One hundred years ago - on August 26, 1920 - the United States officially adopted the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, asserting that “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 sex.” While most people are aware of the women’s suffrage movement, a large part of the story generally goes untold: the racial divides that both ignored the significant contributions of non-white suffragettes and worked to keep many women of color from receiving the right to vote for many years to come.
As the U.S. women’s suffrage movement progressed, inclusion was frequently a battleground. When the 15th Amendment (granting African American men the right to vote, but excluding women) was introduced in the late 1860s, the women’s suffrage movement split between those in favor and those opposed to it. The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, vehemently opposed the amendment and actively campaigned against it, arguing that, “if intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the government, let the question of the woman be brought up first and that of the negro last.” After the 15th Amendment passed, they used the legislation to “pander […] to white southerners by arguing that if white women could vote, they could drown out the Black male vote.”
When the NWSA merged with its rival and 15th Amendment supporter, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), in an attempt to unify the suffrage movement, Anthony and Stanton’s racist tactics prevailed in the newly-formed National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The organization regularly employed racism and xenophobia as a strategy to appeal to Southern states and the anti-immigrant sentiments of the times.
Nevertheless, African American women continued to support the suffrage movement, forming clubs like the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Led by Mary Church Terrell, the NACW sought to improve the lives of African Americans through a wide range of reforms, including suffrage. Terrell and many other women worked diligently alongside their white counterparts to organize activities, produce writings, and deliver speeches championing women’s suffrage.
When the 19th Amendment was finally ratified and white women gained access to the polls, Black women found themselves (along with Black men) confronted with poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, intimidation, and countless other tactics to discourage them from exercising their newfound right. It wasn’t until 1965, when the horrific violence of “Bloody Sunday” was broadcast on television and sparked national outrage, that the Voting Rights Act was passed to shift the power to register voters to the federal government and ban literacy tests. More importantly, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave African Americans the legal grounds to challenge discriminatory policies and invoke true local change.
African American women were not the only ones denied the vote after the 19th Amendment passed. Native American men and women were explicitly denied the right to vote despite the passage of the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States; immediately after its passage, the Senate Judiciary committee clarified that the amendment “has no effect whatever upon the status of the Indian tribes within the limits of the United States.” Even after they were deemed eligible for U.S. citizenship through the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924 (which was largely granted as an attempt to break up Native nations and “absorb Indians into the mainstream of American life”), individual states retained the power to grant voting rights. Many states upheld voting restrictions for Native Americans for many years, and it wasn’t until 1962 that New Mexico became the final U.S. state to fully allow the Native American vote.
Similarly, the right to vote was not available to many Chinese-American women until 1943, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. The Chinese Exclusion Act, a Federal law passed in 1882 to restrict the power of Chinese workers and businessmen amid racial tensions and anti-Chinese sentiment, both limited Chinese immigration to America and kept Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens – and therefore denying them a vote in American politics. Despite their inability to benefit from the suffrage movement, women like Dr. Mabel Lee fought tirelessly for women’s voting rights in the United States.
For Latinx women, the ability to vote was curbed in part due to language barriers. Though they had received the right to vote, these women and those of other “language minorities” struggled to pass the literacy tests required by many states. It was not until the 1975 extension of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed voters to require their jurisdictions to translate voting materials into Spanish and other languages, that many were able to vote.
Read More:
Al Jazeera - Who got the right to vote when?
The New York Times - How the Suffrage Movement Betrayed Black Women
National Park Service - African American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment
The New York Times - In 1920, Native Women Sought the Vote. Here’s What’s Next.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice - 50 Years of the Voting Rights Act: An Asian American Perspective
Remezcla - A Brief History of Latino Voting Rights Since the 1960s
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