The Genius of America (16 page)

Kennedy had to respond, despite his political reluctance. The brutality was escalating, and it was broadcast by television news throughout the country and world. The question, he announced to the nation, was “whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities” to eat “in a restaurant open to the public,” to “send [their] children to the best public school available” and to “vote for the public officials who represent [them]”— the very questions the Civil War amendments to the Constitution would seem to have answered but had not. Kennedy announced his support for proposed federal civil rights legislation. Civil rights leaders said the legislation was too weak, and, in any case, southern legislators stalled it.

Against this background, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin announced a march on Washington for jobs and freedom, a march to pressure Congress to pass a meaningful civil rights law.

Their planned march had not made the Kennedy administration happy. Would it further legislative goals or harden the resistance of powerful southern legislators? What would its effect be on the required Republican Party support? Would violence occur in the nation's capital? What would be its effect on the 1964 elections? But realizing it could not be stopped, the president's advisers entered into a long negotiation with the organizers over the march's tone and logistics. The administration exercised so much control over the logistics of the march that some civil rights leaders balked at their commitment to participate, and Malcolm X named it the “Farce on Washington.”

But the day of the march dawned beautiful, and attention was not on the politics or logistics but on the sense of unity and possibility it created.

King was the day's last speaker. The extraordinary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson had just concluded singing the spiritual “I've Been Buked and I've Been Scorned.” The towering figures of the civil rights movement had already spoken. But now everyone was waiting to hear from the fiery young minister from Atlanta who had electrified the country that summer by his passion, courage and cunning in Birmingham. He had planned only a short recitation, but as he was finishing, Jackson was heard advising him, “Tell them about your dream, Martin! Tell them about your dream!” And King delivered.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal . . .” And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.

King's quote is from the Declaration of Independence. But his appeal was to America's Constitutional Conscience. All Americans knew that African Americans had to be included in the political process. But many had struggled against that. It would limit their power. For real enfranchisement for African Americans would mean opportunities for political and economic power. More competition, less monopoly. But within two years of the march, almost 180 years after the Constitution's enactment and ninety-eight years after the post–Civil War amendments, it would finally be achieved. Congress and President Lyndon Johnson enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The federal government committed itself to the enforcement of both acts.

W
OMEN
A
LSO
W
IN THE
V
OTE

Women also had to struggle for their rights, including the right to vote. In the beginning they were often allied with the abolitionists to win enfranchisement. But when African American men were offered the promise of full citizenship, the alliance split.

Women in America, as elsewhere in the world, were essentially without civil or economic rights. “A woman is nobody. A wife is everything,” editorialized a Philadelphia newspaper, capturing the predominant sentiment of nineteenth-century Americans (many women included). As a wife or single person, an American woman had few rights. For the most part, as a wife, she could not have her own property, could not enter into a contract, could not keep a salary of her own and could not maintain custody of her children. All her rights depended upon the discretion of her husband. “A married woman has no legal existence; she has no more absolute rights than a slave on a Southern plantation,” wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1850. “Civilly, socially, and religiously, she is what man chooses her to be—nothing more or less—and such is the slave.”

The power of the Constitution's message that representation protected liberty was well illustrated by the strategy of women activists. “No country ever has had or ever will have peace until every citizen has a voice in the government,” said Stanton, in a pithy adaptation of Madison's theory. “Now let us try universal suffrage. We cannot tell its dangers or delights until we make the experiment.”

Under this banner, an alliance between suffragettes and abolitionists was forged. “If that government only is just which governs by the free consents of the governed,” argued the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, “there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise.” Together they would fight. “For a quarter of a century the two movements, to free the slave and liberate the women, nourished and strengthened one another.” Women, for example, provided the grassroots effort necessary to force some reluctant senators to support adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment as it faltered from the resistance of northern Democrats. Four hundred thousand signatures made their petition campaign “the largest in history up to that time.”

But this unity, as the framers would have predicted, faltered at the end of the Civil War as the debate began about enfranchising the freed slaves. The suffragists wanted this to be their moment, too.

Legislators were divided on the issue of female suffrage. Even some of those who were committed to it judged that the country was not ready. Many Americans shared the view that “women should not vote because they could not.” The “mission” of women, one senator from New Jersey pronounced in an 1866 debate over the franchise in the District of Columbia, “is at home, by their blandishments and their love to assuage the passions of men as they came in from the battle of life, and not by joining in the contest to add fuel to the very flames.”

There was a political danger that tying the vote for women to the vote for black men could produce defeat for both. Republicans did not want to lose a political benefit. “Two million newly enfranchised black men offered the party in power the possibility of building a Republican South.” Republicans argued that slavery had been the cause of the war and that the North's victory had been greatly aided by the thousands of African American males, freemen and former slaves, who fought in the Union Army.

The Fourteenth Amendment made the issue stark. The first section says that states may not “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” and that “all persons” born or naturalized in the United States “are citizens.” Voting would seem to be a privilege of citizenship, women's rights activists argued. But the second section set them straight, describing the right to vote as belonging to “any of the male inhabitants of such state.”

How could women support such an amendment? asked Stanton and many other activists. How can you not? asked her longtime ally and friend the abolitionist Wendell Phillips and many other Republicans. “This hour belongs to the negro,” he told the Anti-Slavery Society in 1865. “Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?” she answered. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony worried that if African American males were assured the vote, the opportunity for women would be lost. “If that word male be inserted as now proposed, it will take us a century to get it out again,” Stanton wrote. Actually, it took fifty-five years.

The suffragists lost on the Fourteenth Amendment, but the fight continued into 1869 as Congress debated the Fifteenth Amendment. The Republicans, worried that the prescription for voting in the Fourteenth Amendment was fuzzy, undertook to make it crystal clear through an amendment that expressly barred states from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” But not gender. In other words, women were left out again. Women activists divided on the issue. Stanton and Anthony adamantly opposed the amendment. “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work for or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman,” exclaimed Anthony.

Anthony was passionate about the right to vote. She, like the framers, saw it as a key to freedom. For Anthony, the right to vote would lift the legal burdens that men had placed on women “to protect them.” And, since attending a women's rights convention in 1852 in Syracuse, she had committed her life to securing women's suffrage and what she saw as related causes, such as the abolition of slavery. Her life was the relentless pursuit of this goal, through organizing, publishing, writing, speaking and petitioning. She would pursue this goal until her death in 1906, fourteen years before women were enfranchised.

ALL WISE WOMEN WILL OPPOSE THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT
, blasted a headline of the
Revolution
, a paper Stanton and Anthony coedited. The showdown came in May of 1869 at a convention of the American Equal Rights Association at which Stanton's longtime friend and ally Frederick Douglass rose to challenge her position: “When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement . . . then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.”

With this, the matter was settled, at least for then. Many women activists reluctantly supported the Fifteenth Amendment, continuing the fight for their vote separately. In 1869 and 1870, the territories of Wyoming and Utah granted suffrage in state elections to their female citizens, and other territories and states followed suit. But the fight for women to vote in federal elections would continue another seventy years. Along the way, one woman, Susan B. Anthony, would get to vote in a presidential election, in 1872, although women had not yet received the right to do so.

S
USAN
B. A
NTHONY
I
S
A
RRESTED
FOR
V
OTING

When Susan B. Anthony entered the parlor of her home in Rochester, New York, to greet the federal deputy marshal, she knew he had come to arrest her. Her crime? As stated in the arrest warrant: “Without having a lawful right to vote in said election district the said Susan B. Anthony, being then and there a person of the female sex . . . did knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully vote.” On November 5, 1872, she had entered the polling place in Rochester's Eighth Ward, convinced the inspectors of her right to vote (she had convinced them of her right to register several days earlier) and cast her ballot for the Republican Ulysses S. Grant and the rest of the Republican ticket, whom she judged were most sympathetic to women's rights. “Well I have been & gone & done it!!—positively voted the Republican ticket,” she would write her friend and ally Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Anthony believed she did have a lawful right to vote. She and many others found it in the recently ratified Fourteenth Amendment. The magistrate hearing her case did not agree. After her arrest, he required the posting of bail, which Anthony refused to do. So she was held. This was a part of her strategy, not a sign of her poverty. Anthony had plenty of money available to her to secure her freedom. Rather, she wanted to be held so she could bring her case directly to the Supreme Court under the rules of habeas corpus. This would allow a national test of the question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote. But her lawyer, Henry Selden, a former judge on New York's highest court and supporter of women's suffrage, posted bond for her without her approval. In a triumph of gallantry over political stratagem, he would later explain, “I could not see a lady I respected put in jail.”

But despite her anger over her lawyer's act, she used her case to publicize the issue of women's suffrage. In her writing and speaking she would ask the simple question of whether an American should be arrested for voting in a presidential election. Anthony brought all the strands of thinking from the revolutionary era together. She offered arguments from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the writings of Thomas Paine and James Madison, asking her audience to see the denial of suffrage as slavery. She was speaking for history but also to influence potential jurors. “The only alleged ground of illegality of the defendant's vote is that she is a woman,” her defense argued.

There is evidence her campaign was working. First prosecutors moved the case to find a less influenced jury pool. Then, when the trial was held, Justice Ward Hunt, in a very unusual and probably unconstitutional move, refused to let the jury decide the case, finding her guilty himself. Depriving the jury of the opportunity to decide Anthony's case again underscores the extent to which those with power are unwilling to share it. A jury of “one's peers” is another important representative institution with which government power is shared. No other country gives as much power to juries. Before the Revolution, juries were often a way for colonists to subvert the edicts of the Crown. And after the Revolution, juries could effectively render unpopular laws null, as, for example, some northern juries did with laws demanding the payment of debt or later the return of fugitive slaves.