Women's Suffrage Parade in Washington Attacked by Hostile Crowds as Police Stand By

On March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, newly-appointed chairs of NAWSA’s Congressional Committee, organized the first major civil rights march on Washington, D.C. Lawyer and activist Inez Milholland, riding a white horse named Grey Dawn while wearing a white dress, cape, and golden tiara with the star of hope, led over 5,000 suffragists, 20 parade floats, nine bands, and four mounted brigades down Pennsylvania Avenue. Paul had strategically chosen Milholland, known as “the most beautiful suffragist,” for her photogenic appeal, demonstrating sophisticated media strategy to generate publicity for the cause. The procession deliberately followed the same route planned for Wilson’s inaugural parade the next day, challenging the incoming president to acknowledge women’s systematic exclusion from the democratic process he claimed to champion.

The parade generated massive crowds that grew increasingly hostile, blocking streets and forcing marchers to push through with horses and automobiles. Suffragists were verbally abused and physically assaulted while D.C. police stood by and did little to protect them, revealing how law enforcement institutions allied with those opposing democratic expansion. Concerned citizens, including a troupe of Boy Scouts, the Pennsylvania National Guard, and a U.S. cavalry escort intervened to protect the marchers when official authorities failed in their duty. This state complicity in violence against peaceful democratic protesters foreshadowed the pattern of arrests, imprisonment, and brutality that suffragists would face during the 1917 White House picketing. The police failure to maintain order exposed how institutional power structures tolerated violence against those challenging existing hierarchies.

The parade itself reproduced the racial hierarchies it challenged in other ways, demonstrating how even progressive movements could perpetuate systems of exclusion. Alice Paul, fearful of losing southern support, capitulated to demands that African American women not march with white state delegations. Black marchers were instead relegated to the back of the parade, enforcing racial segregation within a movement claiming to expand democratic rights. Ida B. Wells, the pioneering anti-lynching journalist and civil rights activist, refused this discrimination. She waited in the crowd and jumped the barriers to march with the Illinois delegation representing Chicago, making her own statement about intersectional oppression. The parade’s success in reinvigorating the suffrage movement—evident in the eventual 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment—was thus compromised by its accommodation of white supremacy. This demonstrated how corporate and political interests opposing democratic expansion could exploit racial divisions to weaken reform coalitions, a strategy that would continue undermining movements for institutional change throughout the 20th century.