Suffrage

By: Rosalyn Terborg-Penn

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Suffrage

Black women were active participants in the movement to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, which in 1920 enfranchised all American women. For white women, the amendment's passage ended battles that had begun more than seventy years before. For most African American women, however, the struggle to maintain the ballot continued for two generations more, as they were robbed of their hard-won victory by white political supremacy in the South. But this is the story of the first seventy years, or the first three generations of African American women who became woman suffragists, their long struggle for political equity, and how through this movement many of their voices were heard for the first time. The term “woman suffrage” is the name of the historical movement whose members actively lobbied for women's right to vote. These activists were called “woman suffragists.”

Black women, in their struggle for the right to vote, fought racism and sexism at the same time. Their battles revealed several aspects of African American women's history. First, although black women appeared to be in the forefront throughout the woman suffrage movement, their position of prominence on a national level occurred during the first thirty years. From the last decade of the nineteenth century to the end of the struggle for the Nineteenth Amendment, a larger number of African American women took leadership positions in local and regional woman suffrage activities than on the national level.

“Headquarters for Colored Women Voters.”  Black women were long active in the suffrage movement. In their struggle for the right to vote, they confronted racism and sexism at the same time.

Austin/Thompson Collection, by permission of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

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Second, black women's support for woman suffrage often paralleled, yet developed differently from, that of white suffragists, especially as the movement progressed. There were similar strategies and coalitions among black and white supporters, but the existence of an antiblack woman suffrage rationale and the discrimination that black women found at the polls, reinforced disparities among African American and white woman suffragists.

Third, black male leaders who publicly supported woman suffrage made their presence visible in the movement, while black women who actively worked for the right to vote often remained invisible, a burden imposed by a sexist society. These suffragists were limited politically and as a result remained relatively invisible throughout the movement. Consequently, the struggle for suffrage among African American women was similar to but different than both that of white women and black men.

Finally, although some woman suffrage supporters and scholars who studied the woman suffrage movement have denied that the woman suffrage leadership deliberately discriminated against black women, African American women themselves tell another story. They perceived white woman suffragists to be prejudiced against both black men and black women. Hence, many African American leaders created a united front of men and women to overcome the racial prejudice they observed from white supporters of the woman suffrage movement both in the South and outside of the region.

First Generation

The woman suffrage movement began at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 and ended with the passage of what was called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in 1920. In reviewing woman suffrage movement events over time, we see the changing status of African American women and the changing goals of the wider woman suffrage movement as black strategies influenced the political behavior of white movement leaders.

Beginning in the antebellum years, white male suffrage, not universal suffrage, characterized the growth of democracy. African Americans, both males and females, supported and argued for universal suffrage, for along with white women, they were denied political rights. While male leaders dominated the reform movements of the era, white women often worked behind the scenes to petition governments and to raise funds. Such was also true of the small free black women's population. Antebellum black female abolitionists known to have supported the universal suffrage movement through organizational activities included Sojourner Truth, Harriet Forten Purvis, Margaretta Forten, Sarah Remond, Nancy Prince, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary. They were among the first generation of woman suffragists.

After the Civil War, universal suffrage continued to be the goal of woman suffrage advocates. However, during the late 1860s, a split in the movement developed over conflicting strategies. Feminists disillusioned by the introduction of the word “male” into the U.S. Constitution first lobbied unsuccessfully to exclude the word from the Fourteenth Amendment. They then protested the Fifteenth Amendment, which proposed to enfranchise black males but leave women disfranchised. The ensuing debate divided the universal suffrage movement into those who felt that black men needed the vote even more than did women and those who disagreed.

The African American poet and abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper articulated the views of the first camp. Although she regularly attended the American Equal Rights Association conventions and was committed to women gaining the right to vote, she supported Frederick Douglass, himself a woman suffragist, who argued that the vote was a matter of life or death for black men. Harper said she was willing to wait to gain the ballot in order not to jeopardize this right for the men of her race. She supported what was called the “Negro suffrage” side of the controversy.

Second Generation

Throughout the years of the split, a second generation that lasted twenty years, the suffragists used two different strategies to gain the ballot. For a brief period, the more women-centered members of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) held that women should focus their efforts upon challenging the Fourteenth Amendment by actually attempting to vote. Among the African American women who attempted unsuccessfully to vote in the 1860s were Sojourner Truth in Michigan and Mary Ann Shadd Cary in the District of Columbia. For a while they focused upon state referenda, but they eventually worked toward a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women. Members of the American Woman Suffrage Association who had supported the Fifteenth Amendment and universal suffrage focused on state legislatures in attempts to obtain suffrage on local and state levels. A large number of black women joined with this group, which also pressed the fight for universal suffrage. During the 1870s, this organization attracted the black suffragists Frances Harper of Pennsylvania, Caroline Remond Putnam of Massachusetts, and Lottie Rollin of South Carolina. All three women served as delegates representing their states at national conventions.

As black women's clubs emerged, so, too, did goals and concerns unique to African American women. The changing status of black women also became evident. Increasing numbers of free women became educated and worked to uplift their communities. As a result, black woman suffragists moved in two directions, identifying with the mainstream, white woman suffrage organizations on the one hand and developing their own agendas in black woman suffrage organizations on the other. By the end of the century, thousands of African American women had joined clubs with affiliations in state federations. Most of these included woman suffrage as one of their goals, and from them many black women developed as leaders of the suffrage movement.

By 1890, when the two national associations merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), only four states, all in the West, had offered full suffrage to women. Although by the 1910s women had gained limited suffrage in ten more states, most white men in the East and the South remained resolutely opposed to woman suffrage. Throughout this period, African American women participated in growing numbers in the movement, yet the probability of their achieving suffrage was far less than that for either black men or white women. Despite the fact that most African American men in the South had been disfranchised during the 1890s, those who lived in all regions outside of the South could still vote, and black politicians nationwide used a variety of strategies designed to re-enfranchise black males. As for white women, in the states where they had won full or partial voting rights, the black female population was small. Nonetheless, black woman suffragists and black suffrage associations continued to grow as African American, not white, suffragists utilized strategies in support of universal suffrage.

The growth of a nationally organized black women's club movement in the 1890s revealed the belief that votes for black women would mean regaining the votes stolen from disfranchised black men. National leaders of the black women's club movement presented their views to black and white leaders whenever possible. For example, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, founder of the National Federation of Afro-American Women and editor of Women's Era, a newspaper for African American women, told her readers that the strategy to keep black women from obtaining the ballot would provoke black Americans to defend suffrage for black women. Not surprisingly, Ruffin was correct in her prediction.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, founder of the black women's club movement in the state of Illinois, was noted by suffragist Susan B. Anthony as one of the most respected African American woman suffragists in the nation. Wells-Barnett used this leverage to lobby Anthony to oppose the growing political expediency among white northern women, as they acceded to the antiblack suffrage views of their southern counterparts. Wanda Hendricks, in her study about African American suffragists in Chicago, confirms that black suffragists confronted discrimination from white suffragists in the movement. Nonetheless, black suffragists in Chicago, undaunted by discrimination, played significant roles in the city's politics. Wells-Barnett, Hendricks found, argued that the vote was essential to black people in their goals to end lynching and the disfranchisement of black men.

Third Generation

As the third generation of woman suffrage emerged in the early twentieth century, a new exclusionary strategy developed among mainstream suffragists as some form of literacy requirement was legislated in several states. Among woman suffrage advocates, this trend was known as “educated suffrage” and was meant to limit uneducated black and foreign voters. Some suffragists, therefore, adopted the strategy of trying to convince the white male electorate that the ballot should be extended to the middle-class, educated, white women of the nation. While attending the 1903 NAWSA convention in New Orleans, Susan B. Anthony visited African American women of the Phillis Wheatley Club. The club president, Sylvanie Williams, used the opportunity to publicly inform Anthony that black suffragists knew how negatively they rated among white suffragists. She made it clear, however, that African American women would continue their struggle for the vote.

“Just like the men!”  This cartoon by Boardman Robinson, which appeared in the New York Tribune on 1 March 1913, captured one of the main difficulties facing black women suffragists.

Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library

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Nonetheless, most mainstream white suffrage leaders acquiesced as southern whites attempted to cancel out the black vote by writing black women out of state and federal suffrage proposals. During the eight years before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, national and local coalitions of black men and women worked to intensify support for its passage. When Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), discussed the suffrage controversy with Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), these leaders of two of the largest African American organizations agreed that if most white woman suffragists could, they would omit black women from the federal amendment. Their correspondence, found in the Mary Church Terrell Papers at the Library of Congress, revealed evidence that African American leaders believed that white woman suffrage leaders, for the most part, were racist.

In Chicago, Ida B. Wells-Barnett's goal was to seek civic representation for the masses of African American women who had migrated from the South to Chicago after Reconstruction. In so doing, she was forced to overcome the barriers Chicago white suffragists had erected to prevent black women's enfranchisement. Wanda Hendricks interpreted white women's actions as subtle racism when they ignored black women's claims to suffrage. She saw white suffragists rationalizing their actions under the guise of “expediency,” when they claimed to be appeasing southern woman suffrage supporters who rejected black women as potential voters. According to Hendricks, Wells-Barnett defined African American women's demands for suffrage to be based not just on race, but on gender and American citizenship as well.

White women did, however, work to include black women in the movement in places like New York City and among politically progressive women such as Harriet Stanton Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's daughter, who had opposed the “educated suffrage” strategy at the turn of the century. Blatch and other New York suffragists Alva Belmont and Alice Dewey, wife of the philosopher John Dewey, encouraged African American women in the black wards of Manhattan to actively support woman suffrage. These elite, outspoken white women appeared to have been in the minority.

While the politics of race divided the woman suffrage movement, advocates of both races identified the absence of civil and political rights as barriers to the progress of women. They also argued that female reformers could better solve the problems of their society if they were armed with the ballot. This view was especially popular during the Progressive era, when woman reformers sought to address the societal ills of intemperance, political corruption, inadequate economic and educational opportunities for women, crime, and limited consumer protection. Adella Hunt Logan was representative of the African American women who saw the connection between social reform and electoral politics. A leading club woman in Alabama who had taught at Tuskegee Institute before marriage, Logan hoped to use the ballot to improve conditions in black communities and to address the negative treatment of her people by the courts. Similarly, Maria Baldwin, a school principal in Massachusetts, looked to the vote as a means of improving public education for children of all races in her state.

Black woman suffragists argued for all social reform issues, even after middle-class white suffragists had abandoned many of them nearly a decade earlier. However, white woman suffragists had not included racial discrimination and the plight of disfranchised black women in their priorities for social reform. White suffragists in the South either avoided the race question or openly opposed the inclusion of black women in the woman suffrage goal.

By the time of World War I, third-generation woman suffragists, for the most part, had realized that a national strategy, rather than a state-by-state approach, was essential to the success of the movement. White southern suffragists, in the meantime, held fast to the traditional states' rights argument aimed at excluding black women voters. By 1918, of the forty-eight states in the union, only seventeen provided for woman suffrage. The growing interest in gaining the vote among African American women frightened national white woman suffrage leaders. For example, when the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women applied for membership in NAWSA, the association leader Ida Husted Harper, an Indiana native, wrote to former NACW president Terrell to express her fear that this initiative by an organization representing thousands of black women would create racial tension among southern members and jeopardize the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Harper, encouraged by southern woman suffrage leaders such as Lila Meade Valentine of Virginia and the NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt, an Iowa native, appealed to Terrell to encourage the federation to withdraw the application. Although Suzanne Lebsock argued that the Virginia women were acting out of expedience, not racism, Terrell and the Northeastern Federation president Elizabeth Carter perceived the deed as an example of racism.

The politics of white supremacy was not unique to the state of Virginia. Glenda Gilmore found evidence of black women like Sarah Dudley Pettey of New Bern struggling against it in the North Carolina woman suffrage campaign. Pettey worked diligently for woman's right to vote, encouraging educated African American women to become involved in Republican Party politics as a means to challenge Jim Crow practices in her state. As for black and white women allies in the woman suffrage struggle in North Carolina, Gilmore argued that whites had to deal with their own desire for woman suffrage versus their need to support white supremacy. She concluded that to win, white suffragists attempted to disregard race as a central issue in the woman suffrage movement, because if they allowed race to become central to the suffrage amendment discussion, women would lose their fight to vote. However, African American women's strategy in North Carolina was to make race an issue to be sure that black women were enfranchised along with white women.

Nineteenth Amendment

Although opposition to woman suffrage failed to check the growth of the national movement, attempts to keep black women disfranchised continued until both houses of Congress passed the federal amendment in June 1919. Ironically, by the time the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in August 1920, nine more states had granted woman suffrage through legislative enactment, including two southern states—Tennessee and Kentucky—where, for a period, black women had been enfranchised with white women.

Woman suffrage did not come automatically with twentieth century changes in the nature of electoral politics. A successful amendment required effective lobbying nationwide. So, too, African American women may not have automatically gained inclusion in the Nineteenth Amendment, had they not lobbied for it. They had to struggle against great odds to remain visible in order to ensure their right to use the ballot box.

When black women at last became voters, they lobbied for political candidates, several of whom were women, such as Maggie Lena Walker of Richmond, Virginia. In addition, black women organized voter education groups in their own communities, fought attempts by southern racists to keep them from the polls, and ran for a variety of public offices. Mrs. Edward Washington campaigned for the Haddonfield, New Jersey, School Board in 1918. The same year, Mrs. W. L. Presto ran for the state senate from Seattle, Washington. In 1920, Grace Campbell of New York City sought a seat in the state assembly as a Socialist Party candidate.

As the women were engaged in these political struggles, black men such as Crisis magazine editor W. E. B. Du Bois mobilized African Americans to support their efforts. He had been printing articles written by black women in support of woman suffrage for a decade before amendment ratification. These women included Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Mary Church Terrell, Adella Hunt Logan, Elizabeth Carter, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Maria Baldwin, Anna Jones, Mary B. Talbert, and many others representing African American women's clubs nationwide.

In spite of efforts to implement their political rights, black women in the South were disfranchised less than a decade after the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised them in 1920, and black women outside the South lost the political clout that they had acquired. As many African American woman suffragists suspected, white women voters ignored their plight. Having encouraged black women earlier in the movement to join in order to bring black male voters into the woman suffrage camp, white suffragists then appeared to abandon disfranchised black women. Similarly, some working-class white women believed that middle-class white suffragists had abandoned them after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. As a result, the coalitions established during the push for a woman suffrage amendment dissolved. Politically conscious women outside of the mainstream became disillusioned with the goals and strategies of the new middle-class feminist leadership and redirected their political activism into areas away from them.

In spite of the disappointing aftermath of the Nineteenth Amendment, black woman suffragists had participated in the enfranchisement process and learned lessons for the future. They had engaged in speech making, in petitioning federal and state governments, and in campaigning for woman suffrage referendums. African American women founded at least thirty groups, which were either woman suffrage associations or women's clubs that had suffrage leaders.

African American club women such as Bertha Higgins from Providence, Mary Church Terrell and Nannie Helen Burroughs, both from the District of Columbia, became active leaders in the Republican Party. Higgins was a leader among Rhode Island Republican women of color before and after 1920. Terrell was the Director of the Committee of Eastern District Work among Colored Women in the Republican Party during the last few years before the ratification of the woman suffrage amendment. After amendment ratification, Burroughs became the Director of Work among District of Columbia Colored Women of the Republican Party. Their party affiliation was not surprising, since the majority of African American male voters had been Republicans since the Reconstruction period, and remained so until the 1930s. Still, like Burroughs, many became disillusioned within four years after women had won the right to vote. Although she criticized the party, Burroughs remained a Republican. By the end of the 1920s, however, Higgins had switched her political affiliation to the Democratic Party.

With all of this in mind, one may ask what was the significant lesson black women learned from the Nineteenth Amendment campaign. It was the triumph of democratic principle, not the reality of political equity. The right of all women to vote was finally acknowledged in the United States Constitution by the Nineteenth Amendment. Attempts to implement this right for African American women, however, would have to wait for another forty-five years.

See also Cary, Mary Ann Shadd; Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre; Terrell, Mary Eliza Church; Truth, Sojourner; and Wells-Barnett, Ida B.

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