Sarah Smith Tompkins Garnet: A Most Remarkable Suffragist
By Susan Goodier
For the last dozen or so years, women’s suffrage has been a popular topic for academics and non-academics alike. In 2017, New York celebrated its centennial of women in the state gaining the right to vote. Then, in 2020, although distracted by the pandemic, the nation celebrated the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibited discrimination in voting based on sex. My own research into suffrage activism began in graduate school and reflected my contrarian tendencies and intrigue about what is left out of the mainstream narrative of a social activist movement. During my research for a book chapter on African American Women’s Suffrage, I came across an encyclopedia article on the Equal Suffrage League of Brooklyn. Presenting only the barest of details, the entry mentioned a suffrage leader, Sarah Tompkins Garnet, who founded the League. The journey of discovering what I could about Garnet has led to a deepening awareness of the significance of the African American women’s suffrage movement, its longtime support by a fascinating cadre of women, and its importance to widening public support for voting rights for women and people of color.
The limited, but most frequently repeated story about Sarah Garnet in secondary sources is one that connects her activism to the very wealthy Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, a white woman who led her own suffrage club, the Political Equality Association. Working to establish an African American branch of her suffrage organization, Belmont contacted the already influential Garnet in early 1910. Garnet helped Belmont set up a meeting at Mount Olivet Baptist Church on West Fifty-Third Street and saw to it that many women and men of the African American community attended. The New York Age observed that most of the women were not particularly interested in establishing a branch of Belmont’s association, although they would be willing to donate money to support its work.
This common story highlights some of the misunderstandings that the white suffrage community held about African American women’s suffrage activism, and which still obscures our understanding of Black women’s involvement in the movement. Black women did not need white women to patronize, direct, organize, or financially support their efforts. They already had quite a few active suffragists, and several prominent leaders, including Sarah Garnet, and at least one organization in the city dedicated to women’s suffrage. In fact, virtually every Black women organization, established for whatever purpose—anti-lynching, racial uplift, integrated education, temperance—also supported women’s suffrage. It is the universality and intersectionality of Black women’s vision of equality and rights for women—as opposed to exclusion and limitation—that differentiates their suffrage activism from that of many white women’s organizations of the period. Garnet had choreographed the women’s movement in the African American community in the New York City area since quite possibly the 1880s. Her charisma, modesty, persistence, and political acumen, as well as her authority as a teacher and school principal, drew dozens of supporters as convinced as she that women’s suffrage would facilitate their goals for equality.
Portrait of Mrs. Sarah J.S. Garnet, ca. 1860
Sarah Jane Smith Tompkins Garnet did not leave an archive of papers, speeches, writing, or much evidence of her work, activism, or political ideology, but she does exist through some scant historical records. A long-time principal of Colored School No. 4 in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, Garnet devoted her life to her family, her students, her community, and to expanding political rights for women.[1] Born on July 31, 1831, quite possibly on the Shinnecock Reservation of Long Island, to Sylvanus and Ann Springsteel Smith, both of African, Native American, and European heritage, she began teaching at the age of fourteen. She left the profession to marry another teacher, Samuel Tompkins, and moved with him to Newark, New Jersey. When Samuel died in 1851, Sarah (her family called her “Minnie”) and her young daughter, Serena, returned to the home of her parents. By 1854, Sarah resumed her teaching career, and in 1863 she became principal of the Manhattan Grammar School No. 4 (formerly Colored School No. 7). Newspapers reported on her accomplishments with her students, the notable guests she invited to speak to her classes, and her many travels to teachers’ and activists’ conferences. In 1875, Sarah Tompkins married the influential abolitionist and minister, Henry Highland Garnet. Educated at the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York, his career eventually brought him to serve as pastor of Shiloh Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn. Later, President James Garfield appointed him as minister to Liberia, and he traveled there in 1881, leaving Sarah behind. He died abroad early in 1882, and Garnet subsequently increased her involvement in various social justice activities. For her, as for many of her friends and colleagues, voting rights would enable women of color to influence political decisions in favor of equal rights for all citizens.
Garnet founded the Equal Suffrage League of Brooklyn in the late 1880s, although virtually no information about its first decades of existence remains (it may have existed only informally). It served to educate its members about civic duties and voting rights. What is known for sure is that many observers considered Garnet the “moving spirit” of the League and called it the only “colored organization in Brooklyn” focused on obtaining equal rights.[2] The “center of attraction in any circle,” according to an early historian of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), Garnet served as the superintendent of its Suffrage Department. Those who knew her celebrated her as the “most noted suffragist” of the race, and as “one of the remarkable women of the age.”[3] This high praise from such prominent sources prompts us to pay closer attention to Garnet and the women and men she drew to her remarkable circle.
The women of Garnet’s sphere who may have attended the organization’s early gatherings in her kitchen included a startling line-up of innovative and extraordinary women. For example, Garnet’s younger sister, Dr. Susan Maria Smith McKinney (1847-1918) was the first Black woman licensed to practice medicine in New York State. Probably also born on the Shinnecock Reservation, she graduated as valedictorian of Dr. Clemence Lozier’s New York Medical College and Hospital for Women.[4] Within a couple of years, Smith founded her own hospital for poor Black and white women and children. Not surprisingly, several other early and longtime members made their living as teachers. For example, Mary Eato (1844-1915), deeply committed to her church, held office in the League, and engaged in a wide range of social justice activities. Other interested educators Garnet drew to her activist circle included J. Imogen Howard (1848-1937), an assistant teacher at Colored School No. 4 and the only African American person to serve on a state Board of Directors for the Columbian Exposition of 1893; S. Elizabeth Frazier (1864-1924), who, after being rejected from a position with the New York City Public Schools, took her case to court in 1896 and eventually achieved her appointment to teach; and Maritcha Lyons (1848-1929), who became an assistant principal in an integrated elementary school.
The membership of the Equal Suffrage League expanded as time went on, drawing new and younger women such as Addie Waites Hunton (1866-1943), an activist who served as the National Organizer for the NACW, and who would work with African American soldiers in France during the first world war; Mary J. Gordon, who, with her husband, administered the Howard Orphan Asylum; Maria C. Lawton (1864-1946), deeply entrenched in Harlem politics and a president of the Empire State Federation of Women’s Clubs; Dr. Verina Morton-Jones (1865-1943), physician, founder of the Lincoln Street Settlement House with its kindergarten and adult education classes, and a member of the board of directors for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and Brooklyn Eagle editor Lydia Cuffee Smith (1871-1948).
Sarah Garnet recognized the value of cooperation and collaboration across race and gender, and at local, state, national, and even international levels. The Equal Suffrage League met at various public venues, including the Bridge Street African Methodist Episcopal Church (famed for having once served as an Underground Railroad station), or the Carlton Avenue YMCA, noted on League letterhead as its headquarters. In addition to meetings that featured tributes to important national figures and the singing of hymns and suffrage songs, Garnet spoke about her spiritual motives for taking up social justice work at events that included ministers from area churches, or alongside members of a men’s Original Rights Society. Garnet’s influence and activities suggest a social integrationist ideology that transcends the local to engage members in discussions of politics at the highest levels.
Members exchanged views about elections and legislative debates, sometimes in creative ways, which illustrates their political acumen as well as their interest in combating racism. For example, Garnet sent copies of an Equal Suffrage League petition to “enforce the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution,” to everyone she knew, including W. E. B. Du Bois.[5] At their July 1908 meeting, aware of the upcoming presidential election, the League hosted a mock national Republican convention, assigning playacting roles to various individuals. Garnet acted as the only female delegate and voted for the most popular candidate, Joseph B. Foraker, a Republican Senator who had vehemently opposed Theodore Roosevelt’s racist decision to dismiss an entire battalion of African American soldiers who had been unjustly accused of terrorizing Brownsville, a town in Texas. The next month the politically savvy Garnet urged members to support the Republican party even if they did not personally care for its candidate, William Howard Taft. Clearly, she and her colleagues hoped to install leaders who would prioritize the end of racism in the United States, and she advocated for the party most likely to promote that goal in her day.[6]
Sarah Garnet (seated) with her niece and two great nephews, date unknown.
International awareness and themes dominated some of the Equal Suffrage League meetings and signaled a broad acknowledgement of the influence of Garnet’s work and connections. In 1908, for example, Anna Cobden-Sanderson (1853-1926), the white English socialist and radical suffragist touring the United States, visited with members of the League. She described her month of incarceration in Holloway Jail, having been arrested on charges incurred while protesting in the lobby of the House of Commons. Always fearful of public censure or ridicule, African American women would never engage in such risky behavior as elite white women might dare, but certainly League members would have thrilled to Cobden-Sanderson’s tale. Then, Cobden-Sanderson listened “with deep interest” as Garnet described the efforts of African American women to assist with the US women’s suffrage movement.[7]
A few years later, in July 1911, Garnet and her now remarried sister, Susan McKinney Steward also attended the First Universal Races Congress at the University of London. Twenty-one hundred people representing more than fifty nations came together to discuss the latest scientific knowledge about race. Members of the delegation from the United States, headed by W. E. B. Du Bois, “considered that the meetings represented just about the most important movement of the twentieth century.”[8] Enthusiastic about the potential of an “interracial culture,” Steward presented a paper on “Colored American Women,” outlining the many achievements of the women of the race.[9] Garnet listened to other activists who discussed the status of people of color across the globe as she gathered information on various topics, including, of course, women’s suffrage. When the sisters, sailing from Liverpool aboard the Caronia, returned to the United States, the Equal Suffrage League held a celebration to welcome them home to Brooklyn. Garnet would have eagerly shared all she had observed and learned at the conference, and Steward likely shared sections of the speech she had given, which she later published in the Crisis.
Ten days after the celebration, on September 17, 1911, Garnet passed away. Hallie Quinn Brown, one of her biographers, noted that, “Her family lost a beloved companion and counselor, her friends, a confidante and sympathizer. The race, one of its foremost educators, a pioneer of the school room. The community in which she lived, a noble, inspiring God-fearing citizen, the world a benefactor, a valuable contributor to literary, domestic and State affairs.”[10]
The process that ultimately culminated in women gaining the right to vote ebbed and flowed over time, influenced by current events, changing organizational policies and strategies, various exclusionary practices, court decisions, and even by several wars. A significant number of middle-class African American women had not wanted to engage in public or political activities that would “compromise their femininity.”[11] Nevertheless, many of these same women realized that bettering the situation for the entire race—called racial uplift at the time—necessitated a deep commitment to public and political engagement. Sarah Garnet clearly epitomizes the spirit of a radical reformer, a woman who knew the value of layers of activism from the local to the international, and her work outlived her. When women won the right to vote through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, members of the “Brooklyn Equal Suffrage League (colored)” celebrated right along with the other suffrage organizations across the nation.[12]
Susan Goodier, PhD, currently holds a fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, after having taught women’s history, Civil War history, and New York State history at SUNY Oneonta. She is a member of the New York Academy of Historians and on the board of directors for the New York History journal. She has written two books, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement (2013), and coauthored with Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (2017). She is working on two books: “Networks of Activism: Black Women in the Suffrage Movement,” and on a biography of Louisa Jacobs, the daughter of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
[1] The former Colored School No. 4 recently earned New York City Municipal Landmark Status. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/nyregion/nyc-segregated-school-landmark.html (accessed August 1, 2023).
[2] Hallie Q. Brown, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, 110-16.
[3] Charles Harris Wesley, The History of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs: A Legacy of Service (Washington, DC: National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 1984), 77.
[4] This college exists today as the New York Medical College.
[5] “Afro-American Notes,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 30, 1908, 10.
[6] “Afro-American Notes,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 1, 1908, 8.
[7] “Afro-American Notes,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 5, 1908, 2.
[8] This turned out to be the only meeting of the Universal Races Congress. Elliott M. Rudwick, “W. E. B. DuBois and the Universal Races Congress of 1911,” The Phylon Quarterly 20, no. 4 (Qtr 1959): 372.
[9] Quote about “interracial culture” is from Du Bois. Rudwick, 377.
[10] Brown, Homespun Heroines, 116.
[11] Karen Garner, “Equal Suffrage League,” Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations. New York: Routledge, 2001, 195.
[12] “Brooklyn Joins Nation in Celebrating Victory,” Daily Standard Union (Brooklyn), August 22, 1920, 34.