American Equal Rights Association (1866-1869)

  • 1863 –Women’s Loyal National League (WLNL) founded
  • 1864 –WLNL presents abolition amendment petitions to Congress
  • 1865 –American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) reorganizes with Wendell Phillips as leader

“Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot, or [while] any discrimination exists between white and black at the South.” —Frederick Douglass, 1865

  • 1866 –Merger of WLNL and AASA as American Equal Rights Association (AERA)
  • 1869 –AERA dissolves amid acrimony over Fifteenth Amendment

“We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.” —Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1866