Good Morning POU! Now let us tell ya why white suffragists can kiss our asses. I will just reprint this article from The Smithsonian Magazine and warn you that your eyes will roll so hard you will lose sight several times.
Rebecca Latimer Felton, a “grand old woman from Georgia,” was 87 years old when she took the oath of office on November 21, 1922, becoming the first female senator in American history.
Suffragists in the Senate chamber cheered. The 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, had only been ratified two years earlier, and Georgia was the first state to oppose it. Now, it was the first state to appoint a woman as a senator.
But this victory for women’s rights was a thorny one: Felton was hardly a progressive champion.
“The day marked a historic first for American women,” journalist Laura Mallonee wrote for Smithsonian in 2022. “But it’s complicated by Felton’s record as an outspoken white supremacist and the last member of Congress to have enslaved people.”
Felton was born on a wealthy plantation near Decatur, Georgia, in 1835, and married enslaver, farmer, surgeon and Methodist preacher William Harrell Felton in 1853. She entered political life as the manager of his successful campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives as an independent Democrat in 1874. For decades, she remained in the limelight of the post-bellum South as a virulent white supremacist, advocating lynchings, drumming up racial hate in speeches and newspapers, and decrying Black men as dangers to white women’s virtue.
Felton was an avowed white supremacist. She claimed, for instance, that the more money that Georgia spent on black people’s education, the more crimes black people committed. For the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, she “proposed a southern exhibit ‘illustrating the slave period,’ with a cabin and ‘real colored folks making mats, shuck collars, and baskets—a woman to spin and card cotton—and another to play banjo and show the actual life of [the] slave—not the Uncle Tom sort.'” She wanted to display “the ignorant contented darky—as distinguished from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s monstrosities.”
Felton considered “young blacks” who sought equal treatment “half-civilized gorillas”, and ascribed to them a “brutal lust” for white women. While seeking suffrage for white women, she decried voting rights for black people, arguing that it led directly to the rape of white women.
Felton also advocated more lynchings of black men, saying that such was “elysian” compared to the possible rape of white women. On August 11, 1898, Felton gave a speech in Tybee Island, Georgia, to several hundred members of the Georgia State Agricultural Society. She urged an increase in lynchings in order to protect rural white women from being raped by black men.
When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue – if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts – then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.
— Mrs. W.H. Felton, August 11, 1898
Newspapers reprinted a transcript of Felton’s speech to garner support for the Democratic Party. On August 18, 1898, Alex Manly’s Daily Record printed a rebuttal editorial arguing that white rape of black women was much more frequent, and contact between white women and black men was often consensual. Manly’s editorial was used as a pretext for the Wilmington Insurrection of November 1898.
Manly (pictured above) was interviewed by the Baltimore Sun three days after the massacre, and he stated that he only had wished to defend “defamed colored men” libeled by Felton. He said that his editorial had been distorted by white newspapers. Felton’s response appeared in the November 16 issue of the Raleigh News and Observer: “When the negro Manly attributed the crime to intimacy between negro men and white women of the South the slanderer should be made to fear a lyncher’s rope rather than occupy a place in New York newspapers.”
In 1899, a massive crowd of white Georgians arrested, tortured, and lynched a black man, Sam Hose, who had been falsely accused of murdering a white man and raping his victim’s wife. Felton said that any “true-hearted husband or father” would have killed “the beast” and that Hose was due less sympathy than a rabid dog.
Her local suffrage efforts, however, were futile. Georgia refused to ratify the 19th Amendment, but it became federal law anyway in August 1920 after 36 of the 48 states voted in its favor. Even then, Georgia blocked its women from voting in the 1920 elections on a technicality because they had failed to register before local deadlines. Felton responded by calling the state legislature “the most uncompromising woman-haters in the known world.”
But Georgia’s Governor Thomas Hardwick knew women would inevitably become a powerful voting bloc once registered. To curry their favor, he appointed Felton to a Senate seat left vacant by another senator’s death. Hardwick himself wished to run for the seat and figured a woman would not oppose his candidacy.
As it happened, Hardwick lost the election to Walter F. George, and suffragists rallied to have Felton seated for just one day before George was sworn in.
Even though Congress was out of session, President Warren G. Harding relented and held a special legislative session on November 21—not just because of Felton’s appeals, but also because he needed to iron out a bit of maritime shipping legislation.
The event was historic, if largely symbolic. In her remarks, Felton, a self-described “remnant of the Old South that has never flickered in her patriotism,” thanked “the noble men of Georgia” and their “chivalric governor” for the opportunity to speak on the Senate floor.
Her first speech was her last, and George promptly took office thereafter. It would be another 16 years until Gladys Pyle, a Republican from South Dakota, became the first woman elected to the Senate without having first been appointed to fill a vacancy.
Felton never returned to public office, dying at the age of 94 in 1930. Her groundbreaking victory for the suffrage movement laid bare the contradictions in American Progressivism, making it all the more essential to consider all her successes, failures and flaws as part of the nation’s messy past. As historian Crystal Feimster put it to Smithsonian, “we can’t relegate her to the dustbin of history.”