from the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 Wikipedia entry:
Plans for the march were threatened when black suffragists announced they intended to participate, which lead white southern suffragists to threaten to boycott the event.[7] One solution discussed was segregating the black suffragists in a separate section to mollify white southern delegates.[8]
After a good beginning, the marchers encountered crowds, mostly male, on the street that should have been cleared for the parade. They were jeered and harassed while attempting to squeeze by the scoffing crowds, and the police, said to be of little help, sometimes even participated in the harassment. The Massachusetts and the Pennsylvania national guards stepped in. Eventually, boys from the Maryland Agricultural College created a human barrier protecting the women from the angry crowd and helping them progress forward to their destination.[13] Over 200 people were treated for injuries at local hospitals.[14] Still, most of the marchers finished the parade and viewed an allegorical tableau presented near the Treasury Building.[1]
Considerable debate exists about the segregation of black woman suffragists in the parade. A contemporaneous newspaper account indicated that Alice Paul objected to participation of "Negro" suffragists, but Anna Howard Shaw insisted for them to be allowed to participate.[15] In a 1974 oral history interview, Alice Paul recalled the "hurdle" of Mary Church Terrell planning to bring a delegation from the National Association of Colored Women.[16]
Delegations from the National Association of Colored Women and from the new Alpha Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority from Howard Universityparticipated and black women marched in various state and occupational groups. While in Paul's memory, a compromise was reached to order the parade as southern women, then the men's section, and finally the Negro women's section, reports in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People paper, The Crisis, depict events unfolding quite differently, with black women protesting the plan to segregate them.[17] What is clear is that some groups attempted, on the day of the parade, to segregate their delegations, but women like Ida B. Wells-Barnett refused to comply.[18]
Woodrow Wilson's segregation of the Federal Government and military:
the twenties:
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