Black women’s fight for right to vote
Exhibit pays tribute to women pushed into the background of fight for right to vote
An online exhibit and archive at the Connecticut Historical Society is collecting, and displaying, stories of Black Connecticut women like Minnie L. Bradley, Mary A. Johnson and Rose Payton who fought for the right to vote because white suffragists didn’t let them have a prominent place in the mainstream women’s suffrage movement.
When thinking about the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, a group of names traditionally comes to mind: Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, etc. But what about Black leaders Mary Townsend Seymour, Rose Payton, Sara Lee Brown Fleming?
A new project and online exhibit at Connecticut Historical Society focuses on these and other Black women, who were intentionally pushed into the background of the fight for women’s right to vote.
The exhibit comes in the 100th anniversary year of women nationwide getting the right to vote.
“When you talk about Black women in the suffrage movement, the first woman you think of is Ida B. Wells, as if she was the only Black woman in the United States who thought about suffrage,” said Brittney L. Yancy, a professor at Goodwin College and a co-curator of the exhibit. “That’s just not true.”
Yancy, along with CHS research historian Karen Li Miller, created “The Work Must Be Done: Women of Color and the Right to Vote” to shine a light on
Black women from Connecticut whose activism included not only women’s suffrage, but other issues important to the Black community, including discrimination, anti-lynching, labor reforms and access to education.
Not just in Connecticut but nationwide, Black activists were edged out of leading roles in the suffrage movement, primarily for three reasons. Many white suffragists were angry that Black men got the vote before white women did.
White suffragists had little interest in Black women’s multidimensional goals, preferring to focus exclusively on suffrage. And they wanted the support of Southern states.
So prominent white suffragists like Paul, and League of Women Voters founder Carrie Chapman Catt, strategically coddled white supremacists.
“They advocated for women’s right to vote at the expense of inclusivity of women of color,” Yancy said.
Yancy and Miller’s exhibit, however, focuses on Black women who advocated for the issues they faced in their own communities. Disenfranchisement from the white movements led them to form their own, less-publicized organizations. On their exhibit’s website, chs.org/wocvotes, they tell the life stories of Black women activists such as: t Minnie L. Bradley, the first president of the Connecticut branch of the National Association of Colored Women, which formed in 1920 and later was renamed the Nutmeg State Federation of Women’s Clubs. t Mary A. Johnson and Ida Napier Lawson, co-founders, in 1918, of the Women’s League, Inc., of Hartford. t Pearl Woods Lee, who was grandmother of Carrie Saxon Perry, Connecticut’s first Black female mayor. t Rose Payton, who was the first Black woman to register to vote in Connecticut, in 1893, when the state passed women’s suffrage.
Yancy and Miller are asking state residents to contribute stories of women they are related to, or women they have heard of, to be researched and possibly added to the database. Information can be submitted at chs.org/ wocvotes.
Yancy’s favorite Connecticut Black female suffragist is Mary Townsend Seymour of Hartford, who invited W.E.B. DuBois to Hartford in 1917 and co-founded the Greater Hartford branch of the NAACP.
“One of the great things I love about African American women is how they used the press to their advantage. [Seymour] wrote for The Courant, she wrote for W.E.B. DuBois’ magazine The Crisis,” Yancy said.
Seymour also founded an allBlack women’s labor union in Hartford. “Can you imagine what that must have been like? It was amazingly radical for the time. At its height, she had 60 dues-paying women committed to this work,” Yancy said.
Miller is fond of Sarah Lee Brown Fleming of New Haven. Fleming was a writer, most famous for the antislavery novel “Hope’s Highway” and the poetry collection “Clouds and Sunshine,” which expands on her political views. In addition, Fleming was a “club woman,” who organized Black women’s clubs that addressed a myriad of social issues.
“The clubs’ agendas were so multifaceted,” Miller said. “In Connecticut, the club women were the ones who were fighting on the ground, coming together for the welfare of men, women and children.”