#otd in 1870, the American Anti-Slavery Society disbanded.

Why? Because the #15thAmendment had been ratified.

Members declared that the 15A represented "the fulfillment of the pledge which the anti-slavery movement made to the colored population of the United States."

William Lloyd Garrison wanted to dissolve the AA-SS 5 years earlier, after passage of the 13th Amendment and the Confederacy's defeat.

But Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, & others said no.

"Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot," Douglass said then.

In 1870, the 15A had written that into the US Constitution.

Still, some members argued against disbanding in 1870. They believed that too much work remained to be done to secure the practical meaning of freedom.

The majority wasn't blind to the challenges.

They acknowledged "social prejudice, the anarchy and the rule of assassins at the South."

And they called for education and economic justice for the formerly enslaved.

But the majority - inc. Douglass and Phillips - felt the 15A wrapped up one phase of the struggle.

They now saw electoral politics as the main arena for struggle.

Passage of the 15A cemented Douglass's ties to the Republican Party.

Later that year, Phillips ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Labor Reform ticket (and lost badly, alas).

150 years later, when the right to vote remains under attack, it perhaps look naïve for the AA-SS to have declared that "a voting class is never permanently wronged without its own consent."

But remember, they didn't think the fight was over. And neither should we. /fin