Belle Kearney

A Slaveholder's Daughter (Illustrated Edition) (Dodo Press) Belle Kearney Illustrated edition

Belle Kearney (1863-1939) was a Mississippi temperance reformer, suffragist, teacher, and legislator. Kearney was interested in education and she began teaching in the newly established public school system despite her father's protest. Her interest in education and women's roles in the New South made her accept being a superintendent in the Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1889. She went all over the United States and Europe giving speeches, using these opportunities to advocate her ideas about the relations between races in the South. In 1903 she addressed the NAWSA convention, using the issue of black male political power to argue for the enfranchisement of white women.