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Black Women and the Activist Challenge 5 children being sold away. Her acknowledgement that only Jesus could hear her points to a lack of confidence that there was anything that could be done to address her pain in the earthly realm. Debates about whether or not women were suited to fully participate in politics as voters included questions about their intellectual capacities. Truth understood that there was something very fundamental about the right to vote whereby a formalized education was not a prerequisite, espe- cially for groups like black women who were legally kept from not only voting but also learning to read and write. Truth also took what some scholars to today might call a womanist stance in her response to biblically based rationalizations for disenfran- chising women, including black women. Truth offered an interpretation of the origins of human beings and her relationship to God and to the world from that unique vantage point when she described not only the biblical account of the “original sin” but also the salvation of the world. Women were central in changing the course of world history and were also at the heart of the world’s redemption. Black women fought during the enslavement period to address the struggles of black people and women, and the struggle continued after slavery through the Reconstruction period. Reconstruction was the period immediately following the end of slavery through the late 1870s. Even as black men were granted the right to vote, black women continued to fight for that right and address other social justice issues, including physical violence against black women, black men, and black children in the form of lynching and in other ways. Assaults on the image and physical bodies of black women and of black people continued in the decades that fol- lowed the end of Reconstruction. Questions about how the nation might unite and how racial progress might be achieved took place in the 1890s as highlighted in the historic address delivered by Booker T. Washington at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition. The address was later referred to as the Atlanta Compromise speech. BLACK WOMEN, THE CLUB MOVEMENT, AND THE POLITICS OF RESPECTABILITY: 1890s–1920s Booker T. Washington was considered one of the most important and influential people of his time as the head of the Tuskegee Institute. ­ Washington was invited to address a group of elite white men where he