Town Hall Meeting

 Hello all. My name is Susan B. Anthony. Many people know me as an icon in the women's suffrage movement, but there is much more to me than that. I am a women's rights activist, abolitionist, and suffragist. 

Believe it or not, my work helped create the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Thanks to my hard work and many other factors, women now have the right to vote.

My role in the anti-slavery movement stems from the Quaker belief in equality under God and my knowledge of slavery as a young girl. My dad owned a cotton factory, and one day, I overheard him saying that he tried to avoid purchasing cotton raised by enslaved labor. This stuck with me and stayed with me throughout my lifetime. This foundation led me to join the Society of Friends, aka the Quakers, right after my 13th birthday. 

By 1845, my family's farmhouse became a meeting spot for abolitionists, including Fredrick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. 

Furthermore, by 1856, I had become an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society; I arranged meetings, posted flyers, made various speeches, and even encountered hostile mobs and armed threats, and had my image dragged through the streets due to my belief in the abolishment of slavery.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and I formed "The Women's Loyal National League" to press for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.

Although I have lobbied for the abolition of slavery and the rights of enslaved African Americans, I often adopt the racist positions used by many other white women currently to support my goal of women's suffrage. I focused solely on white women suffragists and did not include any women suffragists of color.

Although I do not mention enslaved women of color in my women's suffragist movement often, I never waiver in my opposition to slavery. I see the fight for women's rights and the abolition of slavery as intertwined struggles for human equality. 

In 1859, I presented a speech called "Make the Slave's Case Our Own." I want to take a moment to highlight some of the things that I mentioned that I believe will leave you with something to think about:

Let us, my friends, make the enslaved person's case our own for the passing hour. As much as in us lies, let us feel that is ourselves," "Let us feel that it is our own children, that are ruthlessly torn from our yearning mother hearts, and driven into the coffle gang, through burning suns, and drenching rains, to be sold on the auction block to the highest bidder," 

As a society, would it be that hard to make the enslaved person our neighbor? 

Luke 6:31 says, "Do to others as you would have them do to you."

It is said that all of the blame for slavery should be placed upon the South, but we, the North, have made an agreement with them to capture any runaway slaves. We are currently dancing with the devil but we're quick to quote God and the bible. The South and the North are both to blame at this moment. We must take accountability for the role we play in slavery. 

The numbers regarding slavery have gone from half a million to nearly 4 million. As a country that we all could once proudly claim and represent, we should be ashamed of ourselves. We must now put our heads down in embarrassment and shame at the slightest mention of our country.

If the roles were reversed, do you think it would be easier for us to abolish slavery? If we magically changed skin tones and the enslaved person's fate became ours, then there would be no need to continue with this debate or the need for rhetorical questions.