Yesterday, August 18th, marked the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which barred states from denying American women the right to vote on the basis of their sex. From the earliest years of the suffrage movement, Black women worked side by side with white suffragists. By the late nineteenth century, however, as the suffrage movement splintered over the issue of race in the years after the Civil War, Black women formed their own organizations to continue their efforts to secure and protect the rights of all women and men. The US women’s rights movement was closely allied with the antislavery movement, and before the Civil War Black and white abolitionists and suffragists joined together in common cause. During the antebellum period, a small cohort of formerly enslaved and free Black women, including Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Maria W. Stewart, Henrietta Purvis, Harriet Forten Purvis, Sarah Remond, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, were active in women’s rights circles. They were joined in their advocacy of women’s rights and suffrage by prominent Black men, including Frederick Douglass, Charles Lenox Remond, and Robert Purvis, and worked in collaboration with white abolitionists and women’s rights activists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony.
Source: https://www.nps.gov/articles/african-american-women-and-the-nineteenth-amendment.htm
Make sure you are registered to vote by going to: https://clarkson.turbovote.org
To learn more, check out the following articles:
- Between Two Worlds: Black Women and the Fight for Voting Rights: https://www.nps.gov/articles/black-women-and-the-fight-for-voting-rights.htm
- List of African American Women Leaders in the Suffrage Movement: https://suffragistmemorial.org/african-american-women-leaders-in-the-suffrage-movement/
- ‘It’s a Struggle They Will Wage Alone.’ How Black Women Won the Right to Vote: https://time.com/5876456/black-women-right-to-vote/
- African American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment: https://www.nps.gov/articles/african-american-women-and-the-nineteenth-amendment.htm
