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In April of this year, we went to the Capitol Rotunda to pray as Congress was beginning to consider Trump’s Big Deadly and Destructive Bill that sold out poor and low-income Americans to give a tax break to billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. We bowed our heads beneath that vaulted dome on behalf of the people we know who will die because of this wicked policy. We did it as Christian preachers because we had seen others misuse our faith to hold a service of false worship in that space, blessing the things that we know God hates.
We did not go to the rotunda to get arrested, but to arrest the attention of the nation.
When we paused at the center of the rotunda to listen to the Spirit, we were drawn to the statue that honors the founding mothers of America’s woman’s suffrage movement – Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Throughout our Moral Mondays in DC this summer, moral witnesses who came to the rotunda to pray bowed their heads alongside these giants of America’s long journey toward freedom and justice for all.
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton first met in 1840, when they were both US delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Their Quaker and Reformed faith traditions had instilled in each of them a commitment to equality that compelled them to not only oppose slavery, but to also work for its abolition. As two of a handful of female delegates to the convention, however, Mott and Stanton learned that they would not be permitted to speak. In response, they started making plans for the Seneca Falls Convention, which would launch the woman’s suffrage movement in America eight years later.
But that was still 70 years before the 19th amendment to the US Constitution would finally be ratified on August 18, 1920 in the most unlikely of times and places – at the Tennessee statehouse, in the midst of Jim Crow’s authoritarianism. By that time, the first generation of suffragists had all died, and second and third generation activists had fought amongst themselves for decades about strategy, tactics, and the familiar divide-and-conquer issue of race. Despite setbacks and betrayals that constantly frustrated the movement, stalwarts kept hope alive, even waging a hunger strike after being arrested in DC for civil disobedience. But no one – not even the most hopeful of suffragists – expected to win the ballot in the heart of Dixie.
Still, that’s what happened on August 18, 105 years ago.
It happened despite the racism that led Josephine Pearson to pose with a Confederate veteran beneath the battle flag of the Lost Cause at the headquarters of the anti-suffrage lobby in Nashville.
It happened despite a campaign in Tennessee’s churches that claimed the pro-suffrage movement was an unbiblical assault on the traditional family that would ruin America. (Pearson included a copy of Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible in her exhibition, warning of its dangers to so-called traditional values.)
It happened despite the influence of the corporate “whiskey lobby” that set up a Jack Daniels speakeasy in the Hermitage Hotel, plying legislators with liquor to try to influence their vote - or, at the very least, get them so drunk that they wouldn’t show up for the next morning’s session.
It happened despite a propaganda campaign that sent false telegram messages to pro-suffrage legislators, urging them to rush home before a wife or child died from some dreaded disease.
Lies. Money. Racism. Distorted religion. All of the worst that we see in today’s Trump regime was present in spades in Nashville in 1920. But the suffragists didn’t give up. Factions who’d fought each other for funders and for leadership positions refused to let disagreement distract them from their shared conviction that women should have the franchise. People who’d been pitted against one another came together – Black and white, women and men, rich and poor, urban and rural.
They called it the “War of the Roses” that hot August in Nashville because the anti-suffragists wore red roses on their lapels while the pro-suffragists wore yellow. Members of the Tennessee legislature at the time were all men, so only men would cast votes. In one of the more dramatic scenes in American legislative history – a moment made for the stage and powerfully imagined in Shaina Taub’s SUFFS The Musical – it all came down to one man’s vote. Harry Burn was wearing a red rose on his lapel when he entered the statehouse, but he took it off and cast his vote for suffrage, he said, because he’d gotten a telegram from his mother in East Tennessee that morning. She’d made a moral appeal and asked her son to do what he knew was right.
We didn’t know it then, but it seems clear now that the Spirit led us to pray with the suffragists when we began this Moral Monday campaign back in April because we needed their example and this history.
This Monday, on the 105th anniversary of the day when the unimaginable finally happened for the woman’s suffrage movement in the heart of the South, we are following Southern Senators home for their August recess. Led by women who are moral leaders and directly impacted people in their communities, we will expose the death that these representatives voted for by cutting healthcare and nutrition assistance. We’ll carry coffins to their offices to shine a light of the death they’ve unleashed because we know what it means to bury people before their time when political leaders sell them out.
Some say there’s no sense protesting in the South, where MAGA controls the narrative and the electorate is reliably “red.”
Some say a moral action may be noble, but it isn’t likely to make much difference while those who have power silence dissent within their party and the media.
Some say a pro-democracy resistance is needed, but the majority that opposes authoritarianism is so divided that it cannot form a united front.
All of these things were said about the final campaign for woman’s suffrage in 1920. But people decided to come together and do the work anyway. They petitioned their legislators. They wrote newsletters. They rallied in parks and preached sermons in pulpits. They staged public theater. They went to jail. They fasted and prayed. They sent telegrams to their sons.
They did it all because they knew that it was right. And somehow, despite all of the arguments that it would never work then and there, the 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, by a single vote in the Tennessee legislature.
Thank God for every single soul who stood for justice then.
Thank God for every one of you who’s standing now.
May the Spirit of truth, love, and justice embolden each of us to do all that we can wherever we can while we still can.
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