The month’s episode of the A Minute in New York History podcast tells the story of the Equal Suffrage League, an organization founded in Brooklyn by Black American women.
The Equal Suffrage League was a pioneering late-1880s organization founded by Sarah J. Garnet and Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward. As a prominent Black suffrage group, it tackled both gender and race discrimination, later affiliating with the National Association of Colored Women, which also took on the evils of Jim Crow and lynching.
Sarah J. Tompkins Garnet, nee Smith, (1831-1911) was among the first African-American female public school principals in New York City, teaching at the African Free School of Williamsburg in Brooklyn beginning in 1854.
Sarah married for a second time to noted abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882), and thereafter was usually identified as Sarah Garnet.
Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward (1847-1918), one of the first Black women physicians and the third in New York State to earn a medical degree, was also Sarah’s younger sister.
Dr. Steward’s medical career focused on prenatal care and childhood disease. From 1870 to 1895 she ran her own practice in Brooklyn and co-founded the Brooklyn Women’s Homeopathic Hospital and Dispensary.
She sat on the board and practiced medicine at the Brooklyn Home for Aged Colored People and from 1906, she worked as college physician at the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Wilberforce University in Ohio.
The sisters’ other siblings were Emma Tompkins, who became a school teacher; Clara Brown, a piano teacher; and Mary who was a hair stylist. Their father held jobs as a porter, carpet cleaner, and laborer and also sold hogs which provided him and his family with a respectable living.
In 1907 the Equal Suffrage League and National Association of Colored Women jointly supported a resolution supporting the principles of the Niagara Movement, a direct precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which advocated for equal rights for all American citizens.
Podcast interviewees include Dr. Susan Goodier, historian and co-author (with Karen Pastorello) of Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (2017), and Dr. Jennifer Lemak, Chief Curator of History at the New York State Museum.
You can read the podcast transcript or listen to the full episode here.
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