For Black women, the story of voting rights is a long one.
Very early on at the dawn of the 19th century, they are already at work on a political philosophy that decries racism
and sexism in American politics. But constitutionally speaking, it begins with the 15th Amendment
because Black women also need race to be an impermissible criteria if they are to get
to the polls. Sojourner Truth is a name people might know.
The former slave, antislavery activist and women's rights activist. Francis Ellen Watkins
Harper, poet, antislavery lecturer. We also have figures like Nannie Helen Burroughs,
Ida B. Wells was another major activist that people don't necessarily associate with the
suffrage movement, but she absolutely was. Black women never find a very comfortable
home in women's suffrage associations, racism is always present, sometimes in very pronounced
ways. We have pictures of parades, marches, women dressed up in sort of late 19th, early
20th century Victorian gear, hats, large hats, carrying signs about votes for women. And
most of these images are of white women. The key figures are a remarkable duo of women--Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony… And those two women will take us to the 19th Amendment.
In August of 1920, the state of Tennessee will, by a mere one vote, ratify the 19th
Amendment ,an amendment that prohibits the states from using sex as a criteria for voting
and it will become part of the Constitution.And American women win the right to vote. So,
for a white woman, it was the end of a long fight. But for many black women, it was just
the beginning of an uphill battle to exercise those rights. African American women are aware,
but really everyone is aware that nothing in the 19th Amendment is going to prohibit
individual states from continuing to disenfranchise Black voters.
And so the 19th Amendment, even as we mark this anniversary
… It leaves many, many American women to continue the struggle for political rights,
including the vote. And African American women are one chapter or one facet of that story.
There's nothing in the 19th Amendment that guarantees Chinese immigrant women the vote.
There's nothing in the 19th Amendment that guarantees to Native American women the vote…
Latin X women, particularly Mexican American women, also occupy an ambiguous place in the
story of voting rights. For Black women, the right to vote is symbolic. And that's not
to diminish symbolism, it's to say that the right to vote is a sign that they are full
and equal citizens of the United States. African American women are facing the challenges of racial
violence, lynching and access to the polls. African American women are looking at a range
of inequalities, economic inequalities, housing inequalities, health inequalities, educational
inequalities, and access to the ballot is a lever in those struggles. It is the gateway
to sitting on juries. It is the gateway to office holding. Black women have an agenda,
and it is an ambitious one, and one they hope the vote will help them further.
What did the white people have to fear from so many Blacks registering?
What Black women want in the wake of the 19th Amendment
is federal legislation that will now protect their voting rights... to impose on those
states with a history of disenfranchising Black voters, an extra requirement. And Black
women will wage a campaign that will take them all the way to 1965 and passage of the
Voting Rights Act in that year. It's important to say that winning the Voting Rights Act
is a brutal, brutal campaign. Black Americans, women and men put their lives on the line
in too many southern jurisdictions in order to force the hand of Congress, to force the
hand of Lyndon Johnson to win voting rights legislation. This is not an easy road for
African American women. It is a harrowing road. But it is indeed a victory, one that
Black women had been looking for for nearly half a century.
I know that my grandmother raised my mother, that they always had to vote like it was something
that she was born in. My grandmother, Susie Jones. Her portrait hangs on the wall. And
I am very accountable to her even as she passed many years ago. People ask me...
Today, we live in an era of voter suppression. Laws that are neutral
on their face. Voter I.D. requirements or the purging of voter rolls, or the shuttering
of polling places, none of which announce that they are aimed at keeping voters of color,
women of color from the polls. But when we look at those laws in practice, we can recognize
that like in 1920, in 2020, seemingly neutral laws are being used to disproportionately
keep people of color away from the polls.
By running for political office and effecting
change on the ground in their communities, in their state… we now have Black women
running for governorships. And we have a number of African Americans that we've seen has shaped
elections. So I think that the idea of enfranchisement is also expanded to not just being able to
vote, but exercising political power and exercising political agency. And I think that's the legacy
of the suffrage movement To me, these are not women who dropped out
of the sky. These are women who come out of a political tradition and are building upon
that. And will tell you that if you ask them. These women and the generations that followed
worked to make democracy and opportunity real in the lives of all of us who followed.