3. Despite Being Wounded by these Early Suffragists’ Racist Attacks, Frederick Douglass Continued to Support Women’s Rights
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton supported equality for women. What they had in mind in practice, however, was not equality for all women, but only for white ones. After the Civil War, while both black and white women sought the right to vote, they had different motives. Stanton and Anthony sought the vote as symbol and substance of parity with their husbands, brothers, and fathers. By contrast, black suffragists sought the vote for both themselves and their menfolk, to empower black communities. Especially in the South, where recently emancipated black citizens were subjected to a violent reign of racist terror to keep them subservient and disempowered.
Stanton’s and Anthony’s awful racist attacks deeply wounded Frederick Douglass, who decried “the employment of certain names such as ‘Sambo’“. However, he declined to stoop to their level and engage in tit-for-tat insults, and instead continued to support women’s rights for the rest of his life. His support was frequently snubbed, with racist insults tossed in to rub salt into the wound. 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”.
