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The Dark Side of Great Historic Figures

Khalid Elhassan December 11, 2020 33 min

Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony - Elizabeth Cady Stanton — Susan B. Anthony, left, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. NJTV

35. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Went From a Supporter of Black Rights to a Full-Blown Racist

Frederick Douglass, circa 1879. National Archives

From early on, tensions arose within AERA regarding its goal of winning voting rights for both blacks and women. The question of which should be prioritized ended up wrecking the association. After three years, AERA dissolved amidst bitter arguments about whether to support the 15^th Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote.

Reasonable people could disagree on whether women or black men should be the first to get the vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton went on a Klan-like tirade. Frederick Douglass called for supporting the 15^th Amendment, while continuing to back the struggle for women’s rights. Stanton responded with a racist speech mocking the black men and immigrants whom the amendment would enfranchise.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.