To the Editor:

After reading accounts of the suffrage movement and how it affected African-American women, circa the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it’s a challenge to view Carrie Chapman Catt in a heroic light. Books like Paula Giddings’s carefully researched WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER: THE IMPACT OF BLACK WOMEN ON RACE AND SEX IN AMERICA reveal unflattering methods and motives for most of the white suffragists. (Susan B. Anthony seems the least besmirched by her own conduct, philosophy, and beliefs.) White political activists wanted black women to support their Cause without directly including black women in that Cause. The concern, it seems arose from the fact that in several Southern states black women outnumbered white women. This threatened.

Of Carrie Chapman Catt, probably the worst we can say is that she was racist. The best? That she expressed an insensitivity (racial) common to the era. Somewhere in between these extremes, it’s certainly the case that Catt suffered from a typical white blindness to racism which, according to Celia E. Naylor-Ojurongbe’s recent report of doings in the Chatauqua tent, many whites still labor under.

It’s one thing to name a building after someone who, in spite of human flaws, is nonetheless able to accomplish good things. It’s another thing to act as if those all-too-human flaws didn’t exist.

The men for whom other buildings on ISU’s campus are named are less celebrated, less documented and researched as social pioneers, than Catt. We don’t know where they stood on the racial divide, etc. I suspect, however, that we might find in their biographies a mixed bag of human flaws and goodness.

Barbara Haas

Associate Professor

Dept. of English