American Equal Rights Association
Founded on May 10, 1866, during the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, the AERA met its first test in 1867. In that year Kansas, a Republican state, voted down two separate referenda granting suffrage to blacks and women, respectively. During the Kansas campaign, organization founders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had accepted the help of a known racist, alienating abolitionist members as well as AERA president Lucretia Mott.
In 1869, long-time friends Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony found themselves, for the first time, on opposing sides of a debate. The American Equal Rights Association (AERA), which had originally fought for both blacks’ and women’s right to suffrage, voted to support the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, granting suffrage to black men, but not women. Anthony questioned why women should support this amendment when black men were not continuing to show support for women’s voting rights. Partially as a result of the decision by the AERA, Anthony soon thereafter devoted herself almost exclusively to the agitation for women's rights.
Read more about this topic: Susan B. Anthony, Early Social Activism
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