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Into your hands God has pressed one of the sublimest opportunities that ever came into the hands of the women of any race or people. It is yours to create a healthy public sentiment; to demand justice, simple justice, as the right of every race; to brand with everlasting infamy the lawless and brutal cowardice that lynches, burns, and tortures your own countrymen.

To grapple with the evils which threaten to undermine the strength of the nation and to lay magazines of powder under the cribs of future generations is no child’s play.

Let the hearts of the women of the world respond to the song of the herald of angels of peace on earth and good will to men. Let them throb as one heart unified by the grand and holy purpose of uplifting the human race, and humanity will breathe freer, and the world grow brighter. With such a purpose Eden would spring up in our path, and paradise be around our way.

By Frances Ellen Watkins Harper from “Women’s Political Future,” delivered in 1893 at the World’s Congress of Representative Women at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Published in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, The New Press, New York, 1995.