His message is absolutely relevant today, when we are seeing a resurgence of racism in a way that we hoped had been banished, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations, said in tribute to the civil rights leader, whose death, at the age of 84 was announced on Tuesday.
Born in 1815after the death of a much-desired baby boy, Elizabeth Cady Stanton grew up with the painful knowledge that her father had longed for a son, and later recalled how, as a child of 11, she'd watched him grieve the death of another son, the only one of his five sons to survive infancy; young Elizabeth climbed onto his knee-only to hear him murmur, "Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy." Stanton later described the moment as decisive.