Suffragist Movement

They Would Be Heard: How African American Women Mobilized for Voting Rights

African American women faced racial divisions within the suffrage movement. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores their fight to overcome obstacles to the ballot.

Today, when we think of how to make our voices heard from city hall to Washington, most of us probably think of casting ballots on Election Day. Voting is the essence of being—and acting—as a citizen. Yet, the black heroines of our history show us that, even when our rights are unjustly suppressed, there are thunderous other ways to resist. From our founding through the 19th century and most of the 20th century, discriminatory laws excluded African American women in the South from the body politic. After the Civil War, when the 15th Amendment was ratified banning racial discrimination in voting, it only protected the rights of men (though those, too, would be rolled back in practice under Jim Crow).Even after the 19th Amendment made it possible for women to vote, discriminatory state laws kept black women and men out of the voting booth. In short, being a woman kept the blessings of one amendment out of reach, while being black in the former Confederate states stripped away the other.

But that is not the end of the story.

Even though they couldn’t vote, black women acted politically in other, often subversive ways. Take for instance the great Ida B. Wells-Barnett (also known as Ida B. Wells), the journalist and founder of the Free Speech newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee. Wells-Barnett could not vote out the elected officials who did nothing to stop, and in some cases even encouraged, the lynching of African Americans. She protested in other ways, through the courts, and through her pathbreaking work as an investigative reporter.

Wells-Barnett earned international recognition nine years later when she published her scathing indictment of racist lynching, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She wrote the book after the lynching of three black businessmen in Memphis that year, all of whom Wells-Barnett knew: Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart, the owners of the “People’s Grocery.” Wells-Barnett dismantled the flimsy ways that lynching was justified. Exposed and enraged, Wells-Barnett’s white detractors destroyed her printing press and forced her to leave the South. She moved to New York City to write for the New York Age. The following year, she toured the United Kingdom, fostering a worldwide moral outrage against lynching. Though Wells-Barnett could not herself end lynching—no single person could—she demonstrated how black women could fight it, often at great personal cost—and we are indebted to her for the record she left behind.

Black women demonstrated their political prowess in the summer of 1881, when 20 African American laundresses in Atlanta organized the Washing Society, a union, to negotiate higher pay and force employers to treat them with greater respect. They called for a strike, and 3,000 strikers and sympathizers joined the cause in the first three weeks. On August 1, the city passed a punitive $25 licensing fee for laundry services, but the strikers surprised the government by agreeing to pay it so that “We will have full control of the city’s washing at our own prices, as the city has control of our husbands’ work at their prices. . . . We mean business this week or no washing.” The city withdrew the fee two weeks later.

Black women laborers also used their resources and community status to work politically. In August 1896, ex-slave and Nashville washerwoman Callie House founded the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association of the United States of America, which provided mutual aid for black communities and even called for an early form of reparations. The association held its first convention in the fall of 1898. Along with Isaiah Dickerson, a schoolteacher and minister, House traveled the South forming chapters. The organization counted an estimated 300,000 members by World War I.

From the pen to the picket line, the courthouse to the club hall, African American women at the nadir of race relations in our history found ways to make their voices heard, despite being denied their most fundamental citizenship right, and as we commemorate the anniversaries of the 15th and 19th Amendments this year, we must also remember those who fell through the cracks and still found a way to resist injustice.