Celebrating Fannie Lou Hamer, Sojourner Truth And Other Crusaders On Women’s Equality Day

“If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!”

Those powerful words are from the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, as she demanded equal rights for women at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in 1851, which came to be known as her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. But she was a true powerhouse in all senses of the word, a leader in her time and ours.

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But we must recall the environment she played in, and how, in the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, the women’s rights and anti-slavery movements found solidarity in their call for equality and emancipation, although schisms soon developed between the two campaigns. Black advocates of the women's vote were often fighting for universal suffrage, regardless of race or class as well as gender, necessarily binding their own cause to the wider civil rights struggle. Courting the support of the segregated Southern states, the National American Woman Suffrage Association feared that alignment with the Black suffrage movement would jeopardize their singular objective.

When the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870, enshrining the right of Black men to vote, the movement became further divided. Groups such as the National Association of Colored Women, led by Mary Church Terrell, and the Alpha Suffrage Club, co-founded by Ida B. Wells, counteracted the increased marginalization of Black American women within the enfranchisement struggle. As with the reality of the 15th Amendment, when the 19th Amendment came into effect in 1920, discriminatory state laws and practices prevented many Black women from exercising their right to vote. The Black suffrage movement would persist right up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Born in 1876 and of the Yankton Dakota nation, her work examined the intersection between Native
American and English-speaking cultural identities in the early 20th century. 

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An advocate for women’s rights during the era of the New Woman, Zitkála-Šá founded the Indian Welfare
Committee of the General Federation of Women's Clubs in 1924 and organised voter-registration drives
amongst Native American communities.

Appalled by the checks of Jim Crow laws, which effectively denied Black Americans the right to vote, Hamer led a series of resourceful, brilliantly-executed campaigns and social initiatives. As a community activist and spokeswoman, the racism Hamer personally endured was deeply violent. In 1961, she had surgery to remove a uterine tumor, and during the operation, a white doctor performed a hysterectomy without Hamer’s consent. Years later, after adopting two daughters with her husband, one of her children was to die of internal bleeding and was refused hospital admission because of her mother's activism. Further, Hamer’s own health never fully recovered after being beaten in police custody in 1963.

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Ostracized by some establishment figures for her apparent “illiteracy”, Hamer was a convincing and inclusive orator. Detailing her own experiences, she inspired confidence where fear and intimidation had been used to disenfranchise Black American citizens and the rural poor.

Hamer is pictured here at the 1964 National Democratic Convention, where she spoke as co-founder of
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; she later helped establish the National Women's Political
Caucus. The title of her celebrated speech (and gravestone inscription), “Sick and Tired of Being Sick and
Tired,” has been revived by today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

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Photographed in December 1970, Huerta -- then vice president of the United Farm Workers Union -- joins
Ethel Kennedy in a vigil for Cesar Chavez outside the Monterey County Jail. The UFWOC leader, Chavez
has been imprisoned for violating a court injunction prohibiting a consumer lettuce boycott.