The Democratic Party is the party of change. All men and women are free and have inalienable rights. Democrats have always championed human rights, the poor, and has given a fair deal,and a new deal from FDR thru JFK to Bill Clinton.
The backbone of the Democratic Party are women and African Americans. These two groups have been mostly strong allies working together side by side for the good of the country, but have had their differences. The first major battle between these two disenfranchised groups was who would get the vote first, women or blacks. Now we are at another turning point in history, and the battleground is for which of the groups will be the first to get one of its own elected to the presidency of the United States.
Today many women rightly feel that is time for a female commander and chief and that Hillary Clinton is destined to be the 44th president of the United States.
The overwhelming majority of African Americans are proud of their champion Barack Obama and feel that he has more elected delegates and no one can deny him the nomination and the presidency.
Looking back at the conflict for voting rights for blacks and women might enlighten us so we can check our raw emotionalism and understand the driving force in our brothers and sisters. Both blacks and women have a deep yearning to be an equal and not to be held back. Both are deprived of the power of Ivy League educated white men. Blacks and women usually get along harmoniously, working for progressive causes, but when it came to voting rights and now the presidency, both groups feel they have a pre ordained right to get to the "promised land" ahead of the other.
Frederick Douglass, was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, near Hillsboro in 1818. When he was six years old, a woman, the wife of his slave owner starting to teach him to read, which was against the law, because if blacks got educated they would run away and not want to continue to be slaves. His teacher was scolded by her husband and forbidden to help Douglas, but he learnt from white children and observing whites he worked with. By twelve he read magazines, newspapers and books and was able to form and clarify his thoughts on freedom and human rights. He was sold to a "Slave-breaker" at the age of 16 and whipped regularly till he was nearly broken psychologically.
He fled to freedom at 21, studied in Massachusetts and at 23 became a lecturer on slavery and the rights of blacks. He drew huge crowds participated in the American Anti-Slavery Society's Hundred Conventions project, a six-month tour of meeting halls throughout the Eastern and Midwestern United States. He also participated in the Seneca Falls Convention, the birthplace of the American feminist movement, and signed its Declaration of Sentiments written by Elizabeth Clare Stanton.
He was instrumental in getting congress to pass the 13th - 15th amendments of the constitution. Emancipation and the ending of slavery was ratified by passage of the 13th Amendment, which also granted citizenship to freedmen. The Fourteenth Amendment provided for civil rights for all people and equal protection under the law. The Fifteenth Amendment protected all citizens from being discriminated against in voting because of race.
At 68, Douglass married Helen Pitts, a white feminist from Honeoye, New York. Pitts was the daughter of Gideon Pitts, Jr., an abolitionist colleague and friend of Douglass. She had worked on a radical feminist publication named Alpha while living in Washington, D.C. The couple faced a storm of controversy with their marriage, since she was both white and nearly 20 years younger than he. Her family stopped speaking to her; his was bruised, as his children felt his marriage was a repudiation of their black (deceased) mother. But feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton congratulated the couple, despite knowing she could be denounced by her fellow feminists for doing so.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in 1815. She was well educated and majored in Greek, Latin and mathematics. She focused her work not only on getting voting rights for women but women's parental and custody rights, property rights (women could not own property at that time), employment and income rights, divorce laws, the economic health of the family, and birth control.
In 1848, Stanton joined a handful of other women and organized the first women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls on July 19 and 20. Stanton drafted a Declaration of Sentiments, which she read at the convention. Modeled on the United States Declaration of Independence, Stanton's declaration proclaimed that men and women are created equal. She proposed, among other things, a then-controversial resolution demanding voting rights for women. The final resolutions, including female suffrage, were passed, in no small measure, because of the support of Frederick Douglass, who attended and informally spoke at the convention.
After the civil war, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her partner Susan B. Anthony split with Douglass and half of her own women's movement by opposing the fourteenth and fifteenth amendment
Stanton believed that African American men, by virtue of the Thirteenth Amendment, already had the legal protections, except for voting. She believed that women, white and black, needed to get on equal terms with white and black men. Stanton and Anthony were angry that Douglass refused to demand that the language of the amendments be changed to include women.
Frederick Douglass, believed that white women, already empowered by their connection to fathers, husbands, and brothers, at least vicariously had the vote. According to Douglass, black men's horrifying treatment as slaves entitled the now liberated African-American men, who lacked women's indirect empowerment, to voting rights before women were granted the franchise. African-American women, he believed, would have the same degree of empowerment as white women once African-American men had the vote; hence, general female suffrage was, according to Douglass, of less concern than black male suffrage.
Eventually, Stanton's oppositional rhetoric took on racial overtones. Arguing on behalf of female suffrage, Stanton stated that women voters of "wealth, education, and refinement" were needed to offset the effect of former slaves and immigrants whose "pauperism, ignorance, and degradation" might negatively affect the American political system. She declared it to be "a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk into the kingdom [of civil rights] first."
As a woman, she felt angry and resentful that black men would vote before women, but some say her charges that white men and women were "educated" and blacks were "ignorant" and "paupers" in part established a basis for the literacy requirements that followed in the wake of the passage of the fifteenth amendment. Because of these literacy requirements, it would take over 100 years and the civil rights movement of the 1960s for blacks to get the vote.
Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton are great patriots fighting for our rights. In time all Women and African Americans voted, and someday we will have African American and Women presidents. Who crosses into the "kingdom of heaven first" will someday be unimportant.
However, we must understand the raw passion, the rage, the feeling of being suppressed for so long and needing to be free, that both groups feel as they struggle to have one of their group be president.