-Barnett, who died in 1931, was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
“She lived her life on her own terms,” Ms. Duster said.
Born into slavery, Wells-Barnett “could go to the White House and talk to two different presidents,” Ms. Duster said. “But at the same time, she took in people who were practically homeless.”
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
After college, Ms. Duster immersed herself in Wells-Barnett’s life. “I got very interested in the impact of images on people’s worldview,” she said. “I felt like I was experiencing the results of that level of intentional misinformation. That has been the driving force of my whole career — how can I dismantle these false narratives of exactly who African-Americans are?”
Ms. Duster lives in Chicago, where Wells-Barnett settled after a white mob destroyed her Tennessee newspaper office. She teaches writing at Columbia College Chicago and tutors at Wilbur Wright College.
Ms. Duster speaks widely about her great-grandmother’s legacy, a theme explored in her book “Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells.” She is creating an initiative “to educate people about the involvement of Black women in the suffrage movement, and how it ties into today,” she said. Ms. Duster has seen social media posts invoking Wells-Barnett, and an article crediting her with creating a blueprint for opposing police violence. “They’re giving her credit for paving the way, expressing inspiration for how outspoken she was, and willingly and knowingly putting her life in danger,” Ms. Duster said. In addition to exposing lynchings as state-sanctioned murder, “she was encouraging Black people to exercise the power that they did have,” organizing boycotts of white-owned businesses and streetcars and a mass exodus of Black residents from Memphis. “That’s why they wanted to kill her.”
Pamela Swing, Anna Plotkin-Swing
Granddaughter and Great-granddaughter, Betty Gram Swing
From 1917 to 1920, Pamela Swing’s grandmother traveled the country for the National Woman’s Party. Born Myrtle to Danish immigrants, Gram was singing under the stage name Betty on Broadway when the suffrage bug bit. She and her sister Alice hopped a train to Washington in 1917 and joined a protest at the White House demanding President Woodrow Wilson’s support for a federal suffrage amendment.
Photographs in front of the executive mansion capture Betty Gram striking dramatic poses before being sent to the Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Va., for the “Night of Terror,” when prison guards severely beat the suffragists. An eight-day hunger strike there weakened Alice so much that Wilson dispatched the White House physician to attend to her. The strike ended with the president’s promise to support the amendment. Betty “emerged from this experience gung-ho,” Ms. Swing said.
She added that she heard her paternal grandmother relate her exploits “until I was almost 16.”
“But it wasn’t until I inherited her papers eight years ago that I started digging around,” said Ms. Swing, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology and folklore. “I found six typewritten pages about a jail experience. No location, no notes, nothing,” she said, adding that about a year later, “I started reading about the Night of Terror. I went back and — oh, my God, she was there.”
Betty Gram Swing
Today, Ms. Swing is a resident scholar at Brandeis’s Women’s Studies Research Center in Waltham, Mass. In 2017, the centennial of the start of the White House demonstration, she organized a re-enactment in Washington.
Ms. Swing’s interest in Black women in the movement stems from the often unsuccessful balance that white movement leaders tried to strike between the demands for universal suffrage and the need to persuade racist legislators to back the amendment. With Elizabeth Dabanka, a Brandeis student from Ghana, Ms. Swing wrote “I Want to Go to Jail,” a play about the last time women were jailed for suffrage that links that struggle with civil rights.
“With what is going on right now, my mind is just exploding with new ideas about working more on the white-Black rift,” Ms. Swing said.
As a child, Anna Plotkin-Swing said that she was into historical fiction, and that “Betty Gram was part of that world of women I had in my head.”
When her mother inherited the suffragist’s papers, they teamed up to save them, “one of us typing and the other one reading aloud.”
“The suffragist movement was pretty pointedly exclusionary of Black women and other women of color,” said Ms. Plotkin-Swing, who is studying at Smith College for a master’s in social work. “They made decisions to exclude those voices and those individuals from their movement because they thought it would detract from their cause.”
Intersectional feminism is “vastly different than what she lived through and identified with,” she said.
“I hope she’d be really excited about that and see the ways Black Lives Matter, prison abolition and immigrant rights all are feminist issues in their own right,” Ms. Plotkin-Swing added.
“Whenever I go to a protest — the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter — that feels like following in her footsteps,” she said. “But I think I’ve taken a different path than she did.”
Susan Whiting
Cousin, Susan B. Anthony
Growing up, Susan Whiting remembers a stern portrait hanging in her grandmother’s dining room in Lake Geneva, Wis., of her cousin Susan Brownell Anthony, an abolitionist and suffragist. Barely out of her twenties, Anthony teamed up with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to galvanize the suffrage movement. She traveled the nation to promote an unlawful idea; in 1872, she actually was arrested — for voting. Anthony died in 1906 with her goal unrealized, but by then, as she noted, failure was “impossible.”
Entering the working world in the late 1970s, Ms. Whiting learned that her assumptions that “all women were equal” and that “there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do” were more ideals than reality. Still, she was the first female member of a management development program at Nielsen, the global research giant. Over a 35-year career, Ms. Whiting led departments, including the television ratings division. She retired in 2014 as vice chairwoman of the company.
“As I hired people and furthered my career, I was looking for ways to ensure people had equal opportunities, but of course that can be difficult,” she said. “Many, many times when I would run into barriers, I would think of not just her, but all of our ancestors.”
Today, Ms. Whiting leads the board of the National Women’s History Museum, founded by Karen Staser, a researcher and organizational psychologist who noted that there was no museum or research repository devoted to women’s history. One of the organization’s first achievements was an effort in 1997 to position the “Women’s Suffrage Statue,” a.k.a. the “Portrait Monument to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,” carved by Adelaide Johnson, in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington. The seven-ton sculpture had been displayed in the basement of the Capitol since its unveiling in 1921.
Susan B. Anthony
The museum has grown into the largest online cultural institution dedicated to American women’s history. It provides lesson plans for teachers and organizes panels on women’s history, the suffrage movement and the life stories of major and minor players.
But the goal had always been to build a physical museum. Ms. Whiting says that could happen soon, and she hopes for an announcement to be made this year.
“We want girls and boys, men and women in the United States to have access to inspiration about the roles women have played and are playing in our history,” she said. “Susan B. Anthony’s story is told, but many others have not been.”
Kenneth B. Morris Jr.
Great-great-great-grandson, Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass, though famed as an abolitionist, attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and was one of 32 men who signed the Declaration of Sentiments, demanding the vote. In 1866, he joined Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in founding the American Equal Rights Association, demanding suffrage for all people.
“When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people,” he said in a speech in 1888 to the International Council of Women in Washington. “But when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.”
Growing up, Kenneth B. Morris Jr. spent summers at Twin Oaks, Douglass’s Chesapeake Bay retreat in Highland Beach, Md., an airy home with photographs of his famous ancestors “in every room,” he said.
In 2005, Mr. Morris grew riveted by a National Geographic article on global human trafficking titled, “21st Century Slaves,” as his two daughters, then 12 and 9, got ready for bed.
Mr. Morris, a founder of a marketing firm in Corona, Calif., recalled that he “couldn’t look them in the eyes” as he said goodnight to the girls.
“Frederick Douglass’s goal was to end slavery,” he said. “How could I leverage this platform that I had done nothing with?”
Mr. Morris’s great-great-great-grandfather had written that his lifelong commitment to education was rooted in his enslaver’s rationale for laws criminalizing education for Black Americans: “You cannot teach a slave to read or write because it will unfit him to be a slave.” So in 2007, Mr. Morris co-founded the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, “to ‘unfit’ communities to allow slavery to exist and thrive,” he said. “The foundation of all our work is around education,” including how to identify victims of human trafficking. That work has expanded to nearly three dozen counties in California, as well as cities in Utah and Texas.
Frederick Douglass
After the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed in May while in police custody in Minneapolis, and the ensuing explosion of protest, Mr. Morris said: “We started speaking to students, trying to get a sense of where they were. They were filled with anger.” Recalling Douglass’s 1881 essay excoriating racism as a “moral disorder” and “disease,” Mr. Morris developed a youth writing program to explore “remedies for the disease of racism.”
He has also been speaking out to correct another historical wrong: the near-erasure of his great-great-great-grandmother Anna Murray Douglass. A free Black woman, she sold her personal belongings to help finance Douglass’s escape from slavery.
“Had she not been in his life, I don’t know that he would have had the courage to run away,” Mr. Morris said. “I am as much a product of her as I am of him.”
When Was the First Time a Woman in Your Family Voted? We want to hear your stories as we mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.
Marguerite Buckman Kearns
Granddaughter, Edna Buckman Kearns
In 2019, Marguerite Buckman Kearns joined the nationwide Women’s March in her adopted home of New Mexico, holding aloft a poster-size photograph of her grandmother Edna Buckman Kearns, a Quaker suffragist, her grandfather Wilmer Kearns and their daughter Serena. Edna Buckman Kearns, who died in 1934, played a major role in New York’s suffrage campaign while documenting it as a reporter for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and other newspapers. Wilmer Kearns was her enthusiastic supporter, marching or running the household while his fiery spouse was on the road.
Marguerite Kearns followed her grandmother’s career path, working as a reporter and an editor for The Woodstock Times in Woodstock, N.Y., from its founding in 1972 through the 1980s. In the early ’80s, she documented Pete Seeger’s grass-roots campaign to clean up the Hudson River aboard the sloop Clearwater. The vessel, now a historic landmark, echoes a tactic used by Ms. Kearns’s grandmother, who in the summer of 1913 rode a horse-drawn wagon she christened “Spirit of 1776” throughout Long Island, demanding the vote.
Edna Buckman Kearns
Ms. Kearns learned of her grandmother’s accomplishments from her grandfather, who would haul his wife’s wagon out into his driveway each summer for photographs. “Spirit of 1776” now resides in the New York State Museum in Albany.
Ms. Kearns, retired from the National Education Association, now works to ensure that lesser-known suffragists retain their places in history. They include Adelina Otero-Warren, a revered New Mexico suffragist who became Santa Fe’s first female superintendent of public schools, and Inez Milholland, a National Woman’s Party member who collapsed while speaking in favor of women’s suffrage in Los Angeles. After her death a few weeks later, she was declared a martyr for the cause. Ms. Kearns’s book, “An Unfinished Revolution: Edna Buckman Kearns and the Struggle for Women’s Rights,” will be published in 2021.
“I’m a storyteller for all these generations,” she said.
Joyce Stokes Jones, Michele Jones Galvin
Great-great- and great-great-great-grandnieces, Harriet Tubman
When Michele Jones Galvin was in fourth grade in Syracuse, N.Y., her class was assigned to make a collage depicting a famous person in history. She asked her mother, Joyce Stokes Jones, for an idea. Her mother suggested she choose Aunt Harriet Tubman. Consulting multiple encyclopedias, Ms. Jones Galvin found the same scant sentences, so she chose Sidney Poitier instead.
Soon after, Ms. Jones began filling those historical gaps in the Tubman collage. Over 30 years, she read and researched, traveled and interviewed, learning all she could about Tubman, abolitionist, suffragist and friend of Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony.
Born in 1821 into slavery on a Maryland plantation, according to Ms. Jones’s research, Tubman escaped. Then, through the Underground Railroad, she led slaves to freedom. During the Civil War, Tubman led a spy network for the Union. Though she never learned to read or write, she was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, prominent advocates for universal suffrage.
Harriet Tubman
Inspired by her research, Ms. Jones began writing a weekly column in 1968 on Black heritage for The Syracuse Herald-Journal and produced programming on Black history for local television. In 1985, she produced a documentary on Tubman’s life and family.
Four decades after embarking on her research, Ms. Jones teamed up with her daughter to write a book. In 2013, on the centennial of Tubman’s death, they published “Beyond the Underground: Aunt Harriet, Moses of Her People.”
“We know Aunt Harriet to be as John Brown described her: ‘The best and the bravest person on the continent,’” Ms. Jones Galvin said. “Her rescue missions, military prowess and support of women’s suffrage speak for themselves.” Ms. Jones Galvin is active in a half-dozen charitable and advocacy groups, including the League of Women Voters.
In mid-March, she was asked what Tubman would think of race relations today. “Aunt Harriet would be heartbroken,” Ms. Jones Galvin said. “She’d be wondering, ‘What the heck have you guys been doing for 107 years after I’m gone?’”
But a month later, after the death of George Floyd, came “the emergence of this new, momentous movement — the people standing up for Black Lives Matter were intergenerational, interracial, a conglomeration of all the best America has to offer,” she said. “I felt we had finally come to the America Aunt Harriet would be proud of.”
Coline Jenkins
Great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
One story from the early life of Coline Jenkins’s great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Cady Stanton stood out for Ms. Jenkins. Stanton’s father was a judge in Johnstown, N.Y., with an office in the family home on Main Street. Asking about the anguished faces of women who sought his counsel, Stanton learned that marriage erased a woman’s identity, rendering her “civilly dead.” In a fury, Stanton, 10 at the time, tried to slice the relevant statutes from her father’s law books.
One of her father’s clerks, noticing a coral necklace Stanton had gotten as a Christmas gift, once baited her, saying, “‘When you get married, your husband will own it. He can swap your necklace for cigars, and it will go up in smoke,’” Ms. Jenkins said. As an adult, Stanton lobbied the New York legislature, and the state became one of the first to overhaul marital property rights.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“She was addressing women’s rights from childhood to her deathbed,” Ms. Jenkins said. With Susan B. Anthony, Stanton — 32 and with a family of her own — helped start the movement that culminated in 1920, nearly two decades after her death, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
Ms. Jenkins has that coral necklace now. Her own cause is to ensure that monuments and reminders of the suffragists’ work are all over America.
She is a vice president of Monumental Women, which secured a site in Central Park in New York for the “Women’s Rights Pioneers” monument, portraying Stanton, Anthony and Sojourner Truth. Its unveiling is set for Aug. 26.
Ms. Jenkins lobbied for passage of federal legislation creating a National Votes for Women Trail. With generations of family members, she has donated the Stanton papers, belongings and the original copy of “The Woman’s Bible” — all stored for generations in steamer trunks in the attic of her Greenwich, Conn., home — to institutions across the country. When Ms. Jenkins learned that a collection of 3,000 suffrage campaign mementos was for sale, she bought it: ballots, a fly swatter, a risqué black stocking embroidered with “Votes for Women” that she loans to museums, libraries and the news media.
“To me, this collection reflects the mass movement, the weapons and tools these women used in the world’s greatest bloodless revolution,” she said. “Fifty-one percent of the population gained a legal right, without a gun.”
Jessye Kass
Great-great-granddaughter, Dora Lewis
Jessye Kass really learned about her great-great-grandmother Dora Lewis during the 2016 presidential campaign, when many women believed they would elect the first female president. Lewis was one of the first members of the National Woman’s Party, founded by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, and she served in several top roles, including as treasurer. She was arrested during the 1917 protests in Washington and imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Va. During a crackdown at the prison known as the “Night of Terror,” prison guards knocked Lewis unconscious against an iron bedstead. They force-fed her through a tube down her throat when she refused to eat.
Dora Lewis
Ms. Kass has always had a social justice bent. When she was 15, she began volunteering for a domestic violence services network. In college, she ran the Attukwei Art Foundation, a nonprofit providing art therapy to children in Ghana. A Fulbright scholarship in Thailand took her to Urban Light, a group assisting young boys who had been sex trafficked. Returning home to Massachusetts, Ms. Kass worked for an affordable housing program and groups serving underserved and marginalized people.
In 2018, she joined the Cambridge Women’s Center, the oldest such center in the United States. The Cambridge Women’s Center itself sprang from protest: In 1971, a group of women marched from Boston to Cambridge on International Women’s Day and staged a sit-in at a Harvard University building, demanding affordable housing, child care and education for women. With a $5,000 donation from a sympathetic benefactor, Susan Lyman, they bought the house where the center still operates.
“This job most closely connects me to Dora,” Ms. Kass said.
Ms. Kass and Anna Plotkin-Swing, Betty Gram’s great-granddaughter, are childhood friends and recently worked together at the center. There, they realized that not only were their ancestors were allied in the movement, they were close friends.
Rohulamin Quander, Carmen Quander
Cousins, Nellie Quander
The Quanders are one of the Washington region’s largest and most illustrious African-American families. Their presence in North America dates to the late 17th century, and Rohulamin Quander, a family patriarch, says he has found historical suggestions of shared ancestry with a nephew of George Washington’s. Quander descendants include the first Black people to hold leadership roles in education, medicine, commerce and the military, Courtland Milloy reported in 1978 in a column in The Washington Post.
Nellie Quander, an educator and activist for Black women’s rights, taught in Washington public schools while earning her degree at Howard University. She became the president of Alpha Kappa Alpha, an African-American sorority, in 1911, three years after its founding on the campus. In 1913, Quander incorporated the sorority, preserving its founding principles, including high scholastic and ethical standards and service in perpetuity. Alpha Kappa Alpha now has 300,000 members.
Nellie Quander
Quander supported women’s suffrage, and when the National American Woman Suffrage Association announced plans for the Woman Suffrage Procession, spearheaded by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, in Washington on March 3, 1913, Quander sought entry for Alpha Kappa Alpha. But organizers, acceding to racists in states needed to ratify the 19th Amendment, sought to isolate Black women.
In a letter to Paul, Quander made clear she was having none of it.
On the day of the procession, “Nellie and her group refused to take a place in the back of the D.C. line,” Rohulamin Quander said. “They forcibly integrated themselves into the group of white women from D.C.”
W.E.B. DuBois wrote at the time that “there seems to be no doubt but that the attempt to draw the color line in the woman’s suffrage movement has received a severe and, let us hope, final setback.”
Nellie Quander worked to empower women as a national leader in the Y.W.C.A., where she served for more than 50 years, until her death in 1961.
Much of this history came from Mr. Quander, a Washington lawyer who for more than a half-century has fought as his cousin did to ensure that Black women are not sidelined in the suffrage story. He contributes family history and lends documents to historians, academics and the Library of Congress. His book “Nellie Quander: An Alpha Kappa Alpha Pearl” was published in 2008, the sorority’s centennial year.
“Her family knew Frederick Douglass. Her father was a decorated Civil War veteran. She was an activist until the very end,” Mr. Quander said. “She would be very proud, I think, of the fact that since the 1960s, I have been bringing forth the history of the Quander family.”