Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt traveled through the South en route to the NAWSA convention in Atlanta. Anthony asked her old friend Frederick Douglass, a former slave, not to attend the NAWSA convention in Atlanta in 1895, the first to be held in a southern city. Black NAWSA members were excluded from 1903 convention in the southern city of New Orleans. The NAWSA executive board issued a statement during the convention that said, "The doctrine of State's rights is recognized in the national body, and each auxiliary State association arranges its own affairs in accordance with its own ideas and in harmony with the customs of its own section." As NAWSA turned its attention to a Constitutional Amendment, many Southern suffragists remained opposed because a federal amendment would enfranchise Black women. In response, in 1914, Kate Gordon founded the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, which opposed the 19th Amendment.