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| - Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a photograph went viral showing how women had put "I voted" stickers on famed suffragist Susan B. Anthony's grave in past elections. With U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris campaigning for the presidency, many people online said the gesture had special significance now that a Black woman was running for the office.
However, a number of posts sought to counter that sentiment by highlighting a quote attributed to Anthony that indicated she had racist views, among them a desire to continue excluding Black men from the right to vote, at least until that right was successfully secured for women.
Posts on X referred to this purported quote from Anthony: "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."
(X user @rahne_jones)
Anthony indeed made that statement in 1866, after a meeting also attended by Black abolitionist and activist Frederick Douglass. Her biographies vary on the exact wording and refer to her saying she would cut off either her "arm" or "hand." Anthony was responding to an argument about whether to prioritize suffrage for Black men or for white women. A version of the quote has been cited by her official biographer. As such, we rate this a correct attribution.
The Quote in Context
The website of the National Constitution Center, a museum in Washington, D.C., focused on the U.S. Constitution, referenced her quote as follows:
The [Seneca Falls Convention of 1848] was also notable in that it excluded black women and women of other minority populations. Exclusion was a prominent facet of the new suffrage movement, which seemed at times to view suffrage as a zero-sum game between oppressed populations.
In an 1866 meeting where Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony argued about whether to prioritize suffrage for black men or suffrage for white women, Anthony said, "I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman."
Black women remained largely excluded from suffrage discussions as seen in Sojourner Truth's 1867 comment on the issue: "There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and colored women not theirs, the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before."
The National Susan B. Anthony Museum says the quote emerged from a story written by Ida Husted Harper, a fellow suffragist and journalist, whom Anthony herself asked to be her biographer, according to Britannica. The museum describes how, in 1866, Anthony was privately approached by abolitionists Theodore Tilton and Wendell Phillips, who asked her to suspend her work on women's suffrage and concentrate on getting the vote for men of color only. She reportedly spoke the above words in anger.
According to Volume I of Harper's "The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony," Anthony made the remarks in a private meeting after speaking at the Women's Rights Convention, where she had actually emphasized the need to unite the causes of Black people and women. This is Harper's version of the encounter (emphasis ours):
A short time thereafter [the 1866 Women's Rights Convention] Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton, Mr. Phillips and Mr. Tilton were in the Standard office discussing the work. Mr. Phillips argued that the time was ripe for striking the word "white" out of the New York constitution, at its coming convention, but not for striking out "male." Mr. Tilton supported him, in direct contradiction to all he had so warmly advocated only a few weeks before, and said what the women should do was to canvass the State with speeches and petitions for the enfranchisement of the negro, leaving that of the women to come afterward, presumably twenty years later, when there would be another revision of the constitution. Mrs. Stanton, entirely overcome by the eloquence of these two gifted men, acquiesced in all they said; but Miss Anthony, who never could be swerved from her standard by any sophistry or blandishments, was highly indignant and declared that she would sooner cut off her right hand than ask the ballot for the black man and not for woman. After Phillips had left, she overheard Tilton say to Mrs. Stanton, "What does ail Susan? She acts like one possessed." Mrs. Stanton replied, "I can not imagine; I never before saw her so unreasonable and absolutely rude."
We should note that the Susan B. Anthony Museum calls the idea that Anthony favored suffrage for white women over suffrage for Black people in general a "misrepresentation." It cites another statement by Anthony in which she demands equal rights "for every man black or white, & for every woman, black or white":
It is not a question of precedence between women & black men. Neither has a claim to precedence upon an Equal Rights platform. But the business of this association is to demand for every man black or white, & for every woman, black or white, that they shall be this instant enfranchised & admitted into the body politic with equal rights & privileges.
Anthony was part of an anti-slavery family, yet prioritized the voting rights of white women over those of Black men, while Black women had been completely left out of the debate. Just before Anthony made the statement about cutting off her hand, she gave a speech at the Women's Rights Convention that emphasized uniting these causes into one (emphasis ours):
There is, there can be, but one true basis, viz.: that taxation and representation must be inseparable; hence our demand must now go beyond woman—it must extend to the farthest limit of the principle of the "consent of the governed," as the only authorized or just government. We therefore wish to broaden our woman's rights platform and make it in name what it ever has been in spirit, a human rights platform. As women we can no longer claim for ourselves what we do not for others, nor can we work in two separate movements to get the ballot for the two disfranchised classes, negroes and women, since to do so must be at double cost of time, energy and money. … Therefore, that we may henceforth concentrate all our forces for the practical application of our one grand, distinctive, national idea — universal suffrage — I hope we will unanimously adopt the resolution before us, thus resolving ourselves into the American Equal Rights Association.
Even though she formed the American Equal Rights Association with Black activists like Douglass, there was constant tension within the group over its priorities. Anthony and Douglass had a decades-long friendship that was also fraught with disagreements. For one thing, Black women were ignored in AERA's activism, according to history professor Lisa Tetrault.
The AERA dissolved in 1869 over disagreements about whether to support the 15th Amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote. Indeed, Anthony was among the suffragists who did not support the 15th Amendment.
In an 1868 speech to a group of Black men, Anthony argued against the amendment because if voting "be an inalienable right, it is as much the right of the black woman as it is of the white. And you can't ask it for any class of men, without asking it for all the women who are deprived of it."
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