War it became clear that black and white women had different views of why the right to vote was essential. Unlike white suffragists, Black women sought the ballot for themselves and their men to empower black communities besieged by the reign of racial terror that erupted after Emancipation in the late 1800s. The movement splits The racism that defined the early twentieth century made it so black women were oppressed from every side: first, for their status as women, and then again for their race. Many politically engaged African-American women were primarily invested in matters of racial equality, with suffrage later materializing as a secondary goal. The Seneca Falls Convention, widely lauded as the first women's rights convention, is often considered the precursor to the racial schism within the women's suffrage movement; the Seneca Falls Declaration put forth a political analysis of the condition of upper-class, married women, but did not address the struggles of working-class white women or black women. Well into the twentieth century, a pattern emerged of segregated political activism, as black and white women organized separately due to class and racial tensions within the overall movement, and a fundamental difference in movement goals and political consciousness. Black women engaged in multi-pronged activism, as they did not often separate the goal of obtaining the franchise from other goals, and wide-scale racism added to the urgency of their more multi-faceted activism. Most black women who supported the expansion of the franchise sought to better the lives of black women alongside black men and children, which radically set them apart from their white counterparts. While white women were focused on obtaining the franchise, black women sought the betterment of their communities overall, rather than their individual betterment exclusively as women. In Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis explains that "black women were equal to their men in the oppression they suffered…and they resisted slavery with a passion equal to their men's", which highlights the source of their more holistic activism. Following the civil war, many African-American women struggled to keep their interests at the forefront of the political sphere, as many reformers tended to assume in their rhetoric assuming "black to be male and women to be white". Marginalizing African-American women In 1890, two rival organizations, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). As NAWSA