Alice Paul's Reaction To Police Persecution

There were tireless hours of preparation that went into the parade. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns stayed up into the late hours of the night to finish tasks that could not be finished later, quite frequently. Finally the day arrived for the parade and what a day it was. There were around 5,000 marchers, but they had to fight their way to the finish as there was opposition awaiting them down the parade route. Some of the marchers had tears brought to their eyes from the insults that were hurled at them from the sidewalks. At one point, the crowd broke past the police battalion that was protecting the women, and surrounded the marchers. Thankfully, a cavalry of troops were able to repair the disorder that had taken place and dispersed the crowd of spectators and the marchers. Paul succeeded in making the parade quite the spectacle and the newspapers were on their side as they commented on how outrageous the …show more content…
Despite the credible amount of photographic evidence, and many eyewitness testimonies, the findings let the police department off easy, with a slap on the wrist; however that didn’t stop the press from really letting the investigation committee really have at it. As Alice Stone Blackwell commented “A police force that cannot handle a street parade has not been taught the first principal of its business.” On the bright side, there was a spike in suffrage activity and interest in a federal amendment for suffrage because of the parade on March 3rd. Unfortunately, when these ideas reached the new president, who had never once thought about suffrage, made no immediate change. Paul did not give up, for she created the National Women’s Party a month following the parade and moved to the next strategy she had up her