Suffragist Movement

Through the Cracks of the 15th and 19th Amendments

When the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870, men could not be denied the vote based on race. But African American women, who were key to the fight, were no closer to their goal of suffrage for all.

On February 26, 1869, just a few days before Union war hero Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated as president, Congress passed the 15th Amendment. It declared: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Black men in the former Confederate states had already been registered to vote since 1867, under the terms of military Reconstruction, as prescribed by Congress in the wake of the Civil War. Indeed, they’d been critical in Grant’s election. But this was different. Not confined to any particular states, the 15th Amendment nationalized voting rights as never before. Though it didn’t actually guarantee access to the ballot, it made clear that it could not be denied on the basis of race. Ratified on February 3, 1870, it became part of the Constitution on March 30.

Yet, while African Americans had every reason to celebrate, the amendment failed to protect the right to vote for any women, black or white. As a result, the debates over the 15th Amendment splintered alliances between women’s suffrage and black suffrage activists. In 1869, the white women’s suffrage movement split, with the American Woman Suffrage Association supporting the 15th Amendment and the National Woman Suffrage association, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, opposing it. Stanton used racialized language to make her argument, warning, “The proposed Amendment for ‘manhood suffrage’ not only rouses woman’s prejudices against the negro, but on the other hand his contempt and hostility toward her as an equal . . . the republican cry of ‘manhood suffrage’ creates an antagonism between black men and all women, that will culminate in fearful outrages on womanhood, especially in the southern states.”

Frederick Douglass, easily the most influential African American of the century and a leading abolitionist and suffragist, supported women’s voting rights, but argued that securing the vote for black men took priority. “When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn … then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.”

Black women suffragists found themselves pulled in different directions. The ex-slave from New York, Sojourner Truth, feared that, without the vote, women would necessarily fail to achieve equality with men, predicting, “...if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”

In response, black women formed their own political organizations to promote the idea of suffrage for all men and women, regardless of race. In 1896, the National Association of Colored Women was formed, with Mary Church Terrell as its first president. Under the motto “Lifting as we climb,” the NACW adopted a broad platform, which included, “To secure and enforce civil and political rights for ourselves and our group.”

In 1913, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who’d made her name exposing the horrors of Southern lynching, formed the Alpha Suffrage Club as Chicago’s first black women’s suffrage organization. She also traveled to Washington that year to protest Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration to call for women’s suffrage, despite the call from the National American Woman Suffrage Association that the Illinois delegation should be segregated so that southern women’s groups would participate. The historian Susan Ware has uncovered the stories of many more black women who protested for suffrage outside the major organizations. She shares some of these stories in her book, Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote.

These efforts culminated in the passage of the 19th Amendment 100 years ago this year, but that proved to be of little help to black women in the South, who were still trapped under Jim Crow rule. In a series of constitutional conventions, some states had disenfranchised black voters by going around the letter of the 15th Amendment by implementing diabolic measures, such as literacy requirements and poll taxes.

When the modern civil rights movement gained steam in the decades after World War II, black women such as Rosa Parks and Ella Baker came to the forefront. And a black woman became perhaps the most dramatic face of black voting rights.

Few scenes evoke the power of African American history like that of Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi sharecropper and leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), testifying that the MFDP should replace the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Television cameras broadcast her dramatic speech on her experiences with racial violence and voter discrimination. She explained why the MFDP had made the trip: “All of this is on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives are threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?”

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 resulted from the protests of women like Hamer, who refused to let the federal government continue to duck the issue. Their road to this influence was arduous and long, and paved by the brave women who risked their own safety to fight for the right to vote. As we commemorate the anniversaries of the 15th and 19th Amendments this year, let us cast our ballots in their honor.