Elizabeth

“Marshall and others introduced Abbott to a city where African Americans enjoyed relative freedom in the public way. Blacks rode shoulder to shoulder with whites on streetcars; nor did they have to worry about stepping off sidewalks to let whites pass, or otherwise showing deference to whites at the risk of assault or murder. In Chicago, the police stopped lynchings rather than abetting them as was often the case in the South.”
― Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America

“FDR privately confessed to Walter White, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that his reticence came because he feared that if he endorsed anti-lynching bills, white southerners would retaliate by dismantling the New Deal.”
― Jill Watts, The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt

“Martha—and George—even subscribed to several books of essays published in 1798 by the American writer and women’s rights supporter Judith Sargent Murray, in which Murray argued that women possessed robust intellectual capacities, and therefore, like men, they, too, benefited from a strong education. John Adams, then the president of the United States, also purchased these volumes, so Abigail Adams, Martha’s successor as First Lady, was also exposed to Murray’s progressive views on female education.4”
― Jeanne E. Abrams, First Ladies of the Republic: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and the Creation of an Iconic American Role

“Ida Wells-Barnett, Louis Anderson, and John Marshall were just a few of the success stories in an African American community whose size, by the turn of the century, had doubled to thirty thousand. Chicago’s Dearborn Street corridor, as it was now called, was convenient for those employed as servants in the mansions of the wealthy along Grand Boulevard to the east as well as for the Pullman porters who worked in the rail yards just northwest, and for those employed in Little Cheyenne, the black section of the Levee vice district, directly north. The corridor was by no means an exclusively black neighborhood, perhaps even one-half white on many blocks. Still, its first black-owned businesses—barbershops, tailors, and restaurants—were thriving.43 Abbott’s”
― Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America