She told the white suffragists, to their faces, that her sex would not save her if her race did not.
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper needs to be remembered.
The Person
She was born free in Baltimore in 1825, which in a slave state was its own kind of danger. Free papers could be lost. Free people could be seized. Frances Ellen Watkins learned early that the line between free and owned was thin, and that a Black woman stood on the wrong side of it whether she was free or not.
She became a poet first, then a lecturer. In 1854 she gave her first antislavery speech in New Bedford and never really stopped. She toured the country and spoke about slavery, and after the war she spoke about the vote. She was the first Black woman in America to publish a short story. She was good on a platform — clear, composed, hard to rattle. That composure would matter later, because it was the thing her allies could not forgive.
Her husband Fenton Harper died around 1864. She was left with children and debt, and the men who came to settle the estate took the household down to the bed. She knew, in a way the women she would soon address did not, exactly what the law did to a woman who had no man and no vote.
The Context
In May 1866 the country had a new amendment and an old problem. The Thirteenth had ended slavery. It had not said what a freed person was — citizen, voter, neither. That was the open question, and it sat on every reformer in the room.
The room was the Church of the Puritans, near Union Square in New York. It was the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, and the names on the platform were the famous ones: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott. On that same day, in that same hall, the convention voted itself into something new. It adopted a constitution and became the American Equal Rights Association, pledged to secure the vote irrespective of race, color, or sex. For one afternoon the two causes were one cause.
Harper was invited to speak. She was the rare figure who belonged to both movements and was fully trusted by neither.
The Decision
She stood up and told them the truth they had not come to hear.
“You white women speak here of rights,” she said. “I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man’s hand against me.”
It was a rebuke, delivered from their own platform, to their faces. The women in that hall wanted a single thing — the vote for women — and many of them wanted it enough to take it alone, ahead of Black Americans, or at their expense. Harper would not sign that bargain. Her sex would not save her, she told them, if her race did not. The two wrongs were one wrong, and a vote that fixed only half of it fixed nothing for her.
She made it concrete. She told them about the train from Washington to Baltimore that spring, in the capital of the nation, where they had put her in the smoking car. Loud voices in the hall called out, “Shame.” She had refused to move. She told them of a colored woman in Philadelphia turned out of a streetcar, and of the day a conductor ordered her from her seat and she screamed the only word that would stop him. “Are there not wrongs to be righted?”
She could not have known how the room would take it. She said it anyway. That was the decision — not a vote, not a signature, but the choice to tell allies, in the hour they most wanted unity, that their unity was built on a floor she was standing under.
The Aftermath
Within three years the coalition she had addressed came apart in her hands.
The Fifteenth Amendment would give the vote to Black men and not to women. Stanton and Anthony refused it and turned bitter, arguing that educated white women deserved the ballot before the freedmen, and reaching for the ugliest language to say so. In 1869 they left to form their own association, for women only.
Harper did not follow them. She had been proven right in the worst way, and she still would not take the exit they offered. She supported the Fifteenth Amendment — the loaf of bread offered to one starving man when two were hungry — and she joined the rival wing, the American Woman Suffrage Association, which kept both causes in the same room. She stayed in the interracial fight that had just failed her. In 1873, at that association’s convention, she put it plainly: as much as white women needed the ballot, she said, colored women needed it more.
The cost came slowly, and it was quiet. When Stanton and Anthony sat down to write the movement’s official record, the six volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, they covered the 1866 convention. They left out her speech. The woman who had told them the truth was written out of the account by the people she had told it to. For a century she was a footnote in a history she had helped to make.
The Meaning
There is a particular courage in telling your own side the thing it does not want to hear. It is easier to face an enemy. An enemy expects it. An ally can make you pay in a currency an enemy never holds — belonging, welcome, a place in the story that gets told afterward.
Harper paid in exactly that currency. She was not exiled or arrested. She was minimized, which is the punishment a movement reserves for the member who was right too early and too plainly. She anticipated by more than a century the idea that a person is not divided into separate rights that can be traded against each other, and she said so to a room that wanted very much to trade.
She kept working, inside the coalitions that had disappointed her, because the alternative was to leave the field to the people who wanted her out of it. That is the harder form of loyalty — not to the allies, who had earned less than they thought, but to the cause itself, which was bigger than the people who had claimed it.
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Sources: Primary text drawn from Proceedings of the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 10, 1866 (New York: Robert J. Johnston, 1866), held at the New-York Historical Society and digitized by the Iowa State University Archives of Women’s Political Communication and the Library of Congress. Scholarship: Frances Smith Foster, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (1990); Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy (1994); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause (2016); Nell Irvin Painter, “Voices of Suffrage.” The 1873 line is preserved in the Woman’s Journal, the official organ of the American Woman Suffrage Association.
Next in this series: Amos T. Akerman — a former Confederate who became Grant’s Attorney General and aimed federal power straight at the Klan.
Charles C. Jett is the author of the Courage and Consequence series. A Naval Academy graduate and former Cold War submarine officer, he writes on leadership, history, and the decisions that define character at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.
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