Black Women's Disfranchisement and the Fight for Voting Rights, 1920-1945

FAIN: FT-62152-14

Liette Gidlow
Wayne State University (Detroit, MI 48201-1347)

I propose to work full-time during the grant period to complete a submission-ready manuscript of a journal article on the disfranchisement of African American women in the southern U.S. between 1920 and 1945. This project begins a radical reinterpretation of the constitutional amendment long heralded as the single greatest expansion of democracy in U.S. history. My research indicates that though the 19th Amendment nearly doubled the size of the electorate overnight, a great many women of color and poor women remained in effect disfranchised for decades because opponents, motivated by beliefs in white supremacy and male supremacy and sometimes also by partisan considerations, used Jim Crow tactics, poll taxes, and plain intimidation and violence to block these women from the polls. Though the 19th Amendment officially granted women the right to vote in 1920, it took decades of continued struggle and mobilization before many women were able in fact to freely cast ballots.

Associated Products

The Sequel: The Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Southern Black Women's Struggle to Vote (Article)
Title: The Sequel: The Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Southern Black Women's Struggle to Vote
Author: Gidlow, Liette
Abstract: his essay reframes both the woman suffrage narrative and narratives of African American voting rights struggles by focusing on the experiences of southern African American women between the 1870s and the 1920s. It argues that the Fifteenth Amendment remained central to their suffrage strategy long after the failure of the “New Departure” to win court sanction caused white suffragists to abandon it. As white supremacists in the South worked at the turn of the century to disfranchise black men, leading African American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Adella Hunt Logan called for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the enfranchisement of black women. After the federal woman suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, many southern African American women encountered the same barriers to voting—obstructionist tactics, threats, and violence—that black men had faced a generation earlier. In short, for aspiring African American voters in the South, the failure of the Nineteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black women constituted a sad sequel to the failure of the Fifteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black men. This interpretation offers three significant interventions. It pairs the Reconstruction-era Amendments with the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing their shared focus on voting rights. It connects the voting rights struggles of southern African Americans across genders and generations. Finally, it finds that, for some women, the canonical “century of struggle” for voting rights continued long after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://doi-org.proxy.lib.wayne.edu/10.1017/S1537781418000051
Secondary URL: https://www-cambridge-org.proxy.lib.wayne.edu/core/journals/journal-of-the-gilded-age-and-progressive-era/article/sequel-the-fifteenth-amendment-the-nineteenth-amendment-and-southern-black-womens-struggle-to-vote/9EDB826096C0353E6FE12E3E345FC5CF
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Resistance After Ratification: The Nineteenth Amendment, African American Women, and the Problem of Female Disfranchisement after 1920 (Article)
Title: Resistance After Ratification: The Nineteenth Amendment, African American Women, and the Problem of Female Disfranchisement after 1920
Author: Gidlow, Liette
Abstract: Despite the "triumph" of the Nineteenth Amendment, many women, African American and otherwise, found that after 1920 they still could not vote. To understand their stories, we need to consider their experiences intersectionally, in the full, rich range of their complex identities and in the context of their families and communities. When we do, we can detect how their encounters with the electoral system changed the structure of the political system itself, an insight that challenges the consensus view that woman suffrage simply doubled the electorate without affecting political institutions in any meaningful way. Their stories make it clear that, for many women, the "century of struggle" lasted much longer than a hundred years Furthermore, the entrenchment of the white primary was a direct result of the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, a development that challenges the consensus view by historians and political scientists that woman suffrage did not change the political process in a significant way. The white primary became the new battleground for the voting rights fight and the prime target of the NAACP's legal crusade against disfranchisement; in the decades to follow, the white primary became the terrain on which African Americans in the South would win their long struggle to freely cast ballots.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://alexanderstreet.com/products/women-and-social-movements-united-states-1600-2000
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Women and Social Movements in the U.S., 1600-2000
Publisher: Alexander Street Press

“More than Double: African American Women and the Rise of a ‘Women’s Vote’” (Article)
Title: “More than Double: African American Women and the Rise of a ‘Women’s Vote’”
Author: Gidlow, Liette
Abstract: White women's votes in the aftermath of ratification may not have done much to alter the course of American politics, but southern African Americans' efforts to take their place at the polls in 1920 and in the years to come certainly did. In the short term, the Nineteenth Amendment made the work of white supremacy much more difficult, triggering a new round of Klan violence in the style of the old and stimulating efforts to retool the techniques of disfranchisement. Over the next half century, the racial dynamics forged in the aftermath of ratification resonated as the Republican Party reconstituted its white base in the South and as women's rights activists, Black and white, struggled to make common cause in the feminist upsurge of the 1960s and 1970s. Before the end of the century, a women's voting bloc did indeed emerge, one with high voter turnout, a sharp preference for one party, and consistent performance across election cycles. That voting bloc emerged not among white women but among African American women. After many African Americans moved north and west in the Great Migration; after most Black voters moved into the Democratic column; and after the Voting Rights Act became law, African American women registered and voted, en masse, sometimes despite ongoing resistance. Their votes have made a difference. Sometimes their votes have made the difference. In 2008 and 2012, African American women posted the highest voter turnout of any demographic group, helping to secure the election and reelection of Barack Obama.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://doi:10.1353/jowh.2020.0006
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Women's History

Fellow, Harvard Radcliffe Institute (Staff/Faculty/Fellow Position)
Name: Fellow, Harvard Radcliffe Institute
Abstract: Mellon Schlesinger Fellow
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/people/liette-gidlow
Primary URL Description: Web page, Liette Gidlow, Harvard Radcliffe Institute

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