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The Contributions Of Susan B Anthony And Ida B. Wells

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Susan B. Anthony and Ida B. Wells were among the many women that strived to change post-Civil War America in order to gain rights for women and African Americans. While the effects of their efforts may not have been immediate, these two women significantly helped in bringing about the change during the Reconstruction era. In 1872, Susan B. Anthony was charged for her attempt to vote in Rochester, New York in which the District Attorney stated her actions were a blatant violation of the 14th amendment. Anthony’s goal throughout the trial was to prove that she in fact did not commit a crime because the 14th amendment was a right of citizens and the clause failed to mention anything about an individual’s sex rendering them from the right to …show more content…

Wells was a very prominent activist against lynching and the white supremacists ideologies that continued to prevail throughout the 1890s and onwards. “Her goal was to exposed and publicize the mistreatment of her people”(p.314) and she did just that in the African American newspaper Free Speech and Headlight, voicing her unfiltered, explicitly raw opinions on the accusations against black men and the things black women experienced. The biggest realization she would come upon that changed her life was the lynched of a man she knew, Thomas Moss. She had concluded that “Moss’s ‘crime’ had been the competition that his successful grocery store posed to whites”(p.314). One of her most remarkable yet controversial analysis was in that she stated “black and white people sometimes voluntarily chose to be each other’s sexual partners. […] She was what was termed as a ‘race woman’ meaning her concerns lied with happiness and progress for African Americans rather than with integration” (p.314). This was opposing to the prevailing opinion of why lynching was acceptable as white elite males claimed that African American men preyed on White women and that in order to honor these women lynching would suffice. While her investigation into the lynching of Moss got her kicked out of Memphis, the accounts had a great impact on the African American women in the North- “who went on to form the National Association of Colored women and to join in the work of exposing the true nature, extent, and causes of southern lynchings”

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