Ask Geoffrey: When Ida B. Wells Met Frances Willard

2020 is the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment, which secured women’s right to vote. Next Tuesday, “The Vote,” a major two-part PBS documentary about the long fight for women’s suffrage premieres on WTTW, which we thought gave us a great opportunity to talk about a related conflict between two famous local titans of social justice – Ida B. Wells of Chicago and Frances Willard of Evanston. At its center was the tension between crusaders for women’s voting rights and crusaders for Black citizenship and voting rights that emerged during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War.

Read more at WTTW.