33. A Great Historic Figure’s Turn to Anti-Black Racism
Stanton employed anti-black racist themes with regularity, especially in the South. There, she argued that female voters would maintain the social order by balancing out black voters, whom she painted as ignorant, backward, and prone to raping white women.
Not that there was much need for countering the black vote in the South: within a few years of the 15th Amendment’s passage, Southern states had effectively disenfranchised blacks. Voter suppression means ranging from removing blacks from voter rolls, to lynching blacks who dared assert their voting rights, reduced the Southern black vote to insignificance for generations.