Know Their Names : Five Black Suffragettes Who Changed History
Reported by Alyssa Derania
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote in the United States. While the activism of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and their contemporaries were monumental in this movement, history tends to overlook the many powerful women who battled not only discrimination against their sex, but also discrimination against their skin tone.
The groundbreaking Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, which advertised itself as an event to discuss “the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman,” hosted zero black women. This ostracization was nothing new; black suffragettes were often banned from women’s suffrage clubs and segregated at women’s marches. Fortunately, black suffragettes would refuse to be hindered from advocating their rights.
In honor of Black History Month and its theme, “African Americans and the Vote,” meet five courageous women who overcame great obstacles, refusing to allow racial or sexual discrimination to deter their quest for liberty.
Ida B. Wells (1862 – 1931) dedicated her life to battling racism and sexism. After three of her friends were lynched, she began using her writing skills to bring awareness to racial injustice, particularly lynching cases, as well as women’s rights.
She published her findings in her pamphlets, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” (1892) and “The Red Record” (1895). Due to her habit of publicly calling out white suffragettes on their racism, she was excluded from predominantly white suffrage organizations. Despite being ostracized, Wells continued to fight for liberty. She founded the National Association of Colored Women’s Club and was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Sojourner Truth (1797 – 1883) escaped slavery with her infant daughter in 1826, and won a court case in 1826 to free her son. In 1851, on a lecture tour championing women’s suffrage, Truth delivered a speech that would later be reconstructed by Frances Dana Barker Gage as “Ain’t I A Woman?”. Unfortunately, history has clung to Gage’s rewrite, which changed Truth’s New York accent to a Southern one, misrepresenting Truth’s heritage.
Through the 1850s, Truth participated in the Underground Railroad by providing refuge for people fleeing slavery. After the Civil War, she worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau to help establish freed slaves in society.
Angelina Weld Grimke (1880 – 1958) was from the Forten-Grimke clan of women’s rights activists. Unlike the other women of her family, who founded and took active part in feminist clubs, societies, and associations, Angelina Weld Grimke took to journalism and playwriting to express her views. Her writing, whether for the newspapers or the stage, revealed the injustices in black women’s everyday lives and the double standards of the justice system and society. Her poetry also explored the discrimination against sexual identity and her own struggles as a gay woman. She was one of the first African American women to have a play publicly performed in America.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823 – 1893) was an activist, writer, and lawyer. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, her family moved from Delaware to Canada.
In Canada, Cary married, had two children, and became the first African American newspaper editor in North America with the founding of The Provincial Freeman, an anti-slavery periodical. Graduating from Harvard in 1883, she became the second African-American woman in the United States to earn a law degree. Cary was a prominent member of the National Women’s Suffrage Association.
Mary Church Terrell (1863 – 1954) was the daughter of a former slave. Terrell earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oberlin College, and would become the first African American woman appointed to a school board in the District of Columbia. She became president of the newly merged National Association of Colored Women in 1896, and was responsible for the building of the black women’s suffrage national club movement. Terrell continued her civil rights activism well into her 80s, successfully championing for the desegregation of public accommodations and restaurants in the District of Columbia.
These five heroic women, who battled discrimination for themselves and their neighbors, were not the only black suffragettes blotted from history. Honor their struggles. Celebrate their victories. Remember their names: these are women who lived history and changed it for the better.