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Rebecca Henry Hayes First president of the Texas Equal Rights Association Courtesy Jane Y. McCallum Family Papers Austin History Center, Austin Public Library A group of men and women under the leadership of Rebecca Henry Hayes of Galveston gathered at the Windsor Hotel in Dallas on May 10, 1893, to form the state's first organization for equal suffrage, the Texas Equal Rights Association (TERA). Mrs. Hayes, a Texas resident for twenty years, had worked as a girl in the suffrage cause under Susan B. Anthony. At its second convention in 1894 the membership of the Texas Equal Rights Association debated the advisability of inviting Susan B. Anthony and the Reverend Anna Howard Shaw to visit Texas during a proposed lecture and organizing tour across the South. President Rebecca Henry Hayes argued that southern audiences were not yet ready to receive radical northern suffragist like Anthony. Grace Danforth, Elizabeth Fry, and Belle Burchill led a vocal opposition. The animosity generated over this issue led eventually to a split that fatally weakened the TERA. |