Bob Lonsberry

Bob Lonsberry

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LONSBERRY: IT SHOULD BE ANTHONY/DOUGLASS AIRPORT

Measure twice, cut once.

               When it comes to renaming the Greater Rochester International Airport, it might pay to take a second look before we start ordering new signs.

               In the wake of mounting Black Lives Matter protests, the Monroe County Legislature recently voted unanimously to rename the airport for Frederick Douglass.

               Douglass was the leading black American of his generation, a close confidante of presidents, and the most influential African-American of the abolition and reconstruction eras. The middle portion of his career – 1847 to 1872 – was lived in Rochester, where he published two influential abolitionist newspapers.

               When he died in 1895, after almost 25 years away, his sons and wife brought him back to Rochester to be buried.

               Frederick Douglass is a unique and significant historical figure and is absolutely worthy to have the Rochester airport named after him.

               But he’s not the only one.

               Rochester was also home to Douglass’s contemporary and friend, Susan B. Anthony, another figure of towering significance in American history.

               Anthony was two years younger than Douglass, and they each moved to Rochester in the middle 1840s. Though remembered as a fighter for women’s rights, Susan B. Anthony was involved in the anti-slavery movement from her childhood, passing petitions as a teen-ager and engaging in her Quaker family’s abolition meetings. It was at one of these meetings, at the Anthony’s farm on what is now Brooks Avenue, that Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony presumably met.

               She would be his friend to the last day of his life, literally.

               And their twin legacies of service to the cause of freedom were entwined all of their lives, and all of the years since.

               But the course of their struggles were not parallel. Frederick Douglass’s fight for the abolition of slavery met with a successful end when he was 47 years old. Susan B. Anthony went to her grave at age 86 with the national right to vote for women still 14 years in the future. Black men gained the right to vote in national elections 55 years before any woman had that right.

               Frederick Douglass went to Washington to serve in high appointed office in a succession of Republican administrations. He escorted James A. Garfield to the lectern to be sworn in as president of the United States. He and his reputation rightly flourished in the last third of his life.

               Susan B. Anthony, though nationally prominent, stayed in Rochester and kept working, rallying for the right and pushing the cause of women’s suffrage, each day a new effort to reach a righteous yet unattained goal. 

               They argued from the same Declaration of Independence, cited the same Bible verses, and taught of equal rights and universal liberty. Yet the cause of one bore fruit in his lifetime, and the cause of the other was denied her in hers.

               Some in the women’s rights movement bristled at those disparities. Why the lag in liberty? How could America see the sin of inequality between the races but not the sin of inequality between the sexes? Why did the federal government condemn racism at the ballot box, but not sexism? Susan B. Anthony fought for Frederick Douglass’s right to vote, though she herself would be denied it for some 40 years after he got it.

               In the mind of America in the second half of the 19thCentury, women’s rights were less important than black rights. That can’t continue to be the case in the first half of the 21stCentury. All are equal, all rights are equal, and, in the case of these two great Americans, their legacies are also equal.

               It is right to name the airport after Frederick Douglass.

               But it is wrong to deny that same honor to Susan B. Anthony.

               It is disrespectful to her memory, life, and contribution to the cause of American liberty.

               She lived here longer, and this is the gateway airport to Seneca Falls, where women’s rights are honored and remembered.

Both Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony can be an inspiration to all Americans, but she, as a woman, can be a direct inspiration and role model to fully half of the American population. Denied in life, she should not be denied in death.

We don’t want, by our oversight, to accidently commit the wrong of an earlier day – to imply that one person’s rights are inferior to another’s.       

We are proud of them both, we must honor them both.

               Measure twice, cut once.

               We put both of their names on the bridge, we should put both their names on the airport.


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