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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

31. Susan B. Anthony Wanted Nothing to Do With America’s Leading Black Rights Activist

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seated, and Susan B. Anthony. Library of Congress

Understandably, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s and Susan B. Anthony’s racist attacks deeply wounded Frederick Douglass, who decried “the employment of certain names such as ‘Sambo’“. He declined to stoop to tit-for-tat insults, and continued supporting women’s rights for the rest of his life.

His support was frequently snubbed, with racist insults tossed in. At an 1890s suffrage convention in Atlanta, for example, Susan B. Anthony asked Douglass to not appear on stage with white women. As a black man, she told him, his presence alongside white women would be “inappropriate”.

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.