2022 Society Calendar – “Against the Tides of Injustice: Snapshots of Political Courage”

As part of her Quaker beliefs, Susan B. Anthony stood for equality and human rights. The Anthony family farmhouse in Rochester became a meeting place for abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. In her diary, she wrote of fitting out a fugitive slave for Canada with the help of Harriet Tubman.

In 1856, she served as an American Anti-Slavery Society agent, arranging meetings, making speeches, putting up posters and distributing leaflets. Encountering hostile mobs and armed threats, she persisted. In 1860, she joined in a New York legislator’s petition drive to abolish the federal Fugitive Slave Act.

In her work for women’s suffrage, she again displayed uncommon courage, arrested and convicted for voting in the 1872 presidential election. Although she could have been jailed, she refused to pay the fine.[1]

[1]  Susan B. Anthony Museum & House, online at https://susanb.org/abolitionist/; Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Vol 1, at 216.; Ann D. Gordon, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Vol 1, In the School of Anti-slavery (2001), 386.

Images: 

Susan B. Anthony’s family farm, near Rochester, c. 1855. From the collection of the Rochester Public Library Local History & Genealogy Division.

Cover of An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony, 1874. The New York Public Library, General Research Division.

Portrait of Susan B. Anthony, c. 1875. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-B2-5136-6.

In a famous public corruption case, Tammany Hall “Boss” William Tweed was convicted on 204 counts and sentenced to 12 consecutive terms of imprisonment of one year each. Tweed argued that the sentence was illegal, as the law did not allow consecutive sentences at that time.

Resisting public pressure, the Court of Appeals in 1875 limited the sentence to one year, as required by law. Judge Rapallo wrote:

It is the province of courts to declare the law as they find it to be, and adjudge cases accordingly; not to change or strain the law to make it fit any particular case . . . Laws are framed not merely to secure the punishment of those who are justly accused, but to afford a fair trial to all and guard against convictions being obtained through improper means or influences.

Judge Allen said:

The law is no respecter of persons, and suffers no man, be he guilty or innocent, to be deprived of his liberty, except “by due process of law;” and the writ of habeas corpus is as available, even to the guilty, and he whom the popular voice would condemn, as it has proved against commitments by the king in council. But the act needs no interpretation, and is in full accord with the common law, and the adjudications both in this State and in England, and with the Constitution.[1]

[1] People ex rel. Tweed v. Liscomb 60 N.Y. 559 (1875); Matthew R. Dunn, “Charles A. Rapallo,” https://history.nycourts.gov/biography/charles-anthony-rapallo/; and William A. Lawrence, “William Fitch Allen,” https://history.nycourts.gov/biography/william-fitch-allen/

In the face of personal risk, Mary Burnett Talbert waged a fight for racial justice at the turn of the 20^th century.

Talbert graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio, but she was especially successful in her activities in Buffalo. In 1901, she hosted an interracial forum, protesting the exclusion of Black people at the Pan American Exposition and stereotypical racial depictions.

In 1909, she formed the Empire Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, became its president, and helped in the purchase Frederick Douglass’s estate in Anacostia, Washington, DC to highlight the importance of Black achievement and to empower Black youths.

Her work took her on Jim Crow trains throughout the South to establish NAACP branches in states where Black people had experienced unprecedented violence and hostility.

The State University at Buffalo named its student services building in her honor.[1]

[1] This tribute was drawn from an article by Dr. Lillian Serece Williams in the Spring 2021 issue of New York Archives magazine, with thanks to her.

Before and after graduating from University of Michigan Law School in 1911, Wesley Branch Rickey had a career in baseball including as a player. Rightly, he is known for having broken the color barrier in Major League Baseball by signing Jackie Robinson to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

At the time, the law was governed by Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 (1896) by which racial segregation was upheld on the separate but equal doctrine. There was no law against African Americans playing in the majors, but it was by unwritten agreement. Robinson signed the contract on April 10, 1947 and five days later played his first Major League game at Ebbets Field in front of 26,623 baseball fans.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois Confederacy) unites the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations through Haudenosaunee traditional law and a peaceful means of decision making.

In the 19th century, the balance of responsibilities between women and men in Haudenosaunee society inspired Western New York suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Throughout history and in the present, Haudenosaunee women use their voice and political courage to advocate for women’s rights, food sovereignty, environmental protection, and other issues that are pivotal to the future of society. Many of the women featured in the exhibit The Changemakers: Rochester Women Who Changed the World didn’t simply display political courage—they embodied the very meaning of the term in their actions and words.[1]

[1] With thanks to Felícia Swartzenberg, Communications Coordinator at the Rochester Museum & Science Center, and her article in the Spring 2021 issue of New York Archives magazine. Consultation and research provided by DEI consultant, Dr. Laticia McNaughton, Mohawk Nation, Wolf Clan.

In 1860, the New York Legislature considered a measure to grant freedom and official protection to any slave, even a fugitive, who set foot on New York soil. A Brooklyn Assemblyman criticized the measure as being a violation of federal law and also denounced the proposal in vehement racist terms. New York’s Delaware County Assemblyman Barna R. Johnson answered:

Are we to be compelled by law to aid the master to catch his slave, and help him with his human chattel, on to the land of chains, and stripes, and slavery hopeless, cruel, unmitigated slavery? Is it fair for a quarter of a million of slaveholders to rule with a rod of iron, not only the four millions of slaves, and the free people of color, and the five millions of Southern whites, who would rejoice in the abolition of slavery, but the twenty-millions of free people at the North also?

In a slavery rendition case in 1852, Horace Preston was arrested as a claimed runaway. The U.S. Commissioner issued a warrant of arrest and cynically dispatched Preston south as his wife and four-year-old child looked on, sobbing. Defending him, Erastus D. Culver and John Jay II had no recourse under law but would not let the matter pass without telling the public about the sham proceeding.

 How far [his conduct] in admitting all evidence offered for the claimant, of whatever character, including an affidavit made without knowledge, and confessions of  the defendant while in duress—his refusal to compel an interested witness to answer on a cross-examination, and his cutting off all opportunity of rebutting evidence by a snap judgment, made in violation of good faith—comports with that strict impartiality and fairness which ought to be preserved in trials involving the right to liberty is a question which the undersigned submit to the judgment of the American people.[1]

[1] New York Tribune, April 5, 1852, 4. After being sent South, Horace Preston was bought back for $1200 and came home. See Samuel May, The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1861), 22.

By a vote of 6-3, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1944 upheld a Presidential Executive Order allowing the exclusion of Japanese Americans, after fears generated by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Justices Roberts, Murphy, and Jackson dissented. In New Yorker Jackson’s words:

Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable … Much is said of the danger to liberty from the Army program for deporting and detaining these citizens of Japanese extraction. But a judicial construction of the due process clause that will sustain this order is a far more subtle blow to liberty than the promulgation of the order itself … I should hold that a civil court cannot be made to enforce an order which violates constitutional limitations even if it is a reasonable exercise of military authority.[1]

[1] Korematsu v. United States, 324 US 214 (1944).

The line for lunch at the Manzanar Relocation Center in California, 1943. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Ansel Adams, photographer, LC-DIG-ppprs-00368.

The New York Times, December 19, 1944. Copyright the New York Times.

After the United States Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia in 1787, the states held conventions to determine whether they wanted to join the Union by ratifying the Constitution. Most delegates at New York’s convention, including Smith, were initially opposed to the Constitution, in part because it contained no Bill of Rights.

Smith, however, came around to ratification and persuaded a majority of New York delegates that rejecting the Constitution would isolate New York. He argued that it was better to join the Union unconditionally and to insist that a Bill of Rights follow. He paid a political price for his actions among Anti-Federalist delegates who never forgave him for urging ratification. His was an act of pragmatism and courage. New York joined the Union and helped moved toward ratification of the Amendments, comprising the Bill of Rights.