Trump to posthumously pardon Susan B. Anthony

Anthony died in 1906, and the 19th Amendment, which she fought for, was ratified 14 years later.Trump’s announcement comes a day after he said he planned to pardon someone “very, very important” on Tuesday, adding that it wouldn’t be NSA leaker Edward Snowden or former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.The choice to pardon Anthony may serve more than one of Trump’s core political strategies going into the 2020 election.Anthony, a white proto-feminist and arguably the face of the American women’s suffrage movement, is likely held in a certain esteem by suburban white women, who Trump and his campaign have made clear they view as a key demographic in the election.But in the battle for suffrage, Anthony also embraced white supremacist ideas, virtually ignored and at points excluded black women who were also engaged in the battle for suffrage.During Reconstruction, the period just after the Civil War, a set of former abolitionists and those in favor of expanding Black Americans’ legal rights insisted that “women” should first prioritize Black and presumably male voting rights.