7 Solution 6: Adopt the ERA at Your Company—Because Your Country Didn't
Source: Jo Freeman.
Pierce City, Missouri, population 1,292, was founded in 1870 and named for Andrew Peirce Jr., president of the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway. When the United States Postal Service incorrectly spelled it Pierce, the new name stuck. After that inauspicious beginning, maybe the founders should have scrapped the whole idea of building a community as the town eventually became nationally known for a single horrific act.
In 1901, a white lynch mob killed three African American men who were accused of rape and murder. William Godley, French Godley, and Pete Hampton died by lynching. Pierce's white residents forced all remaining people of color out of town at gunpoint. Harrowing even for its day, that incident prompted Mark Twain to pen, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” a biting essay denouncing both the intolerance and inequality of the nation.
The one bright spot to emerge from a town now stained with the lynchings was a woman named Martha Wright Griffiths. Born a decade after the racially motivated murders of the three young men by town folk, Griffiths would grow up and evolve into an important figure in the realm of women's rights. Raised by a father who believed that girls were innately smarter than boys and a mother determined to raise a young woman who could be economically ...