It's really important that we
tell the truth about who
contributed to the country that
we live in today.
That telling only a part of our history
telling only a part of our
narrative makes it seem as if
there are only one group of people.
There's only one type of person.
We all know that that's not true.
When students learn about
women's suffrage in school, they
often learn about Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony,
the so called mothers of the movement.
And they are taught
that it all started with a
meeting in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.
Oftentimes, the story of the
Seneca Falls meeting is told as
a kind of origin story.
As the beginning of a movement for
women's rights and ultimately,
a movement for women's suffrage.
And yet, when we realize the
meeting is some 300 people,
principally white, middle class women
in a relatively remote
upstate New York village,
that is a hint that we probably need
to look at some other places to
get a fuller story.
For Africa American women who had been
organizing inside churches and
other places since the 20s and 30s,
this was not a particularly
important moment, nor was it a
meeting they would have attended.
Nor were the demands
that they made particularly
germane to the lives of women
living under the twin oppressive
forces of racism and sexism.
Black women are excluded at
Seneca Falls, because they're
not really invited.
Two years later, a much bigger
national convention on women's
rights takes place.
The 1850 meeting in Worcester,
Massachusetts...
Stanton and Anthony aren't even there.
It was the first National Women's Rights meeting.
So in some ways, that's really
cohering activism that's taking
place around the country in a
way that Seneca Falls was just a
local impromptu convention.
One of the women who spoke there
was famed abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
Sojourner Truth
will emerge later in the woman's
movement as an important speaker
on women's rights.
She will also emerge as an abolitionist.
By 1850, Sojourner Truth is very
much a presence in women's
rights circles really shaping
the debates, but she didn't
begin at Seneca Falls at all.
So, with so much activity
happening and women's rights in
the mid-19th century, why did
Seneca Falls, a small meeting
with only white woman attending
become one of the most talked
about in history?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was
at the Seneca Falls meeting and
was one of the organizers...and
Susan Anthony...well, these two,
along with some allies, begin to
write the history of women's suffrage.
And when they do, not surprisingly, perhaps,
they privilege their own experiences
and they settle on Seneca Falls
as their origin story.
Stanton and Anthony are dealing
with a world where emancipation
is the new reality and many
people are saying to women,
"Black men's right to vote must happen now,"
for reasons of free people's safety.
And Stanton and Anthony will say
"No,"
"women's suffrage should come first."
And they are unusual in the
Women's Rights Coalition that they
demand this. They're staunchly
opposed to Black men voting
before white women...
In unspeakably racist terms.
And "Our movement..." they say repeatedly,
"is the most important movement for human
rights ever inaugurated."
And they're undermining, really,
the memory of abolition and the
memory of emancipation in that process.
It's no surprise then, that in
history written by primarily
white women, there are many
Black voting rights activists we
don't learn about.
I think the world of Ida B. Wells
and her activism...
She's a Black woman who owned two
newspapers, and she was an
anti-lynching activist.
And she was a founder of the
Alpha Suffrage Club, which is
Chicago's first black suffrage organization.
While they fought
and advocated for the right to
vote for all women,
they were mistreated within the larger
suffrage movement because of their race.
The Suffrage March in 1913,
when Ida B. Wells
showed up with the Illinois delegation
and Alice Paul, who
was a popular suffragette at the
time, instructed them to walk to
the back of the crowd.
And while many of the Black women who
showed up that day did...
Ida B. Wells refused.
The women who pushed the story
of Seneca Falls died before the
19th Amendment was passed in 1920.
But, the legacy of
excluding Black woman persisted.
Susan B. Anthony and her
followers have won, for women,
the right to vote.
It's easy to think of the story
of women's suffrage as a kind of
fully emancipatory and
celebratory story that's, you know,
just necessarily progressive.
And in the following November,
the ladies appeared at the polls
on Election Day by hundreds of thousands.
The emancipation of
womanhood in the United States
was now complete.
The 19th Amendment does not
invest anybody with the right to vote.
And we don't spend nearly
enough time thinking about the
language of the amendment,
which is really key, saying you may
not discriminate in voting on
the basis of sex, it does not
say women have a right to vote,
which actually does not exist.
For many white women clearing
the obstacle of sex was
sufficient to get them voting access.
When the 19th amendment is adopted,
the open secret is
that too many millions of
African American women in this
country will not be able to vote
because the amendment doesn't do
anything to override the
segregationist laws,
the Jim Crow laws in the South, like
poll taxes and literacy tests
that are going to be imposed on
black women, such that they
won't be able to vote even after
the 19th Amendment.
We don't realize the ways in
which the white suffrage
movement threw women of color
under the bus, allowed their
continued disenfranchisement to
go ahead, allowed their
brutalization of their bodies to
go ahead, and say nothing.
We lose track of the fact that lots
of other women are not
emancipated in this story.
That those women's rights are
sacrificed.
After 1920, African American
women have to look up from the
19th Amendment to not only
recognize that they are still
disenfranchised, they have to
look up to answer the question,
"So, how are we going to win a right to vote?"
That is the
moment for the building of a new
movement for voting rights.
One that will take Black women and
men until 1965,
in passage of the Voting Rights Act.
So, you don't win the right
to vote and then that's just it.
Throughout the course of
history, for every expansion of
voting rights, we have a
backlash that seeks to make it
more difficult for people to vote.
That seeks to shrink the
electorate and shrink the number
of people that participate in our democracy.
One recent and significant
backlash happened in 2013
when the Supreme Court case
Shelby County v. Holder removed some of
the protections of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Even as we celebrate the centennial of the
19th Amendment, activists like
Nsé Ufot remind us that voting
rights remain threatened in many places.
"Georgians have an opportunity to save our democracy."
The State of Georgia
has closed over 10% of their polling locations.
Voting rights advocates have witnessed
nearly 2 million people purged
from Georgia's voter pool.
I'm urging my supporters to go
into the polls and watch very
carefully.
Black voters are subject to intimidation.
New Americans are
subject to intimidation.
The 2020 election is the most
recent example of the organizing
power of Black women, as Ufot and
others are being credited with
turning Georgia blue for the
first time in 28 years.
I think that it's harmful that
we only learn about white
suffragists because it doesn't
tell the full story of how we won.
And if we're going to be
able to fight future oppression,
knowing the real story about how
our ancestors looked oppression
in the face and then defeated it
helps us as we build toward the
communities that we want to live in.