All Over Albany

The United States v. Susan B. Anthony at the Albany federal courthouse

Speaking of the women's suffrage movement...

The federal courthouse in Albany will be hosting a re-enactment of the 1873 trial in which Susan B. Anthony was tried for voting in the presidential election.

The re-enactment is being staged by the Northern District of New York Federal Court Bar Association and members of the judiciary and community will be playing the roles of the people involved.

In November 1872 Susan B. Anthony and 14 other women convinced election inspectors in Rochester to allow them to vote in the presidential election. Their argument was that 14th Amendment required that women be allowed to vote. They were arrested for illegal voting, and Anthony was put on trial.

Anthony was found guilty at the direction of the judge. She then proceeded to unload on him in what became a famous speech and a key moment in the women's suffrage movement (even if accounts of it vary). A clip from one of the accounts:

Yes, your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor's verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.

The trial re-enactment is Thursday, November 16 at 6 pm in James T. Foley U.S. Courthouse on Broadway in downtown Albany. It's free.