The Douglass-Anthony Alliance, Reform Across the Color Line

When Frederick Douglass moved to Rochester in eighteen forty-seven to publish The North Star, he and Susan B. Anthony were almost immediate allies. She was twenty-seven years old, the daughter of a Quaker abolitionist family from Adams, Massachusetts. He was a formerly enslaved man in his late twenties, already the most famous Black American alive. They were neighbors in the same small city, working in overlapping movements, and they found in each other a rare combination: genuine intellectual partnership and personal friendship.

Both believed that the great injustices of the era, slavery and the denial of women's rights, were connected. Douglass attended the eighteen forty-eight women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, just a few miles away, and spoke forcefully for the resolution demanding women's suffrage. Anthony signed anti-slavery petitions as a teenager and spent years before the Civil War canvassing New York State for the abolitionist cause.

The friendship frayed after the Civil War, when the question of the Fifteenth Amendment divided the reform community. Douglass supported ratifying the amendment even though it excluded women. Anthony opposed it on those grounds. The argument was real and painful. But it did not end the relationship. They continued to appear together on lecture platforms, to speak well of each other publicly, and to share the complicated labor of long-range moral campaigning.

When Douglass died in February eighteen ninety-five, Anthony was among those who eulogized him. She called him her friend and the most remarkable man she had ever known. They are buried a mile apart at Mount Hope, the city that held them both.