President Trump announced Tuesday morning he will give a posthumous pardon to Susan B. Anthony, one of history’s biggest figures in the women’s suffrage movement.
The announcement came 100 years to the day after the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
Anthony, a strong anti-slavery pioneer who died in 1906, had been arrested in 1872 for violating laws that had permitted only men to vote in the presidential election.
TRUMP SAYS HE WILL PARDON SOMEONE ‘VERY, VERY IMPORTANT’ TUESDAY
She was then indicted, tried and convicted for voting illegally and sentenced to pay a fine of $100 and court costs.
The historic New Yorker described her two-day trial in June 1873 as “the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded,” according to The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
While President Ulysses S. Grant had pardoned election inspectors, he never pardoned Anthony and had told her before she cast her ballot that he had “already done more for women than any other president.”
In 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The amendment was ratified on Aug. 18, 1920.
Susan B. Anthony is now honored in the Capitol Rotunda as part of the women’s suffrage monument. Called the “Portrait Monument,” it depicts three women who fought to secure the vote for women, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Anthony.
On Monday, President Trump told reporters that he would pardon someone “very, very important,” but refused to go into details.
“She was never pardoned. Did you know that? She was never pardoned,” President Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “What took so long?”
“She was guilty for voting,” he said, “and we’re going to be signing a full and complete pardon.”
Majorie Dannenfelser, the president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, and conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell were in attendance.
The president has pardoned or granted clemency to a number of people in the past and most recently granted clemency to longtime political adviser Roger J. Stone Jr., who was convicted of impeding a congressional inquiry into Trump’s 2016 campaign and possible ties to Russia.
The New York Times alleged that the pardon “appeared to be an effort to distract from the Democratic National Convention and narrow the historically large gender gap that has him trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the White House race.”
Story cited here.
