True Crime Historian

Washington, D.C.March 3, 1913. The day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer named Inez Milholland climbed onto a white horse and led more than five thousand women down Pennsylvania Avenue in the largest suffrage demonstration the nation had ever seen. They never made it four blocks before a mob of a quarter million men surged into the street. Women were grabbed, shoved, spat upon, and pelted with bottles while D.C. police laughed along with the crowd. Over a hundred marchers were hospitalized. Helen Keller was so shaken she couldn't speak. The cavalry had to be called from Fort Myer to restore order. Meanwhile, Ida B. Wells-Barnett defied orders to march in the back of the parade and took her rightful place with the Illinois delegation. The resulting scandal cost the police superintendent his career — and gave the suffrage movement the momentum that would carry it to the Nineteenth Amendment.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian