State will honor 29 Black women suffragists
The historic 1878 State Capitol building, with its dozens of statues and displays of historic artifacts, will soon become moreinclusive, when a plaque honoring 29 Black women suffragists of the early 20th century is cast and installed in what advocates hope to be a public celebration.
It’s also a invitation to help solve mysteries, with many details on the women’s lives seemingly lost in the mists of the decades and generations. There are no available photos for a dozen of the women, all of whom were born in the 1800s.
The two-by-three-foot bronze plaque is being made for the Connecticut League of Women Voters, who got the go-ahead from the little-known Capitol Preservation and Restoration Commission to provide some equity and expand on an honor roll of white suffragettes, including the mother of actor Katharine Hepburn that was installed on a wall inside the Capitol’s south entrance in 1934.
“I think it will blend in very nicely with what’s there now,” said Buddy Altobello of Meriden, a former longtime member of the state House of Representatives who now heads the commission. The plaque will go on the wall directly below the other.
“We feel that this is adding to the story of women seeking the right to vote in Connecticut,” said Carol Reimers, president of the league. “We’re pleased to have the opportunity. We still recognize that the women on the first plaque were important contributors, but this remedies the
need to highlight the role of women of color.”
The plaque will be supplemented with a guidebook containing biographies of the women. Some of the Black women are better known to historians, including Mary Townsend Seymour of West Hartford, an activist who ran for the state House of Representatives after women were finally given the right to vote in 1920. But even for Seymour, the only photograph that researchers found was a grainy image from The Hartford Courant.
For Brittney Yancy, an associate professor of the humanities at Goodwin
College in East Hartford who did much of the research, the plaque represents living history and a challenge to find out more about these women of color, who were generally kept out of white suffrage organizations.
A Ph.D. candidate at UConn, Yancy said in a recent interview that the idea for the plaque emerged in 2020, when she addressed the League of Women Voters state convention at the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford. She said that unlike most white-dominated advocacy organizations, Black women were accepted
by the League of Women Voters New Haven chapter.
“I found that astounding, actually that there were examples of that in the mainstream suffragist movement,” Yancy said. “There were clearly of women of color on the ground, even in the face of racial discrimination.”
Yancy worked with Ilene Frank, chief curator and Karen Li Miller, research historian, at the Connecticut Historical Society to create an exhibit last year, based on a quote from Seymour, called ”The Work Must be Done,” honoring the women. It even includes tips for amateur
historical sleuths to seek out more information about the women and contribute to the research.
Yancy said the team searched newspaper databases, as well as church and community center records to track down whatever details they could on the women, who primarily lived in Hartford and New Haven “There wasn’t an exhaustive list, but that’s the beauty of research,” she said. “There are women of color from all over the state here. To me it is just a huge achievement and milestone and allows people to narrate their own story.”
The women for whom the historians do not have photos include Callie Mathes Coleman, Rosa J. Fisher, Lula M. Graham, Minnie Glover, Margaret Moore Green, Josephine Leverett Haywood, Lena E. Knighton, Pearl Woods Lee , Anna B. Reese, Rose Payton, Ida Sully Troy and Pearl Reese Shaw.
“These individuals have names, stories and lives like everyone else,” Yancy said, describing the project as a continuous work-inprogress. “It really speaks to the fact that so much more research needs to be done. Women led and organized, using the church for both praise and politics.” One trove of detail emerged from records of the Nutmeg State Federation of Colored Women Clubs, Yancy said.
Tracey Wilson, the town historian for West Hartford, said Friday that Seymour, had a major role in forming the NAACP chapter in Hartford, after inviting one of the famous founders, W.E.B. Du Bois, to her Hartford home in the years toward the end of World War I. Active in unionizing tobacco workers, Seymour ran for the General Assembly on the populist Farmer-Labor Party ticket in 1920. She continued as a union activist into the 1930s and died in her mid-80s, in 1957.
“She really has quite a story,” said Wilson, a Ph.D., adding that later, when Seymour moved to West Hartford, cross-race alliances were formed. “Suffrage was just one strategy. They really knew how to lobby and go to the legislature.”