For what good will it do a person if he gains the whole world, but forfeits his soul? – Mat 16:26

We tend to struggle with the reality that a person is more than one thing.  Maybe it’s just too complicated to appreciate human complexity?  I mean, in 2020, six presidents of Southern Baptist seminaries took a stance against intersectionality, (along with Critical Race Theory), claiming it to be “incompatible with Baptist beliefs.”  The very notion that a person’s race, gender, sexual orientation, and class are connected (intersected) identities is somehow a threat when we explore how those intersections contribute to real harm and disparity in our culture.

During the Reconstruction Period of American history, the Women’s Suffrage movement galvanized women across racial and economic lines in the pursuit of voting rights.  Frances Willard, one of the most prominent leaders of the movement in the late 19th century, believed women’s suffrage was key to ending domestic violence.  The Women’s Christian Temperance Union sought to unite women to gain the right to vote, for the purpose of using the women’s vote to outlaw alcohol, with the hope of significantly reducing the abuse of women and children.  But in her attempts to gain Southern white women’s voices, Willard and others were content to remain silent on segregation and lynchings of black men.

Ida B. Wells, a young journalist born in slavery just before the Civil War, insisted on the intersectionality of women’s rights and black rights in America.  Wells brought the horrors of lynchings under public scrutiny through her journalism.  When Frances Willard publicly blamed Black men for the failure to outlaw liquor in the South, calling them “dark-faced mobs whose rallying cry is better whiskey and more of it…The grogshop is their center of power.”  But Wells knew that this kind of demonizing perpetuated white supremacist ideology and mob lynchings, and so Ida B. Wells began a public fight with Frances Willard.  Willard only chose to defend herself, insisting that there was “not an atom of racial prejudice” within her, and pointing to her family history of abolition to verify her innocence.

But Willard wanted the support of white Southern women, and so she categorically refused to speak about injustices against black Americans.  In 1913, when Wells brought a delegation of black women to a march for suffrage, the white leaders were afraid of losing white support, so they were asked to march separately.  But Wells refused, and crashed the parade, boldly defending her belief that gender and racial equality should not be in competition with each other.

Go read up on Ida B. Wells, y’all.  The woman was a legend.