In the mid-1880s, women's suffragist and civil rights activist Orra Langhorne penned an oft-repeated comparison in the Virginia-based periodical Southern Workman: "The history of the African in our land," she wrote, "both in bondage and in the struggle for civil rights presents a constant analogy to that of the Hebrew race." 1 In an earlier article she had explained:The Jews, a wandering and barbarous people . . . in striking analogy with the story of the Negroes in America . . . [were] enslaved, and suffered even a more cruel bondage than the African . . . The history of the Negro-American since he became a free man forms part of our national annals, and the analogy with the record of the Hebrew wanderers in alien lands has been continued. 2