{"id":38948,"date":"2014-12-17T18:59:55","date_gmt":"2014-12-17T18:59:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38948"},"modified":"2014-12-17T19:01:16","modified_gmt":"2014-12-17T19:01:16","slug":"the-double-curse-of-sex-and-color-robert-purvis-and-human-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38948","title":{"rendered":"“The Double Curse of Sex and Color”: Robert Purvis and Human Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The Double Curse of Sex and Color”: Robert Purvis and Human Rights<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography<\/a>
\nVolume 121 [CXXI], Number 1-2, January\/April 1997<\/a>
\npages 53-76<\/p>\n

Margaret Hope Bacon (1921-2011)<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

In 1869 A NATIONAL WOMAN’S SUFFRAGE<\/a> convention was held for the\u00a0first time in Washington, D.C.<\/a> The Fourteenth Amendment<\/a> had\u00a0recently been ratified and the Fifteenth<\/a> was about to be introduced into\u00a0Congress. Elizabeth Cady Stanton<\/a>, Susan B. Anthony<\/a>, and other women\u00a0present used the opportunity to object to black men receiving the vote before\u00a0women, both black and white, were enfranchised. Their arguments were\u00a0countered by those of Frederick Douglass<\/a>, Edward M. Davis, Dr. Charles\u00a0Burleigh Purvis<\/a>, and others, who maintained that the Southern black male\u00a0needed the shield of suffrage to protect him from the reign of terror being\u00a0visited upon him by former slave owners.<\/p>\n

A tall slender man with fair skin and white hair rose at his seat and began\u00a0to speak. Elizabeth Stanton invited him to come forward and address the\u00a0convention from the platform. Robert Purvis<\/a> of Philadelphia<\/a> said that he\u00a0was willing to wait for the vote for himself and his sons and his race until\u00a0women were also permitted to enjoy it. It was important to him that his\u00a0daughter be enfranchised, since she bore the double curse of sex and race. He\u00a0chided his son, Dr. Charles Purvis, for holding a narrow position, and\u00a0reminded him that his sister Hattie also deserved to be enfranchised.<\/p>\n

Alone among the black men who had supported women’s rights in the\u00a0antislavery movement, Robert Purvis remained an advocate of suffrage for women throughout the period of debate and schism over the Fourteenth and\u00a0Fifteenth amendments. In 1888 he was honored by Susan B. Anthony at the\u00a0International Council of Women<\/a>, meeting in Washington, D.C., for his\u00a0courageous stand in 1869 in opposition to his own son.<\/p>\n

Purvis’s advocacy of women’s rights was rooted in his deeply held\u00a0convictions on human rights. He believed strongly that the struggle for\u00a0equality for blacks could not be separated from that of women, of American\u00a0Indians, of Irish nationalists demanding home rule, of all minorities. He\u00a0objected to all associations based on color alone and rejected the term\u00a0“African-American.” ‘There is not a single African in the United States,” he\u00a0told a Philadelphia audience in 1886. “We are to the manner born; we are\u00a0native Americans.”<\/p>\n

Purvis’s position on human rights undoubtedly stemmed in part from his\u00a0own mixed-race background. His grandmother, Dido Badaracka, was born\u00a0in Morocco<\/a>. Purvis described her as a “full-blooded Moor<\/a> of magnificent\u00a0features and great beauty. She had crisp hair and a stately manner.” In\u00a0approximately 1766, at the age of twelve, she was captured by a slave trader\u00a0along with an Arab girl. The two had been enticed to go a mile or two out\u00a0of the city where they lived to see a deer that had been caught. They were\u00a0seized, loaded on the backs of camels, and carried to a slave market on the\u00a0coast. Here they were loaded onto a slaver and transported to Charleston,\u00a0South Carolina<\/a>. At the slave market in Charleston, Dido was bought by a\u00a0kind white woman, named Day or Deas, who educated her, treated her as\u00a0a companion, and left instructions that she was to be freed when the woman\u00a0died, nine years later, in 1775…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The Double Curse of Sex and Color”: Robert Purvis and Human Rights Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Volume 121 [CXXI], Number 1-2, January\/April 1997 pages 53-76 Margaret Hope Bacon (1921-2011) In 1869 A NATIONAL WOMAN’S SUFFRAGE convention was held for the\u00a0first time in Washington, D.C. The Fourteenth Amendment had\u00a0recently been ratified and the Fifteenth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,20,25],"tags":[18790,18789,2190,4889,15507,4888,2191],"class_list":["post-38948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-charles-burleigh-purvis","tag-charles-purvis","tag-margaret-hope-bacon","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-magazine-of-history-and-biography","tag-philadelphia","tag-robert-purvis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}