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rganized suffrage activity was centered on educated, middle-class white women, who were often reluctant to accept immigrants, African Americans, and the working class into their ranks. Belmont's efforts only partially broke with this tradition. In 1910, Belmont initiated the first attempt to integrate the enfranchisement movement in New York. Working with leading clubwomen in the African American community, like S. J. S. Garnet, F. R. Keyser, Marie C. Lawton and Irene Moorman, she encouraged them to form a Black branch of her Political Equality League. She established its first "suffrage settlement house" in Harlem, and she included African American women and immigrants in weekend retreats at Beacon Towers, her Gothic style castle in Sands Point. However, she also contributed to the Southern Woman Suffrage Conference, which refused to admit African Americans. Alva E. Belmont in 1911. The Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (
CU), originally led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, separated from the NAWSA in 1913. While at the same time, Belmont was funding Laura Clay's Southern States Woman's Suffrage Conference in Kentucky, because of her Alabama roots.[citation needed] Belmont then merged the Political Equality League into the CU. Now committed to securing the passage of the 19th Amendment, she convened a "Conference of Great Women" at Marble House in the summer of 1914. Belmont's daughter Consuelo, who promoted suffrage and prison reform in England, addressed the gathering, which was followed by the CU's first national meeting. Belmont served on the executive comm
