Even Black rights conventions debated whether citizenship rights extended to women.

Evidence

But not all delegates were seated easily. Helen Johnson of Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, met with objections from Fields Cook of Virginia, who “understood the call for this Convention to be expressly for colored men.” Henry Jerome Brown of Maryland favored seating Johnson, and reportedly argued that “this was a progressive age, and that women would yet have a vote.” Johnson was seated and John Willis Menard of Louisiana cautioned the men about what it meant to wield new power as citizens: The “greatest lever in their way was in themselves…. They had but one voice in the South, and that was to know no distinctions of color or sex.” With citizenship came the grand challenge of showing the way forward on how women fit into the ideals of universal rights. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 734

Categorization

• SEED: A narrative episode showing that the ‘universal rights’ question was internally contested within the Black convention movement — the debate over seating Helen Johnson mirrors later conflicts over whose rights count.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ in the sense of contested definitions of equality within a movement — though the tie is thematic, not direct.