“You white women speak here of rights,” Harper said that day in 1866. “I speak of wrongs.” Reciting the litany of humiliations that black women had to endure on public conveyances — not because they were women but because they were black — she asked, “Are there no wrongs to be righted?”

Harper’s speech anticipated by more than a century the “intersectional” legal analysis of the critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, who showed how policies that treat race and gender as mutually exclusive deprive black women of redress in discrimination cases while also obscuring the fact that they struggle under the dual burdens of racism and sexism.

“History of Woman Suffrage” draws heavily on the proceedings of the 1866 meeting but tellingly leaves out Harper’s momentous speech. The historian Nell Irvin Painter argues that her words were “too strong” for white suffrage leaders who saw her polished, self-assured style as antithetical to what they viewed as blackness. They preferred the uneducated version of black womanhood embodied by the formerly enslaved suffragist Sojourner Truth, who entertained her audiences as she imparted her ideas.

Yet Harper’s poise and self-possession were the norm among the affluent freeborn black women who had time to engage with the suffrage movement. For example, the sisters Harriett Forten Purvis and Margaretta Forten — daughters of the wealthy Philadelphia sailmaker and abolitionist James Forten and his wife, Charlotte — were central players in the staging of the Fifth National Woman’s Rights Convention in their hometown in 1854. The Boston journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who played a leadership role in the Massachusetts suffrage movement in the late 1800s, was the wife of the pro-suffrage state legislator George L. Ruffin.

Another respected suffragist and abolitionist — but again, whose voice is missing from the suffragist narrative — is Sarah Parker Remond, who grew up in a prominent New England family. Remond, like Harper, was a member of the American Equal Rights Association. She was popular on the abolitionist speaking circuit and also toured the Northeast with her brother, Charles, in the late 1860s in support of women’s voting rights.

Chroniclers of the suffrage struggle tended not to record their black peers. Fortunately, the 1853 lawsuit Remond filed against two men who ejected her from an opera in Boston for reasons of race provides a window into what she believed. The archivist Dorothy Porter Wesley writes in her study of the Remond family that the judge issued a forceful decision, “fully sustaining the equal rights of our Colored citizens.” We also know that Remond grew sufficiently tired of racism in the United States and fled to Europe.