By Thomas Nast for Harper's Illustrated Weekly.
Today is the day in 1865 when the last enslaved people in the treasonous (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2381) section of our country learned they were free, by virtue of Abraham Lincoln’s General Order Number 1 of January 2, 1863 (https://www.loc.gov/resource/lprbscsm.scsm1019/?st=gallery).
Although, these were the last people in the treasonous section to learn they were free, they were not the last people in need of freedom. It would not be until 1866 that the United States enacted the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution abolishing slavery, “except as punishment for a crime” (a huge loophole- we have learned subsequently https://www.pbs.org/show/slavery-another-name/ ), which freed enslaved people in the “loyal” slave states of Missouri, Maryland, Kentucky and Delaware, which were not entirely loyal, but held through military occupation and Southern “confederate” government incompetence. Similarly, it should be added that many treasonous states had substantial loyal factions, as well. West Virginia, and Appalachian Tennessee and North Carolina come to mind.
This Juneteenth coincides with recollections of the centennial of the Constitutional amendment enfranchising all women in the United States, and with widespread protests against systemic racism and police brutality, a long legacy of the defeat of Reconstruction by Southern white supremacists, aided and abetted by Northern allies. (https://www.pbs.org/show/reconstruction-america-after-civil-war/)
Since their birth, the causes of abolition and women’s suffrage were linked, as they should be, and the failures of America led to their unlinking in the post-Civil War years, even as troubling issues of racism and white supremacy in the South among Southern leaders, complicated the fight for Women’s Suffrage in the 1910s.
At the famous Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, Frederick Douglass, the towering intellectual leader of abolitionism, lent his voice to women’s equality, and William LLoyd Garrison, publisher of The Liberator and leading father of the second, successful abolitionist movement was tireless in his advocacy of women’s freedom and citizenship rights. Similarly, leading suffrage women like Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott advocated the cause of Black freedom. Sojourner Truth, blind prophetess of intersectionality, embodied these joint causes through her powerful orations.
Courtesy of the National Parks Service- Women’s Rights National Historic Park
It is worth examining these two causes together, because we learn a lot about freedom, equality and those that strive against it.
180,000 Black men fought in the Civil War, putting their lives on the line for theirs and their families’ freedom, despite the fact that their Southern enemies would give them no quarter, and frequently perpetrated war crimes against them, through wanton massacre and slaughter (https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/exhibitions/congress-investigates-part-2/fort-pillow-massacre). Similarly White and Black women spied for the North, tended to the wounded, and, in the most famous incident of all, led armies of Black men in battle, directly to liberate enslaved people, as Harriet Tubman did on the Combahee River in 1862. (https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog/combahee-ferry-raid)
After the war, as freed people claimed their freedom and moved about the country in search of loved ones, they often gathered in cities, usually under the protection of Federal troops, including many of the Black troops that had aided in the liberation, while the defeated traitors went home to pick up the pieces. It was in this environment that Southern leaders began devising new strategies for dealing with African-Americans over whom they still felt supreme. In 1866, in Memphis and New Orleans, the police departments of the respective cities engaged in vicious assaults and massacres of Black civilians and Black veterans of the war, in an attempt to drive them from the city, or terrorize them back on to the plantations they had left. (https://www.wwno.org/post/absolute-massacre-1866-riot-mechanics-institute and https://www.memphis.edu/memphis-massacre/ )
This was the beginning of long distrust between policing authorities and free African-Americans in the United States, a distrust which continued as police forces participated in lynchings, or stood aside while they occurred, and actively enforced laws which denied African-American social and political equality. (https://withoutsanctuary.org/) It was, after all, the police who arrested Rosa Parks and her predecessor Homer Plessy, the police who beat the peaceful marchers at Selma, who directed the hoses on them in Birmingham, who have continued to beat and kill them from Ferguson to Jackson to Philadelphia to Charleston to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago and Atlanta.
So, what does this have to do with women earning their right to vote in 1920? A great deal, it turns out. When the 15th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted in 1870, it gave all MEN the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”, but it completely disregarded women, an omission which infuriated Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This denial of women’s aspiration caused a racial rift in the Women’s Suffrage movement that, arguably, has never healed. New Jersey’s, Alice Paul, was a founder of the National Woman’s Party, and author of the still extant, but unratified Equal Rights Amendment. (https://www.alicepaul.org/); despite her radical reputation, Paul would constantly dance around the race issue, attempting to placate white supremacists to advance the cause of women’s votes, in a way similar to when Frederick Douglass had decades earlier told Susan B. Anthony that racial violence in the South necessitated putting women’s votes on the back burner to placate male supremacists, and that women needed to support the 15th Amendment. (https://www.nps.gov/articles/comrades-in-conflict.htm)
Photo Courtesy of the Library of Congress
When Alice Paul began her campaign of pressure for a Constitutional Amendment to guarantee all women voting rights, she began picketing a White House inhabited by Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, the former governor of Paul’s New Jersey, was a Virginian whose major actions in Washington included imposing racial segregation in the District of Columbia and among the Federal workforce, and hosting a White House screening of “Birth of a Nation” a racist revision of reality, in which the Ku Klux Klan were heroes who defended the South against “Negro Rule” (https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/birth-of-a-movement/), directly leading to the rebirth of this terrorist organization, which exists to this day. Like his famous Virginia predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, Wilson spoke a great deal about democracy and self-determination, but in practice actively suppressed it for a great many people.
As Paul’s pickets continued their daily vigil at the White House gates, starting in 1916, the weather rode heavily upon them. Paul was required to recruit as many women as possible to man the picket lines (joke intended).
Although reluctant to do so, Paul allowed Mary Church Terrell to join the picket line. (https://www.pbs.org/video/part-2-the-vote-american-experience-o95eqq/) Terrell had been a long time activist and president of the National Association of Colored Women, whose members included such luminaries as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and which had been working for Women’s Suffrage since 1896. It was Wells-Barnett in Chicago, Illinois being the only state east of the Mississippi to give women voting rights, that had helped elect the first Black Alderman in Chicago’s history, Oscar Stanton De Priest, who would go on to be the first member of Congress ever elected from a Northern state in US History. (https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/12155) It was also Wells-Barnett who would slip into the Illinois delegation during the March, 1913 Women’s Suffrage parade in Washington, DC, integrating it despite Paul’s attempt to keep the parade segregated in a bow to prevailing racist ideas.
Photo Courtesy of the National Park Service https://www.nps.gov/articles/woman-suffrage-in-the-midwest.htm This integration of the parade by Wells-Barnett and appearance of Terrell on the picket lines two years later occurred because peaceful women’s protesters were violently assaulted and arrested by the active participation or acquiescence of the DC police forces, that were supposed to protect the women. The 1913 Parade occurred right before Wilson’s inauguration as President, and the mass arrests of peaceful picketers outside the White House occurred at Wilson’s orders. In both cases, the police of the District of Columbia neither protected nor served the women of DC, nor upheld their Constitutional rights.
By 1917, things had gotten considerably worse, as police arrested picketers for “obstructing sidewalk traffic” and sending them to jail. (http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/jazz/jb_jazz_sufarrst_2.html) As the women were arrested, police and onlookers subjected them to verbally and physically violent abuse, culminating in the “Night of Terror,” when multiple suffrage protesters, including Alice Paul’s deputy, Lucy Burns, were beaten and tortured by prison guards at the Occoquan Workhouse, after they requested to be treated as political prisoners, because of the dubious natures of the “criminal” charges levied against them. This, of course, occurred because they were exercising their 1st Amendment right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” (https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v17n1/gallery/1917-suffrage/intro-page-night-of-terror.shtml)
When the women subsequently went on hunger strike, they were violently force fed, by having tubes shoved up their noses and down their throats, until the ensuing poor health of the protesters, from the violence and abuse, became a political liability to Wilson, and they were freed.
It is notable that the violence against these women’s suffrage picketers occurred as Wilson was leading the nation in the First World War, in defense of “democracy,” a mere two years after the Ku Klux Klan had been reborn on the Stone Mountain of Georgia, inspired by the movie Wilson had screened in the White House. The tone of a nation comes from the top, and Wilson’s tone was definitively hypocritical.
As women were violently hauled off to jail for exercising their rights, at the behest of Woodrow Wilson, a new organization was rallying to continue suppressing these rights for African-Americans, with the seeming blessing of Wilson. This new Klan would be far more expansive in its targets, however, going after Jews, Catholics and immigrants, culminating with the decidedly racist Immigration Act of 1924, a “comprehensive immigration reform” aimed at keeping America white and Protestant. (https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act) This act was the law of the land until overturned in the 1960s by Lyndon Johnson.
In 1919, Alice Paul’s picketers had won a great success (not alone, of course, as the National American Woman Suffrage Association under Carrie Chapman Catt had played an inside game, as well), as the Republican-controlled US Senate had passed the proposed 19th Amendment, and sent it to the states for ratification. Passage came after mid-term elections had blunted the power of Southern Democrats to block the amendment by delivering a Republican majority. This majority was able to vote with Western and Northern Democrats to secure the ⅔ majority required, in June. Southern Democrats' opposition to a women’s suffrage amendment stemmed from their realization that if the Federal government could “impose” Women’s Suffrage, it could also one day “impose” Black suffrage, so they worked to deny women’s voting rights, so that they could continue to deny African-American voting rights.
As Alice Paul’s picketers turned into Paul’s organizers, pushing for the States to ratify the proposed 19th Amendment, a phenomenon known as Red Summer broke out throughout the United States, but especially notably in Chicago. Chicago, Ida B Wells-Barnett’s adopted home (she was originally from Memphis, yep, Memphis.. history connects), had elected its first Black Alderman and the power of Black voters, including Black women voters was apparent. During that hot summer beach-goers along Lake Michigan were escaping the heat and swimming, while maintaining an unofficial “color line.” Unfortunately, several young Black men were on a raft, which drifted across the color line. White beach-goers began throwing stones, which struck and killed Eugene Williams. A fight broke out on the beach, and the police arrived. They promptly arrested the Black beach-going victims of the violence, while refusing to arrest the white man who had thrown the fatal stone at Williams. Violence ensued, and a bloody riot erupted. African-Americans fought back, but the all-white Chicago police force was firmly on the side of the white perpetrators of racist violence. Dozens died. (https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/07/27/744130358/red-summer-in-chicago-100-years-after-the-race-riots)
Red Summer, as it was called at the time and since, involved multiple assaults on Black communities in Washington, DC; Knoxville, Tennessee; Elaine, Arkansas; Omaha, Nebraska; Longview, Texas; along with Chicago. In no instances did police act to interrupt or protect Black communities from the violence, even participating in the violence to greater or lesser degrees.
The sham of Wilson’s “democracy” was apparent to all who could see, even as attempts were being made to rectify the egregious sexism that had denied women electoral participation since the beginning of the republic.
Eventually, the 19th Amendment would be made law when Tennessee became the 36th and decisive state to ratify the amendment, and yet, despite the amendment’s passage, African-American women living in Southern states did not gain the right to vote, because the insidious “Jim Crow” laws continued to deny their voter participation for some 45 more years. This is notable because, while Black women in the South were still fighting for their right to vote in the 1960s, white women in the North and South, now into their 2nd and 3rd generation as voters, were concerned with other issues, like equal wages, educational equity, and bodily autonomy, and were using their votes and voices to push these issues into the conscience of the nation. The rift, which had emerged in the 1860s, still persisted in the 1960s, as White women and Black women found themselves divided along lines of race, even as a second wave of liberation movements swept the nation.
So, why reflect upon this on June 19, 2020? This Juneteenth, as we once again face a nation confronting its horrible racist past and being forced to recognize its racist present, we have to recognize that freedom and liberation cannot be compartmentalized, but must be universal. The violence wrought upon Black bodies in prison today (and throughout our history) is not altogether different from what was wrought upon white women’s bodies 100 years ago, when they dared to assert their rights forcefully, and we must consider the reality, that any violence perpetrated upon one group can be transferred to another, that the elements of state and economic power committed to the status quo will commit violence against any who challenge that system, and that policing has always reflected the interests of the people in control of the state and economic apparatus. To reform our justice system, we must reimagine policing and the judiciary to divide it from State power, and instead turn it into an aggressive check on any who use power or violence to harm others, even those with political and economic power, perhaps especially those. To end systemic racism and sexism (homophobia, ablism, all the ways in which we divide and oppress people based upon arbitrary characteristics), we must reimagine that State apparatus as well.
As I reflect upon this Juneteenth and the movement in these streets, I see that June 19, 1865 was really the end at the very edge of the beginning of a liberation struggle that has persisted for 155 years since, and this struggle must be waged on all fronts. Each must be concerned with the liberation of the other, or else none can truly be free.
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