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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2020
This article draws on a collection of crowdsourced biographical sketches of Black women suffragists to explore the contributions of these activists to the expansion of voting rights that accompanied the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. It explores the motivations and strategies adopted by Black women suffragists and interracial alliances that emerged in the course of the suffrage struggle, comparing and contrasting the experiences of suffragists across racial lines.
1 Kraditor, Aileen S., The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), esp. 163–218Google Scholar; Newman, Louise Michele, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Spruill, Marjorie Julian, “Race, Reform, and Reaction at the Turn of the Century: Southern Suffragists, the NAWSA, and the ‘Southern Strategy’ in Context” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Baker, Jean H. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 102–17Google Scholar.
2 Spruill, “Race, Reform, and Reaction at the Turn of the Century,” 108; Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 214–16.
3 For the NWP's stance on Black voting and the Nineteenth Amendment, see Sklar, Kathryn Kish and Dias, Jill, How Did the National Woman's Party Address the Issue of the Enfranchisement of Black Women, 1919–1924?, vol. 1 (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 1997)Google Scholar, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000, https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/c/1000636529 (accessed June 28, 2020). For NAWSA's stance, see Carrie Chapman Catt to Edwin Webb, Jan. 5, 1918, Petitions and Memorials, Resolutions of State Legislatures, and Related Documents Which Were Referred to the Committee on the Judiciary during the 65th Congress, HR65A-H8.14, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, record group 233, National Archives, Washington, DC, www.docsteach.org/documents/document/webb-carrie-catt (accessed June 28, 2020).
4 “Suffrage Paraders,” The Crisis (New York), Apr. 1913, 296; Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998), 122Google Scholar; Materson, Lisa G., For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 190Google Scholar; Nellie M. Quander to Alice Paul, Feb. 17, 1913, National Woman's Party Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/new-tactics-for-a-new-generation-1890-1915/new-tactics-and-renewed-confrontation/howard-university-sorority-seeks-assurances-of-nondiscrimination (accessed July 2, 2020).
5 Spruill, “Race, Reform, and Reaction at the Turn of the Century,” 113.
6 See documents 7A–9 in Sklar and Dias, How Did the National Woman's Party Address the Issue of the Enfranchisement of Black Women?; see also Cott, Nancy F., The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 68–70Google Scholar.
7 Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote.
8 For the initial lists of Black suffragists that I drew on, see Rosalyn M. Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage” (unpub. PhD diss., Howard University, 1977), appendices 1–3.
9 Notable examples include Hine, Darlene Clark et al. , eds., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1993)Google Scholar, subsequently accessible online. See also Smith, Jessie Carney, ed., Notable Black American Women, Book I (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1992)Google Scholar; Logan, Rayford W. and Winston, Michael R., eds., Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982)Google Scholar.
10 Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States (henceforth cited as Online Biographical Dictionary), in Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000, https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/votesforwomen (accessed June 28, 2020); also available via the subscription database, Women and Social Movements in the United States (WASM). The two versions of the database are identical, but there are some differences in the ease of searchability. Also, in WASM users can access the substantial Writings of Black Women Suffragists, which are not part of the freely accessible Online Biographical Dictionary.
11 I did not limit information recorded in this datafile to that found in the crowdsourced or Notable American Women bio sketches, but I coded information found in other published or online biographical sketches, and scholarly articles and monographs touching on this history. Completeness seemed more important than consistency of sources across the database entries. James, Edward T. et al. , eds., Notable American Women, 1607–1950, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Sicherman, Barbara and Green, Carol Hurd, eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period; A Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Ware, Susan and Braukman, Stacy, eds., Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: Completing the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
12 “W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, 1803–1999,” collection MS 312, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/mums312 (accessed June 28, 2020; henceforth cited as Du Bois Papers).
13 Petition for Woman Suffrage from Frederick Douglass, Jr., and Other Residents of the District of Columbia, 1878, Petitions and Memorials, Resolutions of State Legislatures, and Related Documents Which Were Referred to the Committee on the Judiciary during the 45th Congress (HR45A-H11.7), Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1789–2015, record group 233, no. 7330216, National Archives, Washington, DC, www.docsteach.org/documents/document/douglass-petition-woman-suffrage (accessed June 28, 2020). My thanks to Chelsea Lundquist-Wentz and Blair Forlaw for tracking down and sharing these petitions and related documents. See also Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 46–47.
14 For a list of the purchasers of lots from the Barry Farm, see Louise Daniel Hutchinson, List of First Settlers of Barry Farm/Hillsdale, 1867–1871, 1981, History of Place research files, box 1, folder 13, Anacostia Community Museum, Washington, DC. For Frederick Douglass's nearby home, see “Cedar Hill: Frederick Douglass's Home in Anacostia,” National Park Service, Washington, DC, https://www.nps.gov/frdo/learn/historyculture/places.htm (accessed June 28, 2020).
15 Petition of Louis [sic] H. Douglass, R. J. Meigs, M. Albert Clancey, Harriet Cowperthwaite, and other citizens of Washington, DC, asking for an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the several states from disfranchising United States citizens on account of sex, Petitions and Memorials, Resolutions of State Legislatures, and Related Documents Which Were Referred to the Committee on the Judiciary during the 45th Congress (HR45A-H11.7), Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1789–2015, record group 233, folder 15 of 25, National Archives, Washington DC.
16 Biographical information here is drawn from the remarkable biographical sketches of Caroline and Elizabeth Chases prepared by Chelsea Lundquist-Wentz for inclusion in the Online Biographical Dictionary, https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C4384843 and https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C4384845 (accessed July 2, 2020).
17 For a biographical sketch of D. Augustus Straker, see Wikipedia, “D. Augustus Straker,” last modified Mar. 22, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._Augustus_Straker. Straker's speech was published in pamphlet form. See “Citizenship, its rights and duties—woman suffrage; a lecture delivered by D. Augustus Straker, esq., at the Israel A. M. E. Church, and before the Pioneer Lyceum, at Hillsdale, Washington, DC, Apr. 13–14, 1874,” Library of Congress, Washington, DC, www.loc.gov/item/09032738 (accessed June 29, 2020).
18 Matt Saddlemire, Thomas Dublin, and Anne Slatin, “Biography of Alice Wiley Seay” in Online Biographical Dictionary, https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3935930 (accessed July 2, 2020). See also New York Age, July 10, 1913, 1.
19 I am grateful to the genealogist Anne Pratt Slatin for tracking down the vital records related to Seay.
20 New York Age, Dec. 28, 1916, 8. See also the entries for Alice Wiley Seay and her husband in the 1920 and 1930 federal manuscript censuses for Giles, Virginia.
21 New York Age, Nov. 23, 1918, 8; New York Age, Aug. 7, 1926, 10.
22 Saddlemire, Dublin, and Slatin, “Biography of Alice Wiley Seay.” Quotation appeared originally in “Alice Wiley Seay's Memory Honored,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb. 28, 1938, 12.
23 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 8–18, 181–84Google Scholar; Collier-Thomas, Bettye, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), esp. xvi–xxxivGoogle Scholar.
24 Brown, Elsa Barkley, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Woman's Political History, 1865–1880” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, ed. Gordon, Ann D. et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 66–99Google Scholar.
25 Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, “Trust the Women!” The Crisis, Aug. 1915, 88, as quoted in Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn, “Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin: Civil Rights and Women's Rights Trailblazer,” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 19 (Mar. 2015)Google Scholar.
26 Jones, Adrienne Lash, “Addie Waits Hunton: Social Justice and Human Rights Activist,” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 19 (Sept. 2015): 4Google Scholar; Addie Waits Hunton, “Sarah J. Garnett,” The Crisis, Oct. 1911, 253; Cash, Floris Barnett, “Victoria Matthews: Nineteenth-Century Activist and Women's Advocate,” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 18 (Sept. 2014): 5Google Scholar.
27 Addie Waits Hunton, “The National Association of Colored Women: Its Real Significance,” The Colored American Magazine (New York), July 1908, 423.
28 Salem, Dorothy, To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform, 1890–1920 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1990), 104–05Google Scholar. Salem notes that this formal action occurred two years before the similar action of the white General Federation of Women's Clubs. Terborg-Penn sets 1916 as the date for the NACW's formal adoption of women's suffrage. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 93. I sense that Salem's 1912 date is more likely, but I have not found references to primary documents to confirm this dating.
29 See “Suffering Suffragettes,” The Crisis, June 1912, 76–77; “Suffrage Paraders, The Crisis, Apr. 1913, 296; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Votes for Women,” and accompanying articles in Aug. 1915 special issue of The Crisis; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Votes for Women,” The Crisis, Nov. 1917, 9; “Votes for All: A Symposium,” The Crisis, Nov. 1917, 19–21.
30 This discussion is based on linking Black women suffragists in the Online Biographical Dictionary to W. E. B. Du Bois's correspondence, Du Bois papers, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/mums312 (accessed June 29, 2020).
31 Letter from the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs to the Niagara Movement, Aug. 25, 1907, Du Bois Papers, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b004-i062 (accessed June 29, 2020). The Niagara Movement was an early civil rights organization that first met on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls in 1905, led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. The group proposed an alternative, more militant approach to race relations than the conciliatory, accommodationist stance of Booker T. Washington. The organization never gained a strong foothold, but laid the foundation for the emergence of the NAACP in 1910.
32 Petition from the Equal Suffrage League, Mar. 17, 1908, Du Bois papers, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b002-i201 (accessed June 29, 2020).
33 Letter from Addie W. Hunton to W. E. B. Du Bois, Apr. 8, 1907, Du Bois papers, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b003-i066 (accessed June 29, 2020).
34 Bucy, Carole Stanford, “Catherine Kenny: Fighting for the Perfect Thirty-Sixth” in The Human Tradition: Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives; Women in American History, ed. Lindenmeyer, Kriste (Lanham, MD: SR Books, 2000), 206Google Scholar.
35 “Mrs. Milton Heads Woman Suffrage Body,” Nashville Tennessean, June 6, 1919, 2; “Negro Women's League Indorses Church's Stand,” The Tennessean, July 2, 1920, 15.
36 Bucy, “Catherine Kenny,” 207. See also Carole Bucy's biographical sketch of Kenny in the Online Biographical Dictionary, https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1009932459 (accessed July 2, 2020).
37 Kobe Walker et al., “Biography of Mattie E. Coleman, 1870–1943” in Online Biographical Dictionary, https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3957502 (accessed July 2, 2020); “Dr. Mattie E. Coleman Wreath Laying Ceremony,” AAHGS Nashville (blog), https://aahgsnashville.org/2017/10/12/dr-mattie-e-coleman-wreath-laying (accessed June 29, 2020); Smith, Jessie Carney, Notable Black American Women, Book II (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1996), 125–28Google Scholar.
38 Goldstein, Anita Shafer, “A Rare Alliance: African American and White Women in the Tennessee Elections of 1919 and 1920,” Journal of Southern History 64 (May 1998): 245–46Google Scholar.
39 See two bios in the Online Biographical Dictionary: Stephanie Clampitt, “Biography of Caroline B. Williams,” https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3893396 (accessed July 2, 2020); and Anne M. Boylan, “Biography of Fannie Hopkins Hamilton,” https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3893445 (accessed July 2, 2020).
40 There are biographical sketches of each of these suffrage activists in the Online Biographical Dictionary. My thanks to Anne M. Boylan, who wrote or edited all of these biographies and whose research uncovered this dense network of Black activists and their stories. See especially Carol A. Scott, “Biography of Blanche Williams Stubbs,” https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C4078811 (accessed July 2, 2020).
41 Anne M. Boylan, “Biography of Helen W. Anderson (Webb)” in Online Biographical Dictionary, https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3935918 (accessed July 2, 2020).
42 Scott, “Biography of Blanche Williams Stubbs”; Ann M. Boylan, “Biography of Mary E. Taylor” in Online Biographical Dictionary, https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3935916 (accessed July 2, 2020).
43 Alison Lewis, “Biography of Alice Gertrude Baldwin” in Online Biographical Dictionary, https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3593256 (accessed July 2, 2020).
44 For this letter to the NAACP, see Alice G. Baldwin to Portia M. Wiley, 14 November 1920, in NAACP Papers, microfilm edition, part 12, Selected Branch Files, 1913–1919, part B: The Northeast, reel no. 1. There are, though, signs of white opposition to Black voter registration in Delaware. For her experiences in Dover, see Mary Church Terrell to Morefield [sic] Story, Oct. 27, 1920, Mary Church Terrell Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/hear-us-roar-victory-1918-and-beyond/ratification-and-beyond/colored-women-of-the-south-will-be-shamefully-treated (accessed June 29, 2020).
45 Addie W. Hunton, “Phoebus and Hampton” in NAACP Papers, box C284, folder “Discrimination, Voting, Oct. 21–31, 1920, General,” Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. For the broader story, see Liette Gidlow, “Resistance after Ratification: The Nineteenth Amendment, African American Women, and the Problem of Female Disfranchisement after 1920,” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 21 (Mar. 2017).
46 Anne M. Boylan, “Biography of Mary J. Johnson Woodlen” in Online Biographical Dictionary, https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3893456 (accessed July 2, 2020).
47 See Mungarro, Angelica and Anderson, Karen, How Did Black Women in the NAACP Promote the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, 1918–1923?, ed. Horan, Marian (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 2003)Google Scholar, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000, https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/c/1000636528 (accessed June 29, 2020).
48 Giddings, Paula J., “Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell” in Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Schultz, Rima Lunin and Hast, Adele (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001), 955–60Google Scholar; Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race, 95–96; Maureen A. Flanagan, “Suffrage,” essay in Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1217.html (accessed July 2, 2020).
49 Boylan, “Biography of Fannie Hopkins Hamilton”; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 148, 150; Goodier, Susan and Pastorello, Karen, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 187–88Google Scholar.
50 Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 148–49.
51 White, Deborah Gray, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 51–52, 60–62Google Scholar.
52 “Negro Women Appeal Against Ku Klux Klan,” Wilmington News Journal, Oct. 12, 1923, 4.
53 Logan, Rayford W., The Betrayal of the Negro, from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Collier Books, 1965; originally published in 1954)Google Scholar.
54 Mary Church Terrell, “The Woman Suffrage Movement and Frederick Douglass: Speech Delivered at the 60th Anniversary of the Seneca Falls Meeting,” Mary Church Terrell Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Also quoted in Parker, Alison M., “Mary Church Terrell: Woman Suffrage and Civil Rights Pioneer,” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 19 (Mar. 2015): 3Google Scholar. In this speech, Terrell echoed the sentiments expressed by Frederick Douglass forty years earlier during the debate over Black suffrage and woman suffrage occasioned by consideration of the Fifteenth Amendment. There, Douglass stated, “When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the streets of New York and New Orleans; their children torn from their arms and their brains dashed out on the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their houses burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter school, then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.” Somebody in the audience inquired, “Is that not also true about black women?” to which Douglass replied “Yes, yes, yes, but not because they are women, but because they are black.” See also Foner, Philip S., Frederick Douglass on Women's Rights (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 176–81Google Scholar.