Always be sure your own nose is clean!!!
On March 3rd 1913, 5000 suffragists from all over the nation descended on Washington, DC on the day of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration to march for the vote. The march is most remembered for the violence that broke out amongst male onlookers while police stood by but the racist actions of one white suffragist leader, Alice Paul, and the defiance of one Black suffrage leader and anti-lynching activist, Ida B. Wells, is more important history for modern anti-racist feminists to know. Paul ordered Black women, many of whom had traveled long distances to come, to march at the end of the parade rather than with their state delegations. Wells was furious; she’d organized the Chicago delegation! When the march started, she disappeared in to the crowd. When the Illinois delegation passed, she slipped in and locked arms with two white suffragists with whom she regularly organized and finished the parade in her rightful place. Black women have always been in and been leaders of the movement. They and other marginalized folks have and continue to face oppression from within. To disappear history facts like this is to disappear leaders like Ida B. Wells and to make it easier for us to continue as an oppressive movement. This is women’s history. What we do with it, what future movement we make, is up to us.
