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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

33. A Great Historic Figure’s Turn to Anti-Black Racism

Susan B. Anthony, left, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. NJTV

Stanton employed anti-black racist themes with regularity, especially in the South. There, she argued that female voters would maintain the social order by balancing out black voters, whom she painted as ignorant, backward, and prone to raping white women.

Not that there was much need for countering the black vote in the South: within a few years of the 15^th Amendment’s passage, Southern states had effectively disenfranchised blacks. Voter suppression means ranging from removing blacks from voter rolls, to lynching blacks who dared assert their voting rights, reduced the Southern black vote to insignificance for generations.

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.