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David Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass reveals some ugly racist statements by women’s-rights icons Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in fight over whether women should get vote at same time as black men. 1/
Blight gives this example of Stanton’s “invidious ... racial-ethnic slurs”: she asked her readers to imagine “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic ... making laws” for refined women. 2/
Per Blight, many in women’s rights movement were “disgusted” when Stanton and Anthony “allied with white-supremacist Democrats in 1868” and welcomed the support of “wealthy racist merchant George Francis Train,” who funded Stanton’s journal. 3/
Per Blight, Stanton also predicted that allowing black men to vote would “culminate in fearful outrages on womanhood.” She thus injected (in Blight’s phrase) the “imagined demon of the black rapist ... into the suffrage debate.” 4/
Blight also faults Frederick Douglass for a “racialized rant about Native Americans” and for “one invidious distinction after another” between their alleged backwardness and the qualities of blacks. 5/
To be clear: Douglass, Stanton, and Anthony were all remarkable Americans who deserve to be honored and admired for the honorable and admirable things they did. If we’re going to have monuments only to those who are flawless by today’s standards, we won’t have any monuments. 6/
