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Biography & Autobiography. Juvenile Nonfiction. Multi-Cultural. Geography. For African American women, the fight for the right to vote was only one battle. An eye-opening book that tells the important, overlooked story of black women as a force in the suffrage movement�??when fellow suffragists did not accept them as equal partners in the struggle. Susan B. Anthony. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Alice Paul. The Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. The 1913 Women's March in D.C. When the epic story of the suffrage movement in the United States is told, the most familiar leaders, speakers at meetings, and participants in marches written about or pictured are generally white. That's not the real story. Women of color, especially African American women, were fighting for their right to vote and to be treated as full, equal citizens of the United States. Their battlefront wasn't just about gender. African American women had to deal with white abolitionist-suffragists who drew the line at sharing power with their black sisters. They had to overcome deep, exclusionary racial prejudices that were rife in the American suffrage movement. And they had to maintain their dignity�??and safety�??in a society that tried to keep them in its bottom ranks. Lifting as We Climb is the empowering story of African American women who refused to accept all this. Women in black church groups, black female sororities, black women's improvement societies and social clubs. Women who formed their own black suffrage associations when white-dominated national suffrage groups rejected them. Women like Mary Church Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women and of the NAACP; or educator-activist Anna Julia Cooper who championed women getting the vote and a college education; or the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells, a leader in both the suffrage and anti-lynching movements. Author Evette Dionne, a feminist culture writer and the editor-in-chief of Bitch Media, has uncovered an extraordinary and underrepresented history of black women. In her powerful book, she draws an important historical line from abolition to suffrage to civil rights to contemporary young activists�??filling in the blanks of the American suf… (more)
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Evette Dionne has clearly presented the difficult battle for women’s suffrage that African American women endured before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 26, 1920, guaranteeing all women the right to vote.
African American women fought their marginalization in the anti-slavery, and later female suffrage, movements and made their voices heard. The identification of African American female activists and the parts they played in American history is the strength of Dionne’s book. So many of these women played pivotal roles in the passage of fundamental civil rights legislation and yet remain unidentified in mainstream accounts.
Lifting as we climb is a must read book for all. Readers who liked Fighting chance: The struggle over woman suffrage and black suffrage in Reconstruction America by Faye Dudden and Sisters in the struggle: African American women in the civil rights-black power movement edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas will particularly like Dionne’s work.