How did social activists Frederick Douglass & Susan B. Anthony listen and respond?
- Pamela Ruiter -Feenstra
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
I recently returned from a week-long residency at the University of Rochester and Eastman School of Music. My host, University Carillonist Carson Landry, was strikingly attentive and respectful. I felt warmly welcomed and valued. With his students, Carson listened deeply and engaged them in learning music that suited their interests and abilities. These are the traits of a terrific pedagogue–and for me, a great friend and colleague.
Each day, en route to the U-R campus, I walked through the beautiful Mount Hope Cemetery filled with old-growth shade trees. I mentioned to Carson how I loved walking through that cementery, which prompted him to tell me that Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony are buried there.
What?!!! Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony?!
After my final presentation and concert, I asked Carson if we could find their gravesites. It was a powerful experience to witness the resting place of two brave social justice activists–two luminaries whose voices are needed as much today as during their lifetimes. I started reflecting on listening to their voices, to the wisdom and courage they showed in the face of so many injustices and contemporaries who refused to listen to them.
Enslaved from birth, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped in 1838 and soon became a renowned abolitionist, anti-racist orator, and anti-enslavement author. He supported gender equity, and spoke in favor of children of all genders accessing education and people of all genders having the right to vote.
Frederick Douglass valued deep, openhearted listening. He fostered dialogues and alliances regardless of a person’s race or politics. In his 1855 lecture for the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, he famously said,
“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”
A staunch suffragist, Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) also served as the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. She and her close friend and colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton launched the American Equal Rights Association immediately after the Civil War, campaigning for equal rights for women and African Americans. In 1872, Anthony was arrested in Rochester, NY (her hometown) for voting. In 1878, she and Stanton presented Congress with a petition that eventually became the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1920), granting voting rights to white women. Sadly, it took another 45 years until the long overdue Voting Act was passed in 1965, finally giving Black people the right to vote.
Carson told me that during each election season, Susan B. Anthony’s tombstone is covered with a plastic protective bonnet so that Rochesterites may place their “I Voted” stickers on her grave. Herstory (the feminist counterpoint to history) dances into the present.
Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony were tireless activists who refused to be silenced or back down until justice awoke. Each of them made great strides in bending the arc of the universe toward justice. And both of them knew that there was still more work to do.
Each of us social justice and arts activists stand on their shoulders. Let’s listen deeply to their words, pay attention to their actions, and carry their luminous torches forward to address social injustices of our time.
“If there is no struggle,
there is no progress.”
-Frederick Douglass
“Failure is impossible.”
-Susan B. Anthony, about the suffragist movement
To learn more about global majority and women social activists, sign up for the Compose for Change: Healing Arts class here! Don’t wait to reserve your spot. It drops in January.
FAQs
How can music help heal personal or collective trauma?
Music gives us a way to listen beyond words. It carries memory, emotion, and hope all at once. When we create or listen together, the sound becomes a thread, weaving our stories into something whole again, turning sorrow into strength.
How can an artistic project also be an act of social justice?
Art speaks where injustice tries to silence. Every song, mural, or movement can call attention to what needs healing. When creativity becomes compassion in action, it becomes justice, lifting voices that the world too often overlooks.
What role does deep listening play in healing and creativity?
Deep listening is the heartbeat of both. It’s being fully present, to learn and understand. When we listen with empathy and openness, creation flows more honestly, and healing becomes a shared rhythm instead of a private ache.
How can women and global majority communities reclaim healing and power through art?
By telling their stories in their own voices. Through music, visual arts, words, and movement, women and communities reclaim what was taken, rewriting pain into purpose. Every act of creation becomes a way to rise, to remember, to belong again.
How can allies or donors support art that nurtures healing and justice?
By standing beside the work, not above it. Support can look like funding, sharing, showing up — or simply listening. When we invest in art that heals, we’re choosing to believe in a future built on care, creativity, and collective transformation.
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