Lifting as We Climb: Chapter 6–Epilogue

“The hearts of Afro-American women are too warm and too large for race hatred,” she said. “Long suffering has so chastened them that they are developing a special sense of sympathy for all who suffer and fail of justice..."

All the associated interests of church, temperance, and social reform in which American women are winning distinction can be wonderfully advanced when our women shall be welcomed as co-workers, and estimated solely by what they are worth to the moral elevation of all the people.

Fannie Barrier Williams so greatly contributed to the suffrage movement that she was the only African American chosen to eulogize Susan B. Anthony at her funeral in 1906.

She put her plan in motion in 1914, when Hugh Norris, incumbent councilman for the Second Ward, came up for reelection.

The Alpha Suffrage Club’s successful strategy and voter registration drive grabbed the attention of local newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, which ran a story that said, “The women’s vote was a revelation to everyone, and after analysis shows them still actuated by the sense of duty to do more.”

After participating in such intense and extreme activism, Paul thought the NAWSA’s passive approach was inadequate and ineffective, and had to be changed. When Paul and Burns returned from London to the United States in January 1910, they wanted to shake the NAWSA out of complacency and make a push for a federal suffrage amendment.

Some suffragists, like the sixteen women dubbed the “suffrage pilgrims,” decided to walk from New York to Washington—a journey that took more than twenty-four hours.

Some suffragists, like the sixteen women dubbed the “suffrage pilgrims,” decided to walk from New York to Washington—a journey that took more than twenty-four hours.

But finally the parade started, led off by activist lawyer Inez Milholland boldly astride a white horse.

She and the Alpha Suffrage Club picked up where they’d left off, canvassing communities, registering voters, and educating the Second Ward and other predominantly Black communities about the voting process.

She left the NAWSA in 1916 because some of the organization’s members believed her tactics were too radical, militant, and “unladylike.”

Paul organized the “Silent Sentinels,” a group of women, dressed in purple and wearing gold and white sashes, who stood outside of the White House six days a week from January 1917 to June 1919 with protest signs that read “Mr. President—What Will You Do for Woman Suffrage?” and asked how long they’d have to wait before they’d get the right to vote.

Mary Church Terrell often joined them, noting that as a Black woman, she was a part of the “only group in this country that has two such huge obstacles to surmount—sex and race.”

The NAWSA’s racism toward Black woman suffragists continued throughout the 1900s, culminating with new president Carrie Chapman Catt refusing to allow the Northeastern Federation of Women’s Clubs, an organization for and about Black women, to become a part of the NAWSA in 1919.

Suffragists jailed in the workhouse were treated poorly and only fed bread and water. When Paul tried to initiate a hunger strike, she was force-fed.

The earliest and most stalwart of suffragists did not live to see this happen. Black woman suffragists who’d fought to gain the right to vote died before they could ever cast a ballot.

After teaching her night class and sending many of her students home, she, her groundskeeper, and some students whom she asked to remain behind stood vigil outside of the school and looked out for KKK members.

Staring down the KKK and following through with the march to vote turned Bethune into a local celebrity, which brought an influx of money and other resources to the school.

Roosevelt came from an affluent New York family and community. He couldn’t fully grasp the impact of the Great Depression on Black Americans.

But she still faced repercussions for even trying. When the person who owned the sharecropping land that Hamer’s family lived and worked on learned that she’d tried to register to vote, he told Hamer, “You’ll have to go down and withdraw your registration, or you’ll have to leave this place.”

She was also a founding member of SNCC, and helped the organization orchestrate its Freedom Summer, or Mississippi Summer Project, a seminal three-month registration drive that began in June 1964.

Over the course of ten weeks of Freedom Summer, more than one thousand people were arrested and thirty homes that belonged to African Americans were bombed or burned to the ground. And most egregiously, three volunteers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were kidnapped and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

So Johnson met with Senator Hubert Humphrey, who was vying for the vice presidential nomination, and a few others, and created a compromise: They would give the Freedom Democrats two nonvoting seats on the Mississippi delegation in exchange for their endorsement.

“For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great Government—the Government of the greatest Nation on earth. Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man.”

After the successful march, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the other Black women who were fighting for voting rights waited with bated breath to learn the fate of the Voting Rights Act.

That could not have happened without the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The VRA was reauthorized in 1970 for five years, in 1975 for seven years, and in 1982 for twenty-five years. In 2006, the formula to determine whether or not counties or cities were in compliance with the VRA was extended again for twenty-five years.

However, after the 2010 midterm elections led to a number of state legislatures and governors flipping from Democratic to Republican control, a deluge of laws were passed to restrict voting in multiple states.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965, it included Sections 4 and 5, provisions that required cities, counties, and states with a history of racially discriminating against voters to get “preclearance” from either the United States Attorney General or a panel of judges in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia before they could make changes to their voting laws.

Cities and counties governed by Sections 4 and 5 had to prove that their suggested rule or law change wouldn’t “deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group” before it could be enacted.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 came to a screeching halt on June 25, 2013, when the US Supreme Court struck down Section 4 as unconstitutional because it was based on “decades-old data and eradicated practices” that were unfair to states, cities, and counties—like Shelby County, Alabama, the one that brought the case to the Supreme Court—where “there is no longer such a disparity” between registered white and Black voters.

Other Supreme Court justices, such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, disagreed with the ruling. She wrote in her dissent that “throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

These states and others also began purging registered voters from their rolls, nixing same-day voter registration, closing polling places in predominantly Black communities, and employing a number of tactics to prevent Black voters and other voters of color from being able to exercise their rights.

So, more than 171 years after the Seneca Falls Convention, Black people “continue to suffer significant, and profoundly unequal, limitations on their ability to vote.”

If she’d won, she would’ve been America’s first Black woman governor, but instead, the historic election was mired in controversy about voting rights.

Voting is a hallmark of being an American citizen, and preserving the right to vote still matters—forever and always.