of officers consisted of equal numbers of men and women, and the convention agreed to alternate the presidency of the organization between a woman and a man. Henry Ward Beecher was the first president of the AWSA, and Lucy Stone was chair of the executive committee. Its headquarters were in Boston. African Americans attended the AWSA's founding convention and played important roles in the organization. Robert Purvis was elected vice president for Pennsylvania at that convention. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, also a founding member of the AWSA, gave the closing address at the annual conventions in 1873 and 1875. Suffrage activists who hoped to prevent a split in the movement convinced Susan B. Anthony, one of the leaders of the NWSA, to attend the AWSA's founding convention. She was given a seat on the platform where she heard speeches voicing a determination to replace the NWSA. She rose to speak immediately after Lucy Stone's speech, offering to cooperate with the AWSA and saying the movement was more important than any one organization. The split, however, continued for many years. NWSA, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, condemned the Fifteenth Amendment as an injustice to women. In her The Revolution newsletter, Stanton periodically appealed to racism and ethnocentrism in order to distinguish female suffrage from black male suffrage: “ 'Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic,' declared Stanton, had no right to be “making laws for [feminist leader] Lucretia Mott.” ' The AWSA , which included Lucy Stone, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe and Josephine Ruffin, strongly supported the Republican Party and the Fifteenth Amendment, which they felt would not win congressional approval if it included the vote for women. Another member was abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth. In 1870, Lucy Stone, the leader of the AWSA, began publishing an eight-page weekly newspaper called the Woman's Journal as the voice of the AWSA. Eventually it became a voice of the women's movement as a whole. Comparison to NWSA After Reconstruction, the AWSA began to differ from the NWSA in several other ways: The AWSA included both men and women. The NWSA was all-female. The AWSA chose not campaign on other issues related to gender equality, focusing its efforts on suffrage. The NWSA also took positions on a number of