Biographical Database of Black Woman Suffragists

Biography of Blanche Williams Stubbs, 1872-1952

 

Carol A. Scott
Undergraduate student, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware

Edited by Anne M. Boylan, University of Delaware

 

Blanche Williams Stubbs photo, n.d.
courtesy of H. Gordon Fleming

Blanche Williams Stubbs was born in Wisconsin, on February 29, 1872, the tenth child (of fifteen) and eighth daughter of John Ebenezer Williams and Elizabeth Bisland [variously spelled]. John E. and Elizabeth B. Williams, both of whom had been born in Pennsylvania, moved the family to Wisconsin and Illinois before settling in Marquette, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which became the family home. John Williams prospered as a barber, an occupation that provided opportunities unavailable to African American men in other arenas. Among Blanche Williams’s siblings, one brother and two sisters followed their father into the barbering/hairdressing field; others pursued training in nursing, dentistry, master plumbing, and teaching. Tragedy struck the family in 1887 when Blanche was fifteen years old; her fifty-two-year-old mother died of cancer. Elizabeth Williams was buried in the family plot at Park Cemetery in Marquette. The following year, John E. Williams was remarried in Chicago to a Virginia widow, Neeton A. Perry; by 1900 they were living in Philadelphia, along with his two youngest sons. John Williams died in Montreal in 1911 and was buried in Marquette.

Blanche Williams entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., graduating in 1892. Upon graduation, she settled in Wilmington, Delaware, to teach at The Howard School. It seems likely that the school’s renowned principal, Edwina Kruse, a stern educator of Puerto Rican and German ancestry, who was widely revered for her rigorous standards, had recruited her. In Washington and in Delaware, Blanche Williams would have had her first encounters with legal segregation and the perverse inequalities it imposed. Wilmington’s Howard School, which had been founded by the Delaware Association for the Moral Improvement and Education of Colored People, a group organized by whites in 1866, was, by the 1890s, black-run and the first Delaware school to provide a full curriculum to Black students. It offered the only four-year high school course for African Americans in the entire state. Blanche Williams taught at the school for over five years, resigning shortly after marrying J. Bacon Stubbs of Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in December, 1897. Undoubtedly the couple had met at Howard University, as J.B. Stubbs earned his medical degree there. During their marriage, which lasted until his death in 1935, Blanche W. Stubbs bore three children: Jeanette (Jean) (later Jamison); Elizabeth (Liddie) (later Davis); and Frederick Douglass Stubbs.

Blanche Stubbs’s activism was broad, deep, and life-long. In 1912, she and her husband joined with other African American Wilmingtonians, including Howard High School teacher Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar, to found the Garrett Settlement House, named for the city’s famed abolitionist leader, Thomas Garrett. Incorporated in 1913, with a building at Seventh and Walnut Streets, a short walk from the Stubbs family home at 827 Tatnall Street, the settlement was the only such agency serving the city’s African American community. Its offerings included a kindergarten and playground; domestic science, art, and music classes; athletic training; lectures on African American history; and meeting spaces. Blanche Stubbs became the settlement’s first director and served in that capacity until 1949, when her church, St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, took over the work and erected a new building on the site. Along with her husband, she was an early and consistent supporter of the Wilmington Branch of the NAACP, chartered in 1915. Like other educated African American women of her era, Blanche Stubbs devoted time to women’s club work, providing leadership to the City Federation of Colored Women. In 1916, she presided over a meeting of several local clubs at the Garrett Settlement House which resulted in the creation of the Delaware Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, an affiliate of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). She became the Delaware Federation’s first president. During her two-year term, the number of affiliated clubs increased significantly and membership grew to 250. The Federation focused its work on the needs of African American youth; in 1919, it founded the Delaware Industrial School for Colored Girls.

Blanche Stubbs’s suffrage activism emerged from within this matrix of community engagement, concern about African American children’s education, interest in racial uplift, opposition to racially discriminatory policies, involvement in women’s clubs, and efforts to advance the status and rights of African Americans. By the time she attended the organizational meeting of the Wilmington Equal Suffrage Study Club in March, 1914, at the home of Emma Belle Gibson Sykes, a co-communicant at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church and a teacher at Howard High School, Blanche Stubbs was part of a dense network of activist women in her adopted city. Other founding members included the club’s president, Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar, Alice G. Baldwin, Nellie Nicholson (later Taylor), and Caroline Williams—all of them teachers at Howard High School. When Delaware’s suffragists organized Wilmington’s first mass suffrage parade on May 2, Blanche Stubbs served as marshal for the “colored” section, which marched separately from white suffragists. Not long after, in early June 1914, the club announced, in addition to its semi-monthly meetings, a series of lectures on the topic of suffrage and “questions of municipal, state, national, and international interest,” the first of which considered “The World Wide Woman Movement and What It Means to the Negro.”

Blanche Stubbs voiced her views on black women’s suffrage in several ways, most notably in a lengthy letter published in the Wilmington Evening Journal on February 23, 1915. At the time, the state legislature was debating an amendment to the state constitution that would have enfranchised Delaware’s women (the state did not formally disfranchise black men, despite its segregation laws). Addressing the editor’s assumptions about African American voters’ loyalty to the Republican Party, an assumption shaping the debate, Stubbs reviewed the history of that loyalty, and argued that “the vote of the colored women cannot be counted on as an asset to any one party.” Black women, she insisted, might be Democrats or Republicans, and held opinions “just as diversified as those of the white women,” with whom they had been “joining hands … in every reform movement” since 1848. Revealing her own assumptions about class differences between whites and blacks and among African Americans, she contended that a black woman’s “vote is not half so great a menace to the country as that of the poor, illiterate immigrant women who have not been reared under our flag and constitution, and with our language and customs their birthright.” The editor should “study … [N]egro women as a whole, not simply one class, and that the lowest, before making any more prophecies.” In July, 1916, as the Congressional Union (CU) was recruiting ward-level suffrage support in Wilmington, she opened the Garrett Settlement House for CU’s use and presided over an organizing meeting. Later, on June 3, 1920, one day after the Delaware State Legislature had refused to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, she scheduled a public lecture at the settlement house on “The Equality of Men and Women.”

During the 1920s, Blanche Stubbs was active in Republican Party politics, both nationally and locally, and served as state chairman of the black-led National Republican Women’s Auxiliary Committee. In addition, she attended at least one Pan-African Congress in New York (in 1927). As NAACP branch Vice-President, she and her husband (who chaired the Executive Committee) worked with Lewis A. Redding and his son Louis Lorenzo Redding, a Harvard Law School graduate who became the first African American admitted to the Delaware bar, in efforts to mitigate the routine humiliations of segregation. In 1925, the group successfully kept local theaters from screening the racist film “The Birth of a Nation.” In 1927, in her capacity as director of the Garrett Settlement House, she lodged a formal complaint with Wilmington’s Park Commission over an incident that occurred when she took a group of her students, aged three to twelve, to use playground equipment at a local park. They were denied access. Her action sparked a major NAACP-led protest against segregation in public parks. In later years, her daughter Jean Stubbs Jamison, as president of the NAACP’s Wilmington branch, led the effort to integrate all of Delaware’s public accommodations.

Alongside public accomplishments, the post-suffrage decades brought personal sorrows. Between 1919 and 1931, nine of her remaining siblings died; in 1935 her husband died of pneumonia at age 67. In 1947, her son, Frederick Douglass Stubbs, a highly regarded Philadelphia thoracic surgeon, died at age 41. A Wilmington elementary school, dedicated in 1953, bears his name. She continued her work as director of the Garrett Settlement until it closed in 1949. Blanche Stubbs took ill and died on March 11, 1952, at the home of her daughter Jean Jamison in Wilmington, following her eightieth birthday dinner celebration. She and her two daughters—Jean and her sister Elizabeth Stubbs Davis, an anthropological researcher and teacher—had just returned from a cruise to Central and South America. Along with her daughters, she was survived by her youngest brother Hugo.

At her death, Blanche Williams Stubbs was eulogized as one of the most prominent women in Wilmington’s African American community. Her broad commitment to social justice and her associations with Emma Belle Gibson Sykes, Alice Baldwin and Alice Dunbar-Nelson bore fruit in women’s clubs, women’s suffrage, and NAACP activities in her adopted city. For her work and contributions to the civic life of Wilmington, she was honored by the Alumni Association at Howard University in June 1951.

Sources::

Biographical details for Blanche Williams Stubbs and her family can be traced through decennial censuses and city directories, as well as birth and death records available via Ancestry.com and familysearch.org, and African American newspapers, particularly the St. Paul (Minnesota) Appeal, the New York Age and the Chicago Defender. A descendant maintains a genealogy with family photos at https://www.geni.com/people/Florence-Blanche-Williams/6000000009038630483?through=6000000009038223110

An obituary appeared in the Wilmington Journal-Every Evening, March 12, 1952. The papers of the Wilmington Branch of the NAACP, available on microfilm, contain information on her membership and on the 1927 protest over segregated parks. Her correspondence with W.E.B. DuBois in the 1920s, some of which has been digitized, can be found in DuBois’s papers at the University of Massachusetts. The diary of Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Give Us Each Day, ed. Gloria T. Hull (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), covering the years 1921 to 1931, includes details on the Stubbs and Jamison families. Dunbar-Nelson was particularly close to Jean Stubbs Jamison and her husband Dr. Francis T. (“Juice”) Jamison. For her role as first president of the Delaware Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, see Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, Lifting as They Climb (Washington, DC: National Association of Colored Women, 1933), 120-23. Blanche and J. Bacon Stubbs’s wills can be found at the office of the New Castle County Register of Wills office, Wilmington, Delaware; wills #31887 and #31894. Copies and some associated documents are in the papers of Allison Davis, Blanche Stubbs’s son-in-law, at the University of Chicago Library.

Newspaper articles chronicling her activist commitments include “Garrett Settlement,” Wilmington Morning News, June 26, 1913, p. 3; “Negro Women to Study Suffrage,” ibid., March 21, 1914, p. 2; “Suffrage Parade Striking Success,” Sunday Morning Star, May 3, 1914, pp. 1, 23; and “Clash over Use of City Playfields,” Evening Journal, August 4, 1927, pp. 1, 11. For Blanche W. Stubbs’s letter to Editor of the Wilmington Evening Journal, see the misleadingly-titled “Many Anti-Suffragists among Colored Women,” February 23, 1915, p. 6

Important secondary sources include Annette Woolard-Provine, Integrating Delaware: The Reddings of Wilmington (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2003); Carol Hoffecker and Annette Woolard, “Black Women in Delaware’s History,” http://www1.udel.edu/BlackHistory/blackwomen.html; and Pauline A. Young, “The Negro in Delaware: Past and Present,” in Delaware: A History of the First State, ed. H. Clay Reed and Marjorie Bjornson Reed (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1947), II, 581-606.

Blanche Williams Stubbs photo, n.d.; courtesy of H. Gordon Fleming

Biographical Database of Black Woman Suffragists

Biography of Blanche Williams Stubbs, 1872-1952

Carol A. Scott
Undergraduate student, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware

Edited by Anne M. Boylan, University of Delaware

Blanche Williams Stubbs was born in Wisconsin, on February 29, 1872, the tenth child (of fifteen) and eighth daughter of John Ebenezer Williams and Elizabeth Bisland [variously spelled]. John E. and Elizabeth B. Williams, both of whom had been born in Pennsylvania, moved the family to Wisconsin and Illinois before settling in Marquette, on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which became the family home. John Williams prospered as a barber, an occupation that provided opportunities unavailable to African American men in other arenas. Among Blanche Williams's siblings, one brother and two sisters followed their father into the barbering/hairdressing field; others pursued training in nursing, dentistry, master plumbing, and teaching. Tragedy struck the family in 1887 when Blanche was fifteen years old; her fifty-two-year-old mother died of cancer. Elizabeth Williams was buried in the family plot at Park Cemetery in Marquette. The following year, John E. Williams was remarried in Chicago to a Virginia widow, Neeton A. Perry; by 1900 they were living in Philadelphia, along with his two youngest sons. John Williams died in Montreal in 1911 and was buried in Marquette.

Blanche Williams entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., graduating in 1892. Upon graduation, she settled in Wilmington, Delaware, to teach at The Howard School. It seems likely that the school's renowned principal, Edwina Kruse, a stern educator of Puerto Rican and German ancestry, who was widely revered for her rigorous standards, had recruited her. In Washington and in Delaware, Blanche Williams would have had her first encounters with legal segregation and the perverse inequalities it imposed. Wilmington's Howard School, which had been founded by the Delaware Association for the Moral Improvement and Education of Colored People, a group organized by whites in 1866, was, by the 1890s, black-run and the first Delaware school to provide a full curriculum to Black students. It offered the only four-year high school course for African Americans in the entire state. Blanche Williams taught at the school for over five years, resigning shortly after marrying J. Bacon Stubbs of Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in December, 1897. Undoubtedly the couple had met at Howard University, as J.B. Stubbs earned his medical degree there. During their marriage, which lasted until his death in 1935, Blanche W. Stubbs bore three children: Jeanette (Jean) (later Jamison); Elizabeth (Liddie) (later Davis); and Frederick Douglass Stubbs.

Blanche Stubbs's activism was broad, deep, and life-long. In 1912, she and her husband joined with other African American Wilmingtonians, including Howard High School teacher Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar

lectures on African American history; and meeting spaces. Blanche Stubbs became the settlement's first director and served in that capacity until 1949, when her church, St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, took over the work and erected a new building on the site. Along with her husband, she was an early and consistent supporter of the Wilmington Branch of the NAACP, chartered in 1915. Like other educated African American women of her era, Blanche Stubbs devoted time to women's club work, providing leadership to the City Federation of Colored Women. In 1916, she presided over a meeting of several local clubs at the Garrett Settlement House which resulted in the creation of the Delaware Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, an affiliate of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). She became the Delaware Federation's first president. During her two-year term, the number of affiliated clubs increased significantly and membership grew to 250. The Federation focused its work on the needs of African American youth; in 1919, it founded the Delaware Industrial School for Colored Girls.

Blanche Stubbs's suffrage activism emerged from within this matrix of community engagement, concern about African American children's education, interest in racial uplift, opposition to racially discriminatory policies, involvement in women's clubs, and efforts to advance the status and rights of African Americans. By the time she attended the organizational meeting of the Wilmington Equal Suffrage Study Club in March, 1914, at the home of Emma Belle Gibson Sykes, a co-communicant at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church and a teacher at Howard High School, Blanche Stubbs was part of a dense network of activist women in her adopted city. Other founding members included the club's president, Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar, Alice G. Baldwin, Nellie Nicholson (later Taylor), and Caroline Williams—all of them teachers at Howard High School. When Delaware's suffragists organized Wilmington's first mass suffrage parade on May 2, Blanche Stubbs served as marshal for the “colored” section, which marched separately from white suffragists. Not long after, in early June 1914, the club announced, in addition to its semi-monthly meetings, a series of lectures on the topic of suffrage and “questions of municipal, state, national, and international interest,” the first of which considered “The World Wide Woman Movement and What It Means to the Negro.”

Blanche Stubbs voiced her views on black women's suffrage in several ways, most notably in a lengthy letter published in the Wilmington Evening Journal on February 23, 1915. At the time, the state legislature was debating an amendment to the state constitution that would have enfranchised Delaware's women (the state did not formally disfranchise black men, despite its segregation laws). Addressing the editor's assumptions about African American voters' loyalty to the Republican Party, an assumption shaping the debate, Stubbs reviewed the history of that loyalty, and argued that “the vote of the colored women cannot be counted on as an asset to any one party.” Black women, she insisted, might be Democrats or Republicans, and held opinions “just as diversified as those of the white women,” with whom they had been “joining hands ... in every reform movement” since 1848. Revealing her own assumptions about class differences between whites and blacks and among African Americans, she contended that a black woman's “vote is not half so great a menace to the country as that of the poor, illiterate immigrant women who have not been reared under our flag and constitution, and with our language and customs their birthright.” The editor should “study ... [N]egro women as a whole, not simply one class, and that the lowest, before making any more prophecies.” In July, 1916, as the Congressional Union (CU) was recruiting ward-level suffrage support in Wilmington, she opened the Garrett Settlement House for CU's use and presided over an organizing meeting. Later, on June 3, 1920, one day after the Delaware State Legislature had refused to ratify the

Nineteenth Amendment, she scheduled a public lecture at the settlement house on “The Equality of Men and Women.”

During the 1920s, Blanche Stubbs was active in Republican Party politics, both nationally and locally, and served as state chairman of the black-led National Republican Women's Auxiliary Committee. In addition, she attended at least one Pan-African Congress in New York (in 1927). As NAACP branch Vice-President, she and her husband (who chaired the Executive Committee) worked with Lewis A. Redding and his son Louis Lorenzo Redding, a Harvard Law School graduate who became the first African American admitted to the Delaware bar, in efforts to mitigate the routine humiliations of segregation. In 1925, the group successfully kept local theaters from screening the racist film “The Birth of a Nation.” In 1927, in her capacity as director of the Garrett Settlement House, she lodged a formal complaint with Wilmington's Park Commission over an incident that occurred when she took a group of her students, aged three to twelve, to use playground equipment at a local park. They were denied access. Her action sparked a major NAACP-led protest against segregation in public parks. In later years, her daughter Jean Stubbs Jamison, as president of the NAACP's Wilmington branch, led the effort to integrate all of Delaware's public accommodations.

Alongside public accomplishments, the post-suffrage decades brought personal sorrows. Between 1919 and 1931, nine of her remaining siblings died; in 1935 her husband died of pneumonia at age 67. In 1947, her son, Frederick Douglass Stubbs, a highly regarded Philadelphia thoracic surgeon, died at age 41. A Wilmington elementary school, dedicated in 1953, bears his name. She continued her work as director of the Garrett Settlement until it closed in 1949. Blanche Stubbs took ill and died on March 11, 1952, at the home of her daughter Jean Jamison in Wilmington, following her eightieth birthday dinner celebration. She and her two daughters—Jean and her sister Elizabeth Stubbs Davis, an anthropological researcher and teacher—had just returned from a cruise to Central and South America. Along with her daughters, she was survived by her youngest brother Hugo.

At her death, Blanche Williams Stubbs was eulogized as one of the most prominent women in Wilmington's African American community. Her broad commitment to social justice and her associations with Emma Belle Gibson Sykes, Alice Baldwin and Alice Dunbar-Nelson bore fruit in women's clubs, women's suffrage, and NAACP activities in her adopted city. For her work and contributions to the civic life of Wilmington, she was honored by the Alumni Association at Howard University in June 1951.

Sources:

Biographical details for Blanche Williams Stubbs and her family can be traced through decennial censuses and city directories, as well as birth and death records available via Ancestry.com and familysearch.org, and African American newspapers, particularly the St. Paul (Minnesota) Appeal, the New York Age and the Chicago Defender. A descendant maintains a genealogy with family photos at https://www.geni.com/people/Florence-Blanche-Williams/6000000009038630483?through=6000000009038223110

An obituary appeared in the Wilmington Journal-Every Evening, March 12, 1952. The papers of the Wilmington Branch of the NAACP, available on microfilm, contain information on her membership and on the 1927 protest over segregated parks. Her correspondence with W.E.B. DuBois in the 1920s, some of which has been digitized, can be found in DuBois's papers at the University of Massachusetts. The diary of Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Give Us Each Day, ed. Gloria T. Hull (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), covering the years 1921 to 1931, includes details on the Stubbs and Jamison families. Dunbar-Nelson was particularly close to Jean Stubbs Jamison and her husband Dr. Francis T. (“Juice”) Jamison. For her role as first president of the Delaware Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, see Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, Lifting as They Climb (Washington, DC: National Association of Colored Women, 1933), 120-23. [LINK] Blanche and J. Bacon Stubbs's wills can be found at the office of the New Castle County Register of Wills office, Wilmington, Delaware; wills #31887 and #31894. Copies and some associated documents are in the papers of Allison Davis, Blanche Stubbs's son-in-law, at the University of Chicago Library.

Newspaper articles chronicling her activist commitments include “Garrett Settlement,” Wilmington Morning News, June 26, 1913, p. 3; “Negro Women to Study Suffrage,” ibid., March 21, 1914, p. 2; “Suffrage Parade Striking Success,” Sunday Morning Star, May 3, 1914, pp. 1, 23; and “Clash over Use of City Playfields,” Evening Journal, August 4, 1927, pp. 1, 11. For Blanche W. Stubbs's letter to Editor of the Wilmington Evening Journal, see the misleadingly-titled “Many Anti-Suffragists among Colored Women,” February 23, 1915, p. 6 [LINK]

Important secondary sources include Annette Woolard-Provine, Integrating Delaware: The Reddings of Wilmington (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2003); Carol Hoffecker and Annette Woolard, “Black Women in Delaware's History,” http://www1.udel.edu/BlackHistory/blackwomen.html; and Pauline A. Young, “The Negro in Delaware: Past and Present,” in Delaware: A History of the First State, ed. H. Clay Reed and Marjorie Bjornson Reed (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1947), II, 581-606.

Blanche Williams Stubbs photo, n.d.; courtesy of H. Gordon Fleming

 

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