1920 | Human Rights, Social Justice
Human Rights, Social Justice
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is founded by social reformers who include Methodist minister Harry F. Ward, 47; Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes, now 40; Clarence Darrow; Upton Sinclair; Jane Addams; Helen Keller; Roger Williams, 36; former War Labor Policies Board chairman Felix Frankfurter, 37; and Ohio-born socialist Norman (Mattoon) Thomas, 35. Thomas is a former clergyman who will staunchly oppose both communism and fascism but advocate such "radical" ideas as low-cost public housing, a 5-day work week, minimum wage laws, and the abolition of child labor (Congress will ultimately legislate them all), and he will be a quadrennial Socialist Party presidential candidate from 1928 through 1948. FBI agents soon infiltrate the ACLU (see 1919).
Lynchings continue across much of the South, and there is even one at Duluth, Minnesota, where a mob breaks into the city jail June 15, drags out three black circus workers accused of having assaulted a white woman, and hang them from a light pole while a crowd of 10,000 looks on. Lige Daniels, 16, is hanged by a lynch mob at Center, Texas, August 3, and photographs of the black youth hanging from a tree limb are made into postcards.
The first Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) international convention opens at Liberty Hall in New York's Harlem under the leadership of Marcus Garvey, who has founded UNIA branches in nearly every U.S. city with a sizeable black population (see 1916). Some 25,000 delegates from 25 nations attend, and Garvey begins to exalt African beauty, promoting a "back to Africa" movement with a plan for resettlement in Liberia (see politics, 1847; 1924).
Former Royal Air Force officer Anthony J. (John) Arkell, 22, joins the Sudan Political Service with the intent of abolishing the slave trade between the Sudan and Ethiopia. He will establish villages for freed slaves (they will call themselves "the Sons of Arkell") before starting a new career as archaeologist and historian.
U.S. woman suffrage is proclaimed in effect August 26 following Tennessee's ratification of the Nineteenth amendment to the Constitution: "1. The Right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this Article by appropriate legislation." Wisconsin has been the first state to ratify, Illinois the second, but some supporters of woman suffrage—including Kentucky suffragist Laura Clay, 71, whose father, Cassius Marcellus Clay, was an ally of Abraham Lincoln—have opposed a federal law because of their dedication to states' rights. Carrie Chapman Catt, now 61, who has come to Nashville to combat the Men's Anti-Suffrage Association and other opposition groups, will later write, "Never in the history of politics has there been such a nefarious lobby as labored to block the ratification . . . In the short time that I spent in the capital I was more maligned, more lied about, than in the 30 previous years I worked for suffrage," but Catt will be haunted in later life by her 1919 statement, made in Mississippi and South Carolina, that "White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage." Suffragist (Anita) Lili Pollitzer, 25, has met with Tennessee State Legislator Harry T. Burn, 24, and persuaded him to cast the deciding vote. "I know that a mother's advice is always safest for a boy to follow," he says, "and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification." The amendment enfranchises 26 million women of voting age.
Czech women gain the right to vote on the same basis as men.
Japanese feminists who include Raicho Hiratsuka and Fusae Ichikawa (see 1919) form a Coalition of New Women (Shinfujin Kyokai) that includes the Bluestockings, groups of teachers, newspaper reporters, and housewives. It begins to publish a newspaper under the name Josei Dōmei (Women's League) and in July sends a petition to the Diet requesting voting rights for women and an end to laws that forbid women from having political meetings and participating in politics (see 1945).