Ballot Blocked (U.S. National Park Service)

Episodes

August 13, 2021

Ballot Blocked Episode 5: Mexican American Voting Rights

Transcript

Eleanor Mahoney: Welcome to Ballot Blocked, a history of women's fight to access the vote. I’m Eleanor Mahoney. In this six-part series, we talk to historians and scholars to learn about women’s path to the ballot, from the period of the Civil War, through the women’s suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the 2020 election. It’s a story of courage and perseverance, of disappointments and hard-won victories. Some of the people you will hear about are well-known, their names on monuments and memorials. Others may have received less recognition, but their achievements are no less impressive. The history of women’s voting rights isn’t a progressive or linear narrative. Passing legislation is only one step along the way to the ballot box. The laws must be enforced and that takes more organizing and more struggle. New barriers to voting access are still being created today. One hundred years after the 19th amendment barred states from denying the vote based on sex, the fight for social, economic, and political equality continues. Ballot Blocked explores how we got here and asks where we might be going next when it comes to voting rights. In this episode, we learn more about the barriers to voting faced by Mexican Americans in the years after World War II. As the anniversary of the 19th amendment approached in 2020, news reports celebrated the event as a milestone in voting access. Yet, many women, especially women of color, remained disenfranchised for decades after the amendment’s ratification. In western states, Mexican American women faced numerous obstacles in their attempts to vote. In Washington State, for example, some counties still required literacy tests, even after they were supposed to be banned by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. English-only elections also continued to take place well into the 1970s. To learn more about this history and to understand how Mexican Americans in Washington challenged discriminatory laws I talked to Dr. Josué Estrada. Dr. Estrada is a historian at the University of Washington. He studies the history of Latinx voting rights in the United States. He’s also the director of Gear-Up, a federally funded college readiness program for low-income students at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. Dr. Estrada told me that the epicenter of voting rights organizing wasn’t in big cities like Seattle. Instead, it was in more rural areas like Yakima County, east of the Cascade Mountains. Mexican Americans had been living in Yakima County for decades, but still faced significant challenges when it came to voting. Voter suppression was built into the system, as Dr. Estrada explains. Josué Estrada: Part of my study examines Mexican American voter suppression in Washington, and how the community challenged the state's literacy tests to be able to register and vote. And I'm also looking at how local politicians, institutions, and the legal court system responded to their movement. Now, the voting rights struggle here in Washington state was different than in the South. And that's for many reasons. It had to do with the fact that the Mexican American community had unique challenges. It wasn't just English literacy tests that blocked them from the ballot, but also English-only elections. And so the Mexican American movement to further democratize the state does begin in Yakima County, and it's located about two and a half hours east of Seattle. Eleanor Mahoney: Mexicans and Mexican Americans made their way to Yakima County throughout the 20th century. They were hired by growers who needed labor for their farms. Many came to the region as guest workers through the Bracero program. It was a mid-century initiative that allowed farms to employ men from Mexico on temporary contracts to make up for the World War II labor shortage. Growers in Washington also recruited Mexican Americans from other states, to come to the Pacific Northwest to harvest crops By the 1960s, Mexican Americans made up a little less than 10 percent of Yakima County’s population. In interviews conducted by Dr. Estrada, community members recalled the discrimination they faced before and after coming to Washington State. Josué Estrada: I had the opportunity to interview folks that specifically came, were recruited from Texas to come into Washington State. And then what they let me know was that they experienced less discrimination in Washington State than they did in Texas. Now, they didn't say, hey, everything was great here in Washington State, but certainly the overt racism was less, but they continued to experience different challenges in the community. At one point, I interviewed one individual who did see that there were signs posted here throughout the Yakima Valley that said, ‘no Mexicans, no dogs’ allowed here in the area. So, there was certainly racism and discrimination, but at the same time you had these growers that wanted to bring these folks into this area, so they created, at least, a space for them to feel a sense of community and feel welcomed in this place. And then there were other institutions, of course, that helped to transition them into this space. And one of those was the Catholic Church. They were able to have Spanish-speaking priests give Mass. And we can see through the church records that after the 1960s, most people were baptizing their children, and we see the growth of communities there. Eleanor Mahoney: The arrival of growing numbers of Mexican Americans in Yakima County coincided with significant changes to federal election laws in the United States. Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act or VRA into law in 1965. The VRA’s primary purpose was to address the systemic and oftentimes violent disenfranchisement of African American voters in the South. In other regions of the country, however, its immediate effects were more limited, including in the Pacific Northwest. Josué Estrada: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a significant civil rights law. Now, the legislation temporarily suspended literacy tests, it prohibited the enforcement of new voting rules without pre-clearance from the federal government, and also allowed for the appointment of examiners to ensure that persons could register and vote without issue. Now, for Mexican Americans in the American West, however, it was powerless to protect them. This was because the safeguards of the Voting Rights Act were largely limited to six Deep South states and focused on African Americans who were subject to Jim Crow segregation and discriminatory voting restrictions, including literacy tests. Now, Washington State was not included under the coverage of the Voting Rights Act because of the trigger formula. Eleanor Mahoney: Dr. Estrada’s last point is important. When the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965, it included a provision, section 4, which is sometimes called the “trigger formula” or “coverage formula.” The provision applied to jurisdictions that maintained a test or device as part of their voting processes. For example, a requirement to pass a literacy test prior to casting a ballot. The Voting Rights Acts suspended such tests - but with an important caveat. The law’s protections would only be applied or triggered in places where voter turnout was under 50 percent in the last general election or where less than 50 percent of persons of voting age were registered to vote. Neither of these conditions were present in Yakima County. So that left disenfranchised Mexican American voters there without any recourse when it came to challenging discrimination at the polls. Josué Estrada: And in 1964, we see that 64 percent of the county's population voted, so the law didn't apply here in Washington state. But it didn't stop Mexican Americans from trying to file a lawsuit against the county to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The United States Census also wasn't tracking the number of Spanish-speaking, Latino, Mexican American voters at this time. So, there was no data to say these people are being denied the vote, but when we look at the historical record and we look at this lawsuit that was filed, absolutely people were being disenfranchised using the state's literacy test. Washington's literacy test wasn't exceptional. It was really used to target non-White voters. And Washington's literacy test was, essentially, you had to be able to speak English and read English, and that was it. And so who administered the test? It was usually the county clerks. You would see the county clerk when you would go to city hall and pay your bill. So that was the person, the gatekeeper, so to speak. In total, I think there were about, around 20 states in the country that had English literacy tests. In the American West, there were four states that had literacy tests. And along the Eastern coast, there were a number of states that had English literacy tests. And they were essentially adopted in the Northeast to kind of restrict the participation of immigrants that were arriving there in the East Coast. And in the South, they were absolutely being used to target and disenfranchise African Americans. In the American West, a little differently, they were initially used to target Chinese and Indigenous people, but then, as we see in our story, they were repurposed to attack Mexican Americans. Eleanor Mahoney: Because of the requirements of the coverage or trigger formula, the Voting Rights Act didn’t protect Mexican American voters in Washington State from literacy tests. The law only banned literacy tests in places where voter suppression could be documented at higher rates. Puerto Rican organizers in the Northeast fought successfully for an exception to the law for people educated in Spanish at schools in Puerto Rico. But that exception didn’t apply to Spanish-speaking voters with a Mexican background, as Dr. Estrada explained. Later in the 1960s, though, Mexican American organizers were able to gain momentum in their efforts to challenge voter suppression in Washington State. Two groups that played a key role in these efforts were the United Farm Workers union and the Mexican American Federation. Josué Estrada: A number of factors are going to align that are going to move the Mexican Americans to revolt against these literacy tests, the white local establishment, and they're going to demand that they want to be recognized as integral citizens of Washington State. And in this year, 1967, we see the formation of the Mexican American Federation, and also the United Farm Workers union. And they're founded to politically mobilize the Mexican American community. Now, the Mexican American Federation, they're going to encourage Mexican Americans to vote, to run for elected office, and take a stand on political issues to influence local and state governments. A top priority for them is going to be that they want to register all Mexican American people eligible to vote in the state. And the epicenter of this voter registration effort is going to be Yakima County. The Mexican American Federation estimates that they're going to be able to register about 4,000 people. Now, on the other hand, Washington's United Farm Workers union, they are organized, or they're working there in the Yakima Valley, to unionize laborers. They want to improve the health and living conditions of folks. And they're also there to provide legal help to farm workers. And they're going to recruit the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU. So, it's a fascinating time. You have, the Mexican American Federation is attempting to register folks, and they come to find out that Mexican Americans are being asked if they can read and speak English. Now, while there are some that are able to speak English, others have trouble reading the language, and these folks are not going to be allowed to register. And they also observed that there's people who can't speak English, and these folks are immediately turned away. Eleanor Mahoney: The number of Mexican Americans registered to vote in Yakima County got a boost from the combined efforts of the ACLU, Mexican American Federation, and the United Farm Workers union. But the total remained suppressed, largely owing to literacy tests. The practice of requiring such tests wasn’t new in 1968, but the willingness of activists and community members to challenge their continued use marked a significant turning point. Josué Estrada: In 1968, what ends up happening is that in early 1968, the Mexican American Federation, they're going to set up a meeting with a Yakima County auditor, Eugene Naff. And they're going to request that he appoint Spanish-speaking registrars to help people register to vote. They explained that women and men attempting to register are United States citizens, and that the Voting Rights Act has outlawed literacy tests. Naff is going to find out that Washington's exam has not been banned. And so, he refuses to make any changes. One of his reasons for denying the appointment of Spanish-speaking registrars is because he believes that it's going to privilege Spanish speaking Americans. And if you appoint Spanish speaking Americans, next thing you're going to have is the Filipinos and Indigenous people, the Chinese, they're going to want their own registrar. So, he's dead set on not appointing any Spanish-speaking registrars. It's at this point where the Mexican American Federation, they're going to reach out to the United Farm Workers union, who is also working there in the Yakima Valley, and they're going to connect them with the ACLU, who is going to file a lawsuit against the county. They're going to make the case, the Mexican American Federation and its plaintiffs will make the case that Mexican Americans are being racially discriminated against and are being deprived of their right to vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now, the outcome is not going to be good. After a year of litigation, in May 1969, a three-panel judge, in their opinion to the court, ruled against the plaintiffs and the Mexican American Federation. The judges are going to collectively agree that a simple inquiry on the registration form, can you speak and read English, is not a test, and could not conceivably result in discriminatory practices. And that is the ruling that they come up with. Eleanor Mahoney: The 1969 ruling was a bitter disappointment. But it did not stop efforts to end voter suppression in Yakima County. Lawyers for the ACLU planned to challenge the judgement, taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. In the end though, Congress would act first, banning literacy tests across the country in 1970. Josué Estrada: After the decision comes down, the ACLU, they're ready to file a landmark lawsuit to make the case that Mexican Americans are being discriminated against, and they're going to make a case against English literacy tests. But as they're gathering their evidence, they begin to also work and make connections with MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. And they're going to reach out to their lawyers and say, hey, we have a case here that can potentially be a Supreme Court decision that's going to include Mexican Americans. But what ends up happening is that in 1970, the Voting Rights Act is renewed for an additional five years, and it's going to ban literacy tests throughout the country. Eleanor Mahoney: Large organizations, like the United Farm Workers, the Mexican American Federation, and the ACLU, played a role in fighting voter suppression in Washington State. But it also took individual acts of courage to bring the injustice to light. Mexican American women, in particular, helped lead the campaign to abolish literacy tests in Yakima County. Fifty years had passed since the 19th amendment became law, but its full promise had yet to be realized. Josué Estrada: So Mexican American women were important leaders in the fight for voting rights and to further democratize Washington State. While the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote, Mexican women who had limited English skills continued to be denied this right. But there were women such as Jennie Marin and Marta Cantu, who wanted to register and vote, and joined this struggle here in Washington State. And they added their names to the lawsuit against Yakima County. They were mothers, working-class women, and they stated that they wanted to vote so that farm workers could earn better wages. They used interpreters. Using interpreters, these women explained that they came from migrant farm-working backgrounds, and so their families traveled throughout the country constantly, and it certainly affected their ability to stay in school and improve their English skills. Marta Cantu said, for example, in her deposition statement, that her family traveled to Illinois, Michigan, and different parts of the Pacific Northwest. I also found Jennie Marin's testimony to be very powerful as she demanded the right to vote. She used her identity as a mother whose son had served four years in the Navy. She was getting across this fact that she could send her son to war, but she herself was unable to vote. It's also important to note that these were brave women. They risked being ostracized by their community members who maybe didn't agree with the Mexican American Federation lawsuit. And they also might be turned away by employers for joining the suit. And so there was also that level of potential retaliation that these women faced as well. Eleanor Mahoney: The nationwide elimination of literacy tests in 1970 marked a significant victory in the fight for voting rights. But it didn’t mean that the struggle was over for Mexican Americans in Washington State. For example, English-only ballots continued to be the norm in many jurisdictions, limiting access and participation. Josué Estrada: We talked about how, after 1970, the Voting Rights Act was renewed. That particular law, in 1970, when it was renewed, it banned English literacy tests throughout the country, right? But there were other factors that continued to be used to deny Mexican Americans the ballot. And after the lawsuit, what we find out also, is that the Mexican American Federation also ceased to exist. And the United Farm Workers union, they continued to help to register people to vote, but their resources were limited. And then states and counties, they weren't required to provide Spanish language assistance. And we talked about that during this time, the United States Census had not started to collect voting data on Mexican Americans, so it was difficult to track if their numbers had increased after 1970. But what I did is, I looked at the county’s candidacy filing records, and I also didn't see any upsurge in the number of Spanish-surname people running for office, so it's likely that the number of registered voters didn't significantly increase after 1970. Now, in 1975, the Voting Rights Act's protections were extended to Latinos and certain counties needed to provide multilingual ballots. But in Yakima County, after 1975, the struggle still continued there. And in 2012, Mexican American residents there in the county's largest city, Yakima, Washington, filed a lawsuit, challenging its at-large election systems. And this lawsuit forced the city to create seven single-member voting districts. And this was the catalyst for a historic election that got three Latinas elected to the city council for the first time. And this was in 2015. And one of those Latinas was elected as the mayor of the city. So it was an incredible, incredible feat. And it was as a result of the Voting Rights Act. Because the lawsuit, again, used the Voting Rights Act to challenge these at-large election schemes, which were denying, or which were suppressing the Latino vote there in Yakima County. Eleanor Mahoney: The history of voting rights in the United States doesn’t always follow a straight path. Access expands in one place or for one group, only to contract for others. The experiences of Mexican Americans in the Pacific Northwest reflect this fitful pattern, as Dr. Estrada’s research demonstrates. Josué Estrada: If we look at voting rights histories, they tend to chart a progressive narrative. The franchise continues to get widened, and we're headed towards universal suffrage. But when we dig deeper and examine the history, say, for example of Latino voter suppression, we see that that happens in fits and starts. It's a result of people mobilizing to enforce these regulations or to broaden civil rights legislation that is so critical to making the vote accessible to everyone. And, in this particular case, what we see is that Mexican Americans in Washington state were really exposing the limits of the Voting Rights Act. It was really tailored toward African Americans, but they're saying, hold on a second, we're also being denied the right to vote, but our challenges are unique. And I think this is what the benefit of studying the history of Latino voter suppression is, in Washington State, is we see that literacy tests, or just one device, was not a region or race-specific tool to restrict the franchise. In the Pacific Northwest, they were enforced to limit non-White voters' access to the ballot. And like I said, they're again, exposing. This movement exposed those limits of the Voting Rights Act, and Mexican Americans in Washington State were making the case that they were also being discriminated against. And I think the big thing that I see is that their movement then sparks a national movement to broaden the coverage of the Voting Rights Act. And this happens in 1975. I think political scientists have examined Latinx voter turnout, and they continue to explain that their numbers are lower than Whites and African Americans, and they cite that a large number are not naturalized, that many are undocumented, and voter apathy to explain this phenomenon. But what my work does is, I make the case that Mexican American voter suppression must be understood within a historical context, and that national, state and local factors need to be considered to more fully understand Latinx voter turnout. So, you have, in one case where there in Yakima County, beginning of the 1960s, they've been struggling to participate, engage, and be part of the electoral system there. But you had one barrier that was set up and that was literacy tests. And then after that is eliminated, then you have English-only elections, and then no access to Spanish language ballots. And then you have at- large elections, and then redistricting, which continued to limit their access to the ballot. So, unless we can take into account these factors, we're going to continue to see that those numbers are lower than whites and African-Americans, but not take into account the systemic factors that have led up to this, the lower voter turnout. Eleanor Mahoney: It took 50 years for the promises of the Voting Rights Act to fully reach Yakima County. And, in the end, it was by way of a pragmatic reform forced by a lawsuit: ending at-large elections for city council seats. After the change was put into effect, three Latinas took office and the city council started to look a lot more like the city it represents. Dr. Estrada’s research demonstrates that voting rights legislation is often a midpoint in the fight for ballot access, rather than the final destination. Laws have to be interpreted and enforced at all levels of government, a process that takes time, effort, and education. The history of the 19th amendment demonstrates this all too well, with many women denied suffrage long after its ratification. In our next and final episode, we’ll get special insight into how the activism of the last century reverberates in our world today. Dr. Sylvea Hollis, a professor of History at Montgomery College, interviews Dr. Brittany Webb, the Evelyn and Will Kaplan Curator of Twentieth Century Art and the John Rhoden collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts or PAFA in Philadelphia. They discuss the exhibit Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale, on view at PAFA from January 21, 2021 to September 5, 2021. Dr. Webb curated the exhibit, along with her colleague, Jodi Throckmorton.

This episode examines the barriers to voting faced by Mexican Americans in the Pacific Northwest. In Washington State, for example, some counties still required literacy tests, even after they were supposed to be banned by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. To learn more about this history and to understand how Mexican Americans challenged discriminatory laws we interview Dr. Josué Q, Estrada

August 4, 2021

Ballot Blocked Episode 4: The Radicalism of Irish American Women

Transcript

Eleanor Mahoney: Welcome to Ballot Blocked, a history of women's fight to access the vote. I’m Eleanor Mahoney. In this six-part series, we talk to historians and scholars to learn about women’s path to the ballot, from the period of the Civil War, through the women’s suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the 2020 election. It’s a story of courage and perseverance, of disappointments and hard-won victories. Some of the people you will hear about are well-known, their names on monuments and memorials. Others may have received less recognition, but their achievements are no less impressive. The history of women’s voting rights isn’t a progressive or linear narrative. Passing legislation is only one step along the way to the ballot box. The laws must be enforced and that takes more organizing and more struggle. New barriers to voting access are still being created today. One hundred years after the 19th amendment barred states from denying the vote based on sex, the fight for social, economic, and political equality continues. Ballot Blocked explores how we got here and asks where we might be going next when it comes to voting rights. In this episode, we focus on the role of Irish American women in the suffrage movement. Many of these women were already veteran organizers. They had led strikes and fought for labor unions in cities across the country. They had also campaigned for land reform in Ireland and for Irish independence. To learn more about how these experiences affected their views on women’s suffrage, I spoke with Dr. Tara McCarthy. Dr. McCarthy is a professor of history at Central Michigan University and is the author of Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880-1920. I asked Dr. McCarthy to tell me about the activist history of Irish American women, and how this set them apart from many other suffragists. Tara McCarthy: Yeah, I think that part of the timeline of the way things work for Irish American women is that they really got involved in the labor movement or the nationalist movement first. So, it's not a traditional suffrage story whereas usually when we teach women's history, we start with Seneca Falls and the women's rights and then how that moves into a suffrage movement. Of course, Irish American women really aren't part of that story, so hadn't been part of it. So, when I was really looking for Irish American women's activism, I started really with the labor movement and the nationalist movement, but then you start seeing that some of the earliest suffrage converts really are coming out of the labor movement. So, they have a reason to embrace women's suffrage because of their experiences as workers and organizers. Eleanor Mahoney: The suffrage movement in America began to adopt more confrontational tactics around 1910. Leaders like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns traveled to England and saw that picketing and mass demonstrations for women’s suffrage there were effective at moving public opinion. Bringing those tactics to the U.S. marked a major shift in strategy for most suffragists, who were largely middle and upper-class. But for many Irish American women, these tactics were nothing new. As leaders in the labor movement, they already had experience with radical politics. Union organizing in industrial America was almost always violent and contentious and demanded bold action. This exposure to the everyday struggles of working-class people on and off the job gave many Irish American women a new militancy in their approach to social movements, including the campaign for women’s suffrage. Tara McCarthy: I think one of the things is that for Irish American women, they were sort of obvious militants. And what I mean by that is when the American suffrage movement starts to embrace... Not embrace. Maybe that's too strong of a word, but starts to experiment with militancy, of course, that happens later than the British movement. So we think of the British movement as militant and the American movement is really much more conservative if that's an inappropriate word. But for Irish American women, they kind of were more obvious in being able to really navigate working class neighborhoods and things like that. And they seem to embrace the idea that it's okay to be loud, it's okay to be assertive. So they really bring that. So some of the, I think, fun stories about militants come out of this idea. There was a woman by the name of Margaret Foley and she was from Boston. So she was this working class Irish Catholic and when the Massachusetts Suffrage Association was looking for someone to send to England to train in militancy, they chose her and then another woman, and they basically sort of went over there and kind of studied militant tactics and brought them back to the US. So, her job was essentially to go and heckle local politicians in Boston. So she would go to these other Irish American politicians, right? She would go and she would sort of heckle at them and try to get them to engage with her about suffrage. And that was basically her job was to disrupt rallies and to try and get politicians to change their stance on suffrage. So she had to, I think, kind of embrace a certain level of assertiveness because that was her job. Eleanor Mahoney: Many Irish American women maintained close ties to family in Ireland. They remained engaged in Irish politics, including the fight for Irish independence. In the 1880s and 1890s, the Irish Land League became a prominent cause. It sought to help poor tenant farmers and abolish the landlord system. Irish American women organized on behalf of the League in the United States, raising money, and speaking out publicly in favor of land reform. Tara McCarthy: Well, there are three waves of Irish nationalism. The first one started with the Land League. So that's the 19th century and the Land League really, it started in Ireland. It was an Irish movement to reform basically policies towards tenant farmers to give tenant farmers some rights on the lands that they were farming. The Land League was really a male movement, but what happened in Ireland was that they knew that the leaders would be arrested and put in jail. So they intentionally started a ladies' Land League to take over the work when the men were put in prison. So in Ireland, you had women leading rallies and raising funds and providing help for tenants. You had a few American women who actually went over and helped with that. But the American version of the Land League was more educational and fundraising. And they were learning not only about what's going on in Ireland, but about land theories and ideas about private property and starting to do some of the kind of political activism and fundraising that they really hadn't done before. The other thing that the Land League did was embrace some of the more cultural aspects like learning the Irish language and teaching Irish history. So both in America and in Ireland, it was a way for the Irish to preserve their cultural heritage and to educate the next generation. You have other waves of Irish nationalism that come later particularly after 1916. So I do talk about both of those as being really important. But for suffrage really the militant tactics and the things we were talking about, a lot of that is later into the 20th century, particularly as Irish nationalism takes on really, almost a crisis period after the Easter Rising and during World War I. So, a lot of the most militant stuff that's going on is really that time period, where you have militancy in Irish Republican circles. Militancy in the suffrage movement happening at the same time. Eleanor Mahoney: The latter decades of the 19th century saw a rise in anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States. In response, many Catholic women, including Irish Americans, began to re-think the importance of voting, seeing it as a way to assert social and political power. Tara McCarthy: Yeah. There's, again, I think kind of a couple of important trends. One is just nativism in general. It rises in certain time periods and one of them is the late 19th century. So that particularly 1880s and 1890s, the end of the 19th century, you have a pretty, pretty strong anti-Catholic backlash. So for Catholics who were already in this country, suffrage becomes an issue because there's that question of, "Well, if women get the right to vote, will Catholic women vote, will Protestant women vote and how would that help shape or reshape the dynamics, right?" Again, if you're looking at media coverage, you'll start to see comments like, "Well, we already have Irish men voting. We really don't want Catholic men voting. We really don't want Catholic women voting too," that kind of thing. And then in a later time period, again, in the 20th century, Catholics start to say, "You know what, maybe we are interested in this suffrage question, but we want to start to look at it as Catholics, right?" So, what I mean by that is that you start to have interest from the suffrage movement importing the Irish Catholic vote, but also interest from women in having a kind of a separate Catholic organization or Catholic movement. So you do see, I think, a really interesting trend but it happens late, like around 1914-15. You start to see a trend towards groups of Catholic women working for suffrage as Catholics separately from the dominant suffrage movement. Eleanor Mahoney: Finding the stories of working-class women in the past can be hard because their experiences were often not the ones celebrated in the media or recorded in the history books. Dr. McCarthy told me she often had to search through archival records, personal papers, and old newspapers to find even a trace of the women she was researching. That was the case for Gertrude Kelly, an anarchist, a surgeon, and a suffragist. Tara McCarthy: Gertrude Kelly is a fascinating figure. She was born in Ireland, but came fairly young, so largely grew up in the US as part of a big Irish family. She and one of her brothers whose name was John Kelly were both anarchists in the 1880s. They embraced anarchism and they wrote for these American anarchist publications. So you can actually read what they wrote in the 1880s. But she was a surgeon and pretty well known in New York. Well, enough known, they named the playground after her in the 1920s or '30s, the Gertrude Kelly Playground. I think it's still there. So, she was very active in reform in New York City. She was single. She never married. And she really was devoted to her causes of which there were many, but she shows that most of the time in terms of Irish nationalism. But again, it's very hard to find. I met several other historians who were also trying to find more on her. It's very hard to find much of anything on her because she doesn't leave any papers. So, it's just mentions here and there and then letters that she wrote to connections in Ireland or in the US. But she really embraced... I mean, she was a pretty radical woman and it was her skill as a surgeon that allowed her to be active in some of these other causes as well. In other words, she didn't marry, she didn't have children. She was a respected professional, but also active in lots of causes. Leonora O'Reilly and Gertrude Kelly were friends, which is kind of a great story as well. But Leonora O'Reilly has a pretty different background. Her mother and father came from Ireland and they had a little grocery store and then he died. Her mother eventually lost the store, which forced her to take a job basically in a factory. So, it was just mother and daughter living together. As soon as Leonora was old enough that she basically joined her mother in the factory, and they worked in the garment trade. Her mother, Winifred O'Reilly also brought her daughter into trade unionism in some of the more... I don't want to say radical. I don't think that's the right word, but at least the more cutting edge ideas of the labor movement in her time. When Leonora O'Reilly is older, she was taking care of her mother, of Winifred, and Leonora O'Reilly actually died fairly young. She was in her 50s, I think. And when she died, her mother was still alive. So, the women who were her friends from the Women's Trade Union League took care of Leonora's mother. So, there was that family connection that they stayed together their entire lives, but also the Women's Trade Union League, but essentially became her home, Leonora O'Reilly's home. She came to a lot of her activism really through, again, through the union movement, but embraced suffrage very early on, and then came to Irish nationalism sort of after that as well. So, she was involved in all three. So that's why she shows up all the time. Plus, she had papers. She left letters and diaries. She's one of the few that did. Eleanor Mahoney: Working-class and middle-class women came together to found the Women’s Trade Union League in 1903. The organization promoted trade unionism among women workers and lobbied for labor protection legislation. It raised money for strikes, held protests, coordinated boycotts, and investigated conditions in sweatshops. Leonora O’Reilly worked as an organizer and recruiter for the New York City Chapter of the group for more than a decade. As Dr. McCarthy explains, O’Reilly and other working-class members recognized the organization’s value, but also grew frustrated by the influence of its wealthier members. Tara McCarthy: Well, the Women's Trade Union League, I think plays a really important role in this even though there was certainly tension at times. The Women's Trade Union League as a vision was working class women and middle class, and upper-class women really working together, right? But in many cases these middle and upper-class women took on leadership roles and working-class women, they were the organizers, they were the ones out there on the ground, actually doing the work. What that did though was helped them get out of factory life. So that essentially Leonora O'Reilly stopped being a factory worker once she was able to support herself through her organizing and her activism. And for many other women, this would be the case as well, not just Irish women, but other women as well. But as far as how they work together, there was certainly frustration sometimes. At least for O'Reilly, she quit more than once, the Women's Trade Union League, because she was kind of like, "I've had enough." And she would go back. But the suffrage movement was important, tied to that because particularly in the early 20th century, the suffrage movement started to reach out to working class women more. And so, it makes sense. It would be through either the Women's Trade Union League or some other organizations that they would be able to start these dialogues, right? But especially around 1907, 1908, you start to get a lot more interest in working class women in the suffrage movement. And what that then does is open up opportunities for women to become paid speakers for the suffrage movement. And I mentioned Margaret Foley already. She's a really good example of that. There were women who essentially left behind at least temporarily left behind their working-class jobs to work for the suffrage movement and they would travel when needed for different state campaigns. So again, one of the, I think, the best example is an Irish woman by the name of Margaret Hinchey. She was first-generation Irish, and she worked in the laundry until she was blacklisted for her union activities. And then through the Women's Trade Union League and in close partnership with Leonora O'Reilly, she ends up a pretty popular suffrage speaker. She travels to different states to give speeches and to organize for suffrage. But when suffrage is won in New York, she's not needed anymore. Leonora O'Reilly tries to help raise money for her, but she ends up back in the laundry when the suffrage movement is over. And Margaret Foley was, I want to say she was a hat trimmer. I can't remember what she did for work, but she, after the suffrage movement really was scrambling around for a while looking for some kind of appointment with the Democratic Party or something, because, again, these are working women, right? They have to work. So, when the suffrage movement doesn't need them anymore, they have to find something else. So, it's a tricky relationship. It's part employer and part movement for a lot of women. And the Women's Trade Union League is as well. I mean, it's their job, right? They worked for the Women's Trade Union League. Eleanor Mahoney: An important turning point for working-class women and the suffrage movement came in 1911. On March 25, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. 146 garment workers died in the fire; most were young immigrant women. It was one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history and would eventually lead to the implementation of major workplace safety reforms. After the fire, labor activists like Leonora O’Reilly were more convinced than ever that having working-class women involved in the political process was essential for change. Tara McCarthy: So, Leonora O'Reilly was in New York. It's a moment where O'Reilly says in her diary, "All right, we need a working-class suffrage movement, right? Not just a suffrage movement, but a working-class suffrage movement." It's a moment where she says, it's not enough just to be involved in a suffrage movement. We need working class women to work with working class women as well. Eleanor Mahoney O’Reilly and other working-class women began to form wage earners suffrage leagues across the country. These groups would be run by and for the working-class whose lives were far removed from those of the wealthy elite women who headed most suffrage organizations. Tara McCarthy: There was frustration, at least, again, on O'Reilly's part and also Foley's part, I think, we haven't talked as much about her, with some kind of paternalistic attitudes and not really understanding the needs of working class women. Margaret Foley, one of the interesting things that came out in her letters was that she was largely useful to the movement for her heckling and that sort of activism. There came a point where she was less active in the movement. So she wrote to - I don't know if it was the head or one of the officers with the Massachusetts Women's Suffrage Association,And she basically said, "Hey, I'm a well-known Irish Catholic in Boston. Why am I not more needed in the movement? People are asking me why I'm not more visible in the movement." And they basically wrote back to her and said, "Well, you've been really valuable, but the suffrage movement is in kind of a different phase right now. We're focusing on sort of quiet lobbying and things that we don't really think would be your best area essentially." So again, I think the subtext of that was, "Okay, we like when you're loud and you go out and you heckle, and you do these public speeches and demonstrations, but for the quiet lobbying, we're going to send somebody else." So for Foley, again, as I said, since, that was largely how she was supporting herself, she needed to work and she wasn't sort of seen as being useful in that way. For Margaret Hinchey, I think the same thing happens. Leonora O'Reilly is different because, I mean, suffrage wasn't really... I mean, she was a suffragist, but she wasn't the one out there traveling and giving this for the most part. So for some of these women, I think they were useful until they weren't useful anymore. Whereas the Women's Trade Union League would continue to be a home for some women, for women who were specifically within the suffrage organizations, I think it's more complicated. Eleanor Mahoney: Margaret Hinchey and Margaret Foley spent years speaking out in favor of women’s voting rights. Their efforts targeted union members and working-class immigrants. Groups that the mainstream suffrage movement often ignored. Hinchey and Foley made their mark on the fight for ballot access, but, in the end, neither found a permanent home in activism. They didn’t come from money and, unlike many wealthier suffrage advocates, needed a regular paycheck to survive - something that proved hard to come by despite their commitment to labor rights and women’s equality. The 19th amendment barred states from denying the vote based on sex. But, for many women, including the working-class Irish Americans studied by Dr. McCarthy, full and lasting participation in the political process remained an elusive goal. In our next episode, we’ll meet another group of women whose activism had roots in the labor movement. Dr. Josue Estrada will tell us about the struggle for voting rights in Washington State in the decades after World War II. Mexican American women living and working in rural Yakima County east of the Cascade Mountains faced numerous barriers in their attempts to cast a ballot, including literacy tests and English-only elections. Despite these obstacles though, they were determined to assert their right to the vote.

In this episode, we focus on the role of Irish American women in the suffrage movement. Many of these women were already veteran organizers. They had led strikes and fought for labor unions in cities across the country. They had also campaigned for land reform in Ireland and for Irish independence. To learn more about how these experiences affected their views on women’s suffrage, I spoke with Dr. Tara McCarthy. Dr. McCarthy is a professor of history at Central Michigan University.

July 15, 2021

Ballot Blocked Episode 3: Remembering History's Complexities

Transcript

Eleanor Mahoney: Welcome to Ballot Blocked, a history of women's fight to access the vote. I’m Eleanor Mahoney. In this six-part series, we talk to historians and scholars to learn about women’s path to the ballot, from the period of the Civil War, through the women’s suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the 2020 election. It’s a story of courage and perseverance, of disappointments and hard won victories. Some of the people you will hear about are well-known, their names on monuments and memorials. Others may have received less recognition, but their achievements are no less impressive. The history of women’s voting rights isn’t a progressive or linear narrative. Passing legislation is only one step along the way to the ballot box. The laws have to be enforced and that takes more organizing and more struggle. New barriers to voting access are still being created today. One hundred years after the 19th amendment barred states from denying the vote based on sex, the fight for social, economic, and political equality continues. Ballot Blocked explores how we got here and asks where we might be going next when it comes to voting rights. In this episode, we pick up our story in Washington, D.C. at a stately brick mansion just steps away from the U.S. capitol and Supreme Court. A sign outside the building reads Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument. The site is managed by the National Park Service and is staffed by uniformed rangers. For much of the past century though, the mansion was home to the National Women’s Party or NWP. You’ve probably seen old black and white photos of the women who founded the NWP. Images of picket lines and parades, of women wearing white dresses and big hats, marching down wide boulevards and holding banners. The leaders of the NWP, like most of the women in the photographs, were white and from middle and upper class families. But these pictures don’t tell the whole story - not even close. Women from diverse backgrounds were also fighting for the right to vote, but their contributions were not always welcomed by the mainstream suffrage movement. To learn more about the struggle for women’s voting rights and the battles for inclusion and equity within the suffrage movement, I talked to Susan Phillpott, a historian and National Park Service ranger who has worked at the National Mall and Memorial Parks for over a decade. She volunteered to be one of the first rangers at Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument when it was designated in 2016. I asked her to tell me more about the creation of the monument and what the brick mansion in Washington, D.C. meant for women’s voting rights across the country. What stories did it hold, and whose voices had been left out from many accounts of the women’s suffrage movement? Susan Philpott: Since 1929, this historic house has been the headquarters of the National Woman's Party founded by Alice Paul. And Alice Paul was in the new generation of women fighting for equality and particularly the right to vote in the 20th century. And she led what became the National Woman's Party, which was a small organization in the much larger National Women's Suffrage Movement, but they were the ones that were really good at getting publicity. If you have seen any photographs of women fighting for the vote in the early 20th century leading up to the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment, you probably have seen pictures of the National Woman's Party people, because they were the ones that were out there causing good trouble, to borrow a phrase from John Lewis. They were the ones picketing the White House, and planning parades, and doing all sorts of disruptive things in their demand for the right to vote. Alice Paul came to the movement actually not from meeting any U.S. suffrage leaders, but when she was going to graduate school in Europe and particularly at the London School of Economics, she encountered the militant suffragettes there of the Women's Social and Political Union led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters. They used the tactic of being disruptive, being visible. Their slogan was “Deeds not words." Up till that point, most of the work for all social change really, not just the Women's Suffrage Movement, the tactics were things like giving speeches, writing articles, publishing newspapers, getting the word out. This idea that you could convince people of the rightness, the justice, the logic of your movement, and that was going to bring about change. And the suffragettes didn’t think that was going to work. Eleanor Mahoney: Deeds not words. The slogan of the British suffragettes. In England, Alice Paul saw these women using tactics designed to provoke confrontation. They petitioned Parliament, yes, but they also organized big demonstrations, they threw rocks, they broke windows and they even burned buildings and set off mailbox bombs. Susan Philpott told me that Alice Paul brought this spirit to America with her when she came back in 1910. She thought American suffragists were too reserved. She wanted to push the movement toward more direct action. And, she found a partner in this: the wealthy women’s activist Alva Vanderbilt Belmont. Susan Philpott: So you have a couple of things happening in the late 19th and early 20th century. One is this new class of super wealthy people in the Gilded Age, including women, women who have money, have more opportunities than previous generations of women have had, own property, and start to use that money, that standing, people like Alva Belmont, to support these movements, including the labor movement, that you have wealthy women giving their voice and giving their money to the labor movement. The level of leadership among white women is still primarily privileged, although not at Vanderbilt level. But women like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns of the National Woman's Party, and then of the larger National Women's Suffrage Organization, women like Carrie Chapman Catt, are still from fairly privileged backgrounds. But they are, as you mentioned, learning from labor leaders. Some of them, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton's daughter, Harriet Stanton Blatch, are actually involved in that labor movement and supporting the labor movement. And so then you also have women who have been labor leaders joining the suffrage movement. That was one of the arguments that Alice Paul would make is that, "Anything else you care about, whether it is labor reform, whether it is health reform, whether it is improving conditions for immigrants or Prohibition, whatever it is, women, if you have the vote, you will be more likely to be able to get that done. So join us in our fight for the vote, and then you will have the power of the ballot to work for all of those other things." But this period of time is also the period of time that is very much a worsening of race relations, of increasing segregation, and racial oppression and violence. Although the Women's Suffrage Movement started among abolitionists, and it was a very interracial movement, by the time of the 20th century, it has become as segregated as everything else in the US. So Black women have always been forming their own organizations, but they find themselves increasingly not being able to get anywhere with the white leaders and focusing their efforts on their own organization. So the Black Women's Club Movement sort of overseen and supported by the formation of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 with Mary Church Terrell as president. Black women are fighting for many different things all of the time, including the vote. Supporting Black men being able to vote, which they should have had that right according to the Constitution, but it's not happening. They're getting pushed out of being able to have the vote, and other social and civic issues including women having to vote. Still, some of them are continuing to work with or fight for recognition in the white women's organizations, but often finding themselves only able to make marginal progress there and having to form their own organizations. Eleanor Mahoney: Segregation and racism were all too common within the women’s suffrage movement. For example, in 1913, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, or NAWSA, organized a big parade in Washington, D.C., to demand the vote for women. It was the day before Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration in 1 913, and thousands of women came to march. Organizers Alice Paul and Lucy Burns wanted to shine a light on the fact that they were excluded from the electoral process. Prominent Black activists, like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, also showed up that day to demand the vote. Susan Philpott explains what happened next. Susan Philpott: Alice Paul, her vision of this story that they're going to tell in the landscape is really only the story of white women. Very quickly, she discovers that there's Black women who are saying, "Great, sign me up," like Mary Church Terrell, like women from Howard University. Immediately, there is this tension of, well, can we have Black and white women marching together? Is that telling another story that we don't want to get into? We're only talking about women voting. We're not talking about racial issues. So, there's a lot of back and forth. It's hard to tell in the record what the intention was, particularly because Alice Paul's trying to downplay this tension and, sometimes in the history, you might hear that Black women were forced to march in the back. It's certainly clear that that's what Alice Paul wanted. What's less clear is that Black women agreed. It seems pretty clear that they did not. That they marched where they believed they belonged. Ida B. Wells is one of the clearest parts of that story, that she is lining up with the delegation of women's suffragists that have come from Illinois. She's arguably the most famous woman there in that delegation. As they're getting ready to start, the white women's suffragists turn to her and say, "Oh, you know what, we heard that they don't want Black women to march with the white women. So, Mrs. Wells-Barnett, you're going to have to go to the back." Ida is just absolutely incensed. She says, basically, “What are you saying? If you tell me to go to the back, what story are you telling about equality and justice?" She storms off, but she doesn't go to the back. She waits along the parade route. And when the Illinois delegation comes by, she steps right out in front. Eleanor Mahoney: Stories like this remind us of history’s complexity. The centennial anniversary of women getting the vote would seem like a moment for celebration. But Park Service staff knew the story wasn’t so simple. They had to bring forward the voices of those marginalized by the mainstream suffrage movement and those who still had to fight to vote after 1920. Susan Philpott: So that was one of the foundational ideas of the planning of this anniversary. In fact, one of the first decisions that was made very deliberately by the 19th Amendment Centennial Working Group led by Dr. Megan Springate was to call it a commemoration and not a celebration, that we want to use this as an opportunity to tell all of these stories and let that tension of the recognition of these amazing accomplishments with the failings and the failures, to be inclusive and to recognize equality of all, that we wanted to be, that the National Park Service wanted to be a place where we were telling all those stories. One thing, of course, you notice when you walk into the museum at the Belmont-Paul is that you see all of these photographs and paintings and sculptures of women, and it's all white faces. You're struck by that right away. I could definitely see that as I started to give tours in the faces of the visitors as they stood there and looked around, and how many visitors were not seeing themselves represented there. One of the things that's in the first area that you enter when you go into the museum at Belmont-Paul, in addition to having pictures and statues all around you, there's a huge mirror and, on that mirror, is a sticker that looks like a frame. The idea is that, when you look at yourself in that mirror, it's as if you're in the frame. And so, the sign says to see yourself here, that you are here among these suffragists, these fighters, and you are one of them. Right away, we could see that there were lots of people who come and who don't see themselves there. And so part of this work for commemorating this important moment in civil rights history is to help tell those stories, have all people, all parts of the story represented so that we aren't ignoring or shying away from the difficult parts, so that everyone who comes can engage with the story and see themselves in this story of what it means to work for change, and what it means to stand up and demand that you be treated equally...So there are many people who fought for this amendment who said, "Good, we're done. All right, that's it for me. I'm going back home. I'm living a normal life, no more fighting," which is a perfectly rational way to respond to having gone through all this. But then there are others, and there are new people who are joining this movement who said, "No, now that we have the ballot, that's just the beginning. Now we've got the power to fight for everything else." Eleanor Mahoney: So what happened after ratification of the 19th amendment? Members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association started the League of Women Voters in 1920. For more than a hundred years, the League has championed the issue of voter education. The National Women’s Party became an advocacy group focused on social equality for women. Getting women the vote was only the first step. The U.S. Constitution still did not formally recognize women as equal citizens. This led to a fight for the Equal Rights Amendment as Susan Philpott explains. Susan Philpott: So they wrote a new amendment which said, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex." The Equal Rights Amendment. That started in 1923. That's not an amendment that they were successful in getting added to the Constitution. There is still nothing officially, if you're talking about originalists and looking at the words, there's still nothing in the words of the U.S. constitution that says women are equal citizens, need to be treated equally. If you look at the intentions of the people who wrote the words, there certainly is the argument to be made, that the people who wrote these words didn't think of women as equal. One thing that white women in general don't do is pay attention to the issue of the vote, and who's still able to exercise the vote and who isn't. So right from the beginning, you have Black women from the South who are contacting the National Woman's Party and saying, "Hey, we are trying to register, and they are keeping us out. We need your help." The National Woman's Party's response was, "You're being denied because of your race, not because of your sex. That's not our issue." Even though over the years, over and over again, Black women are coming to the National Woman's Party and saying, "Support us as we try to fight against continued racial violence, as we fight against literacy tests and poll taxes and other forms of intimidation that are keeping us from our rights." Over and over again, the National Woman's Party does not respond, even though they look for Black women to help them support the Equal Rights Amendment. So that racial divide continues. Ironically, one of the biggest things that makes a difference for women is the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So here, white women's groups tend to not be getting involved in civil rights issues and racial issues. But it is the Civil Rights Act and one word in Title VII that's about employment discrimination, the word sex in the prohibition against employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, they get the word sex in there. With employment equality, at least in law if not in practice, that begins the process of women being able to move closer towards economic equality, and then from that, political equality. So it always makes me wonder, historians don't like the counterfactuals, but I wonder, what if, what if white women like Alice Paul had joined with all of these Black women who were fighting and said, "Yes, we are making common cause, that we are fighting for equality for all." Maybe they could have gotten there faster. I can understand in a way the desire to say we need to make our demands simple and limited, that that's the way you get change. You say, “I want this one thing and I'm going to fight for this one thing.” But in doing that, it's so easy to exclude people. There's always this response of, "Okay, well, we'll get to you later." As Dr. King said, "That answer of wait has always meant never." Eleanor Mahoney: "This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never’." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote these words in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” more than two years before the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Dr. King knew that the vote would not be given; it must be claimed. In the next episode, we'll pick up our story with Irish-American suffragists, who used their background in the labor and Irish independence movements to push for ballot access. Ballot Blocked is produced and hosted by me - Eleanor Mahoney. Dr. Sylvea Hollis conducted research and interviews and helped plan this podcast. Drew Himmelstein is our producer and editor. Our music is by Podington Bear. This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This episode explores the fight for women's suffrage in the pivotal decades before and after ratification of the 19th Amendment. It explores the changing tactics of the suffrage movement as well as the battles for inclusion and equity that took place within women's organizations in the early 20th century United States. Susan Philpott, a public historian and park ranger, reflects on the challenges of researching and interpreting the complex history of women's voting rights.

July 14, 2021

Ballot Blocked Episode 2: The Transnational Activism of Mary Church Terrell

Transcript

Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks: Terrell is best remembered today for her career in the U.S. as an early civil rights activist, as an educator, as a lecturer on rights for women and African Americans, as the daughter of the wealthiest black family in the South, the Churches at the time. But, recent research, including my own, on her international activism, I think really expands our knowledge or our understanding of who she was as a public figure. It's almost no surprise that Terrell became active in social movements during her time because she was born in the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. Her contemporaries included Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Murray Washington. So, this really made her a part of this pioneering generation of African American women who earned college degrees, who sought professional careers, challenged black male leadership on the basis of gender discrimination, and who became their own ... a political force in their own right with the establishment of Black women's clubs. Terrell graduated from Oberlin College. Against her father's wishes, she pursued a career as an educator. In her early 20s, she managed to convince him to fund her self-guided study abroad expedition around Europe for two years. She then returned with this resolve to fight for racial justice. Not too long after her return home, she married Robert H. Terrell, who was an accomplished young man and was a graduate of Harvard and Howard University. They married in a very lavish ceremony at her father's home. In her autobiography, Terrell points to two traumatic experiences that motivated her to become a full-time activist, one of them being the murder of her childhood friend, Thomas Moss, who was a successful grocery store owner in Memphis, Tennessee, and who was viewed as a threat by white businessmen who wanted to control the economy and the wealth building within black communities in the South. And the second being equally, or even more tragic, was the miscarriage of her three babies, which she blamed on inferior Jim Crow facilities. These two very personal tragedies are examples of the kinds of racial injustices experienced by African Americans from all socioeconomic backgrounds, but they were the main two motivating factors for real that really pushed her into public life.

Eleanor Mahoney: These traumas propelled Terrell into becoming one of the most important civil rights activists of her era. She was a leader in the Black women’s club movement and worked to unify local organizations into a national force for political and social change.

Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks: Black women's clubs were independent black women's organizations that came about in the 1890s and were established across the country. They focused on advancing the race and gender equality. Black women's clubs were intellectual communities, really. They debated about the best strategies for dismantling Jim Crow and ensuring Black women made progress along with civil rights gains for the larger Black community. In the early years of the Black women's club movement, Black women focused on bringing social services to poor Black neighborhoods. They established kindergartens, medical clinics, nursing schools, etc. With the founding of the first African American women's national organization, which was the National Association of Color Women, also known as the NACW, in 1896, and Mary Church Terrell as the organization's first president, we began to see Black women's clubs expand its role into the public sphere through political agitation. And so Black club women challenged discriminatory state laws that undermined their rights as U.S. citizens, so, for example, petitioning against Jim Crow, streetcar laws, and the exploitation of Black prisoners by the convict lease system. Of course, many of these same Black club women had been active in the suffrage movement, or at least to the extent they were allowed. Even for women like Terrell, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Fannie Barrier Williams, these women were all very fair-skinned, and so from time to time they were invited to attend conferences put on by the National American Women's Suffrage Association. But by and large, Black women were really kept out of playing a more, taking on more prominent roles and being more visible within these organizations, in part because they were not yet a national organization until 1896, so they didn't have that standing, but it was also due to racial discrimination. So, one motivating factor for Black women in establishing their own clubs was due to race prejudice from predominantly white women's organizations, on the one hand, and then, on the other hand, sexism from predominantly Black men's organizations. And so, Black women understood that only they could best represent and advance an agenda that would benefit them. So with the formation of the NACW, Black women really became their own political force. They injected their voice in these largely white women’s suffrage organizations, and they really pushed leaders, like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, Emily Greene Balch to publicly include racial justice as part of their platform. Because for Black women, putting in racism and sexism were intertwined. They could not separate the two.

Eleanor Mahoney: During this period, American suffragists were forming ties with other feminists in Europe, creating a transnational women’s movement. Terrell became a leading figure in this exchange, urging the largely white women’s suffrage movement to address racial justice as well as gender inequity.

Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks: African American women used the international arena to make advancements towards gender equality and to dismantle white supremacy in a variety of ways. They attended international women's conferences, often as uninvited guests, as was the case with Hallie Quinn Brown who showed up at the International Council of Women's Conference in London in 1899 and gave an impromptu 30-minute speech on the racial indignities imposed on blacks by white Americans. When extended, Black women accepted invitations to give lectures at these international meetings, and they eventually were able to join as official members to organizations like the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Black women published essays in international journals. In these essays, they would share their experiences abroad in prominent Black newspapers at the time, such as Voice of the Negro, the Washington Bee, The Chicago Defender where they knew there was a large readership and audience. Terrell exercised all these avenues. Her activist debut, if you will, on the international stage was at the International Council of Women's Congress meeting in Berlin in 1904 where she attended as part of the U.S. women's branch or sometimes they're called councils. She was asked to give a lecture on wage-earning women. She turned that moment into an opportunity to talk about the progress of Black women since emancipation. She used it also as an opportunity to lay blame for the challenges confronting Black women at the feet of white Americans. She gave her lecture in German and in French and received a standing ovation. Terrell went on to share her experiences abroad and at that conference in the Voice of the Negro. And she included photos. A number of Black and white newspapers reported on the event and Terrell's very well-received performance. Terrell published essays in international journals not too long after the meeting in Berlin. Her essays focused on the convict lease system and on white Southerners' propensity for violence against African Americans. She argued in that essay that that could only be stopped by non-Southern whites. As I mentioned earlier, eventually, some Black women were invited to become members of transnational women's organizations, and so that was also true for Mary Church Terrell, who became a member and the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Executive Board for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Eleanor Mahoney: The transnational activism of African American women like Mary Church Terrell advanced the causes of racial and gender equity on both sides of the Atlantic. Historians still have much to learn about the effects of this work. And, as Dr. Callahan Banks explains, any assessment or metric seeking to measure its impact must take into the account the pervasiveness of white supremacy in early 20th century feminist spaces.

Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks: I tread lightly when I answer these kinds of questions that kind of inherently assume that Black women were on the same playing field as white feminists in terms of Black women's access to sites of power and/or access to individuals in positions of power who could make things happen on their behalf. I say that to say that we must always recognize that Black women were claiming agency in a white supremacist world. What often happens when we in the scholarly world ask about their direct impact, what we're really saying is if we cannot draw a straight line from, say, Mary Church Terrell’s or any other African-American feminist transnationalist actions to an outcome in the international field, well, then Black women were not really that effective or it raises doubts in terms about the significance of African-American women's activism abroad. That being said, I do have an example of how Terrell influenced the position of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, also known as WILPF, on an international debate in which race and white womanhood was at the center. Following the end of World War I, an international scandal erupted in Germany regarding the stationing of French African troops in occupied Germany's Rhineland territory. Accusations that basically said Black troops were raping German women and spreading venereal diseases. All this gained traction and became a global debate in which the U.S., Great Britain, and other Western industrialized countries began putting pressure on France to remove the French African troops from Germany. The white European and American women within the transnational feminist organization, WILPF, then circulated a petition with the end goal of sending it to the League of Nations to put their ... as a way of putting their support behind the removal of the troops. So, Mary Church Terrell, of course, was asked to sign the petition mainly because she was the only Black woman sitting on the executive board. And of course it would add legitimacy to WILPF's position, but Terrell refused. It had more to do with race than raping German women. She made it clear to her colleagues that Black women are raped in occupied territories all the time and with impunity and there's no outrage. Terrell encouraged her colleagues to look further into the matter. She was pretty resolute that she thinks there's more to this than black troops just freely having their way with German women. So not too long after that, there ... It became clear in Germany and the international community that these were trumped up charges, that these were politically motivated, and there was really not much to them. That's really an example of how Terrell intervened in an international political affair. When it comes to African American women and our understanding of transnationalism, we have to be more creative. We have to get out of these rigid definitions of transnationalism. If anything, Terrell and her ... Ida B. Wells, and Addie Hunton, and other Black women who were on the international scene at the same time, if anything, they remind us that transnationalism isn't simply cross-border dialogue that causes a direct outcome, but it's really a web of various forms of communication through a diverse set of channels. As I mentioned earlier, African American women were not in positions of authority within these transnational feminist organizations. So as an alternative, Terrell published articles on racial violence against Black Americans in foreign newspapers, which then translated and republished and circulated her work in other countries, and so, we had to get to a place where we also see this as transnationalism.

Eleanor Mahoney: Mary Church Terrell and other African American women started their own transnational feminist group in 1920, only a few months after the end of World War I. The organization was to be independent of existing groups that had long been dominated by white women and would put the fight against racism front and center in its actions. As Dr. Callahan Banks explains, the early 1920s was a period of international activism, and, by founding a new organization, African American women seized this unique moment to advance their social and political aims.

Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks: The International Council of Women of the Darker Races, also known as ICWDR, remains a story that really needs to be told. But with such limited sources, scholars have been left with more questions than, honestly, we have answers to. The ICWDR was founded in 1920 by Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie Burroughs, Addie Hunton, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Margaret Murray Washington, Mary Church Terrell, and a few others. I mean, all very prominent, heavy-hitter Black club women. In this post-war era, Black women had a clear understanding that the international arena was important, was an important site for them to advocate where they could advocate their own political agenda. They also understood that their agenda will really never be fully realized, embraced if they only worked with or collaborated with a majority white organization like WILPF, like the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. So, Black feminists of the ICWDR wanted to place the fight against global racism at the center of their activism in the international sphere. One of the initial aims of the organization was to disseminate knowledge about people of color around the world. They saw this as a way to educate African Americans about the accomplishments of Black people worldwide and also as a way to encourage racial pride. They also formed local study groups to learn about the conditions of women of color outside of the US. They also raised funds to build schools in Liberia and Ethiopia. There were also plans for Black women to take a trip to some of these sites and collaborate with women of color on the ground. But, unfortunately, the ICWDR never really realized its fullest potential. Its membership remained small, roughly only 100 members or so, and most of them were African American women. I believe they only held one official conference. So by the early 1940s, the organization had pretty much phased out of existence. But, to make the connection to WILPF, several of the founders of the ICWDR had been members of WILPF. WILPF was established during World War I, and its goals were to obtain suffrage for all women, to replace militarism with pacifism, and to foster a more cross-culture dialogue. Jane Adams, kind of no surprise, but maybe surprising to some, served as the organization's first president. Initially, Black women were not invited to become members, but Jane Adams and other several ... or and other white progressives really pushed for the recruitment of appropriate Black women, meaning those who had similar backgrounds as themselves, who were high profile political public figures who could meet the financial demands of the organization, so being able to attend meetings, women who did not maybe solely depend on themselves to support themselves financially, but who had husbands that were doing fairly well. Mary Church Terrell, Addie Hunton, and other well-off Black club women were some of the first recruits, I would say, into the organization. But, there were tensions from the beginning. There were white women who left WILPF when they learned that there were Black members. Black women did not hold leadership positions within the national chapters of the organizations. A really good example of how efforts to add a racial justice platform was rejected was at the WILPF conference meeting in Zurich, Switzerland in 1919 where Terrell was invited to give a lecture. When she shared her desire to speak out on the mistreatment of black American troops during the war, and she also advocated to put forth a resolution for WILPF to take a public stand on racial justice, her white American colleagues were not supportive. In fact, long-time suffragist Emily Greene Balch went so far as to go behind Terrell's back and ask the translators to alter Terrell's speech by removing language about race issues in the United States. Terrell was miffed, to put it politely, when she found out. But in the end, Terrell was able to deliver her original lecture in German and French, just like she had in Berlin in 1904 at the International Council of Women's conference because the translator misunderstood Emily Greene Balch's directions and never made the changes. So, Terrell's resolution on race prejudice was accepted and adopted by the organization. I know at one point in the late 1920s there was talk to form an interracial committee, I believe is what they called it, to focus on race issues, but that concept was quickly abandoned as white WILPFers wanted to control that committee and Black WILPFers were not having it. WILPF's black members really suffered over the decades because they did not want to add racial justice onto the platform in a very meaningful way. Just like the black club women, just like they had done decades prior, black feminist transnationalists recognized that they would need to establish an organization by black women for black women, hence the ICWDR.

Eleanor Mahoney: The incredible life and work of Mary Church Terrell demonstrates the possibilities and the limits of transnational feminism in the decades before and after ratification of the 19th Amendment. Born in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, to parents who had been enslaved, Terrell would go on to become an educator, civil rights activist, lecturer, and writer, published in newspapers and journals around the world. She led the National Association of Colored Women and was a leading advocate for women’s rights in the United States and globally. On both sides of the Atlantic, she spoke out in favor of racial justice and gender equality. She connected the fight for women’s voting rights to the ongoing struggle for African American civil and political rights, during a period of intense racial violence and Jim Crow segregation. Yet, all too often, white women’s organizations, like the National American Women's Suffrage Association and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, attempted to silence Terrell and other Black women. As a result, Black women formed their own local, national, and international groups, creating a vibrant movement that represented their needs and voices. Dr. Callahan Bank’s research demonstrates the significance and reach of this work, revealing the international scope of Black women’s activism at the turn of the 20th century. In the next episode of Ballot Blocked, we’ll go further inside the mainstream suffrage movement and explore the limitations of a leadership that repeatedly sought to exclude women of color.

This episode examines the transnational activism of African American women at the turn of the 20th century. Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks discusses the life and work of Mary Church Terrell. An educator, writer, civil rights advocate, and suffragist, Terrell worked to advance the causes of racial justice and gender equality in the United States and around the world.

June 11, 2021

Ballot Blocked Episode 1: Service, Sacrifice, and Citizenship

Transcript

Eleanor Mahoney: Hello and welcome to Ballot Blocked, a history of women's fight to access the vote. I’m Eleanor Mahoney. In this six-part series, we talk to historians and scholars to learn about women’s path to the ballot, from the period of the Civil War, through the women’s suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the 2020 election. It’s a story of courage and perseverance, of disappointments and hard-won victories. Some of the people you will hear about are well-known, their names on monuments and memorials. Others may have received less recognition, but their achievements are no less impressive.

The history of women’s voting rights isn’t a progressive or linear narrative. Passing legislation is only one step along the way to the ballot box. The laws have to be enforced and that takes more organizing and more struggle. New barriers to voting access are still being created today. One hundred years after the 19th amendment barred states from denying the vote based on sex, the fight for social, economic, and political equality continues. Ballot Blocked explores how we got here and asks where we might be going next when it comes to voting rights.

This episode takes us to the 1860s and the period of the Civil War. The nineteenth amendment would not be ratified for another half century, but a lack of voting rights didn’t stop women from being active in civic and political life. In Philadelphia, for example, free African American women played a critical role in supporting the Union Army.

To learn more about this wartime service, I spoke with Dr. Holly Pinheiro. He is a professor at Augusta University in the Department of History, Anthropology, and Philosophy. His forthcoming book, The Families’ Civil War, is under contract with the University of Georgia Press.

Dr. Pinheiro’s scholarship is focused on free African Americans living in Pennsylvania between about 1850 and 1930. It examines the toll that enlistment in the Union Army took on soldiers and their families. His work also highlights the ways that Black women supported their enlisted husbands, sons, and relatives.

Many of the soldiers whose lives Dr. Pinheiro explored were based at Camp William Penn in Philadelphia. They were among the more than 180,000 Black men who served with the United States Colored Troops or USCT during the Civil War. The camp was the largest USCT site in the country and about 11,000 soldiers trained there between 1863 and 1865.

At a time when African Americans could not legally claim full citizenship, including the right to vote, enlistment served as a powerful rejoinder. An assertion of belonging by Black families to a nation that had long denied their humanity. But this decision came with significant risk for not only the soldiers themselves, but for their families and their descendants as well. As Dr. Pinheiro documents in his research, military service has effects that last for generations. Understanding these impacts is personal for him. His work is inspired by his own mother’s military service and his experience growing up in a military family.

Holly Pinheiro: My project is in a roundabout way, my story. My mother served for 25 years. I was raised overseas. My mother served in combat, and this is pre-accessibility of the internet. So, when she would be deployed for six to eight months, I had to watch the news like everyone else, and I'd see a bombing or whatever, and just wonder is my mom coming home because I know she's stationed in some of these locations. That fear, that anger that I had in my mother for what I, as a child, that she would leave us, the anger that I had towards the military and the government. Just because I would always get really annoyed with how people talk about, these events soldiering, and thank you for your service, but, they are not, I always felt, that they're not taking the time to think about what it meant to me, to my grandmother, to my brother and to our community, as we're the ones who are having to literally deal with all these different emotions and feelings.

I think that without question, I'm trying to connect to these individuals that I study to try to take off the glorification of the war and make it more real. If we just take out the tactics, and that's not that tactics aren't important, but what does it mean to an individual's family, right? Even the decision to enlist is going to have unintended, longstanding, in many cases, damaging consequences for a family. What does it mean when they get the notification that someone has passed? What does it mean if this person comes back disabled in any form? What does it mean as we have the concerted attempt to erase the sacrifices of African Americans from the war effort, all these different emotions? I'm trying to basically apply it to what these individuals experienced.

Eleanor Mahoney: Dr. Pinheiro’s scholarship calls attention to the stories of poor and working-class Black women who supported their enlisted family members during the Civil War. These women provided crucial support for life at Camp William Penn. Some got jobs in the camp laundry; others worked nearby to remain close to relatives. They were afraid it might be the last chance they would see their loved ones alive, and they wanted to get as much time with them as possible. This wartime service gave Black women an opportunity to participate in public civic life during a turning point in U.S. history, as Dr. Pinheiro explains.

Holly Pinheiro: So, for me, women are very critical to the Civil War, they're very critical in these records, and I wanted to put them at the forefront of this story rather than focus on what does it mean to fight at this battle? For me, it's more, what does it mean for these women, these children, who are hearing the news or dealing with the loss of life?

These Black women are going to the military camp to watch their relatives train or to say goodbye potentially for the last time, and they're putting their bodies into physical harm. To me, it was like these powerful stories about Black women, long before they're being seen as federal or state citizens, are demanding to be part of the nation, demanding that their families are recognized for their sacrifices.

Black women, particularly in the North, were always visible at USCT camps and not necessarily those directly related to the men or boys that are getting ready to serve. These are people within the community, in the case of Philadelphia that have ties to the African Methodist Episcopal church, the AME church, for example, some of them actually are school teachers, and there are these very important prominent people with ties to the Underground Railroad. They're seeing that the United States military and federal government is not giving these soldiers proper medical care, right? In some cases, if you look at New York, they're sleeping on dirt. They don't have a stove to cook. They don't have clean water. They can't take baths with warm water in the wintertime. So, it's the Black community, and particularly Black women, are basically going to the camps and informally taking the responsibility that the government should be doing as these men prepare to sacrifice their lives. And we need to recognize that because for so long the scholarship has focused on the prominent role that white women play, if we talk about the Sanitation Commission, for example, but Black women are finding their own ways to involve themselves and make themselves visible on these military spaces.

And I think to me, that's a demonstration of their empowerment. I would also argue that they are agitating for a new, of what some called cultural citizenship. So, rather than looking at the right to vote, they're saying that they belong to the United States in this case because of their actions and their sacrifices and their support. So, trying to expand the term citizenship to recognize those who don't have rights to vote.

And the most fascinating thing that I do briefly talk about in the book is, a number of African Americans will actually get married on Camp William Penn's grounds. It's recorded in the Christian Recorder, which is a Black newspaper tied to the AME church. That is really fascinating since these are spaces meant for national patriotic training and all this, and yet Black communities will make those spaces to continue to define their families in the context of the nation.

Eleanor Mahoney: The meaning of citizenship was bitterly contested in 1860s America. After the Civil War ended, Congress passed a series of laws that promoted civil and political rights for African Americans. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 stated that anyone born in the United States was a U.S. citizen, with certain rights such as the ability to make contracts, own property, and sue in court. It also stated these rights could not be denied based on race. The 14th Amendment likewise formalized the principle of birthright citizenship and forbade states from denying citizens equal protection under the law. Notably, Indigenous peoples were excluded from these bills and most would not be considered citizens until 1924.

Almost immediately, state and local governments across the country acted to curtail these new rights. But, Dr. Pinheiro says, it is important to recognize that through their wartime service, as well as other acts, like paying taxes, Black men and women had long been carrying out the duties of citizenship - even though they continued to face discrimination and violence.

Holly Pinheiro: Many Americans of all races don't have a clear understanding prior to the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, of what the definition of a citizen is. In many cases, even when they use the term, it's going to be more at the state level. Unfortunately, there are many, numerous States that will add in the male, and also white layer, to those state policies that will limit citizenship to white men, and usually that's native born. Though there were some places, like in New York, where they would have what was known as the Property Qualification law. So, a Black man who had over $250 in property in theory could vote, but that was such a small proportion of the population, which also brings in a layer of financial issues. What many scholars, and I would say I'm in that conversation, are doing, is saying Black men are citizens, and actually in Pennsylvania, they're paying state taxes, they're paying city taxes, and I always bring this up to my students because we talk about unpacking, "What is a citizen?" Paying your taxes essentially is a component of that, which most people don't like. So, in many ways, Black Pennsylvanians are already doing this element. Once they enlist in the war and sign a contract with the United States government and then put on the uniform and serve, they're also doing the duty of a citizen. So, it's like even before they go and get these later federal policies, they're doing what a citizen is supposed to do, but due to racial discrimination, it's being barred from them.

Eleanor Mahoney: What makes someone a citizen? As Dr. Pinheiro’s research demonstrates, the answer isn’t as straightforward as we might think. Even though they could not vote, Black women asserted their citizenship in many ways before and after the Civil War. They paid taxes, brought lawsuits, formed clubs, and ran mutual aid societies. In New York City, for example, the abolitionist Julia Williams Garnet started the Ladies’ Committee of New York to support the USCT during the Civil War. Her choice of the name “Ladies’ Committee” was deliberate. The distinction of being a “lady” was almost always reserved for upper-class white women. By using that term, Black women, like Williams Garnet, were demanding recognition for their contributions to social welfare during wartime. Yet, despite their achievements, organizations like the Ladies Committee of New York struggled for respect within a system that devalued the labor of Black women, while celebrating white women for the same work. Dr. Pinheiro explains more:

Holly Pinheiro: So, for example, in New York state, the Union League Club, the women connected to that organization, which still exists by the way, the wives who were all white and daughters and all that, they will raise the money and actually present to the 20th United States Colored Infantry, their regimental flag, which happened seven months after the New York city draft riots, which is depicted in, Gangs in New York, but they are not allowed to speak. It's actually going to be only the president of Columbia College, who is going to speak on their behalf. That is really, there's so much to unpack there, but actually in Pennsylvania, at least in the case of one or two of the regiments, Black women are going to be the ones who raised the money and are there to support the bestowing of this flag, well, actually there was two, to the regiment.

To me, that's just really interesting because it's another example of Black women doing what white women are doing during the Civil War era. The soldiers and the colonels, for example, they look at these flags as symbols of statehood, of national patriotism, of the sacrifices and support of the home front. So, one could make an argument that these flags represent Black and white women's demands and continued support for the war, but also a call to their citizenship to be recognized.

Many of the demands that these women are going to make with the suffrage movement, and then, once they have the right to vote, and then obviously the racial discrimination layer that will come with it, Black women, white women, women of all colors, are going to have what we call cultural citizenship elements, and they're going to look to the societal changes in many cases directly connected to major conflicts, and I mean like military. There is, without question, connections. I think, maybe again, someone in a future project doing a research study that looks at Spanish-American Cuban Filipino War, or even World War One, and the influence that it might have had on the suffrage movement. I would guess that there are some connections there, because I do see it in the Civil War era and post era.

Eleanor Mahoney: One-way Black women challenged their treatment during the civil war was through the legal system. They filed lawsuits to desegregate Philadelphia streetcars in the 1860s; historian Judith Giesberg writes about their activism in a book called Army at Home. Many of the women used public transit to travel to and from Camp William Penn, and the streetcars became a vital link to the military regiments stationed in the city. By going to court, Dr. Pinheiro says, Black women asserted their place in society and fashioned their own definitions of citizenship.

Holly Pinheiro: Black women are going to bring up many civil suits, essentially where they're agitating for the desegregation of streetcars in Philadelphia. And most of these women will have ties or are supporting the USCT regiments that are training. So, they're actually going to use, and that's a great connection too is, the citizenship that Black men are demonstrating as soldiers, to also with these legal cases in which they're supporting Black men's national sacrifices. So, even them bringing up a case and multiple suits, they're also doing something that should be limited to a citizen of the state. So, Black women are finding very inventive and important ways to push the conversation of, "What does it mean to be a citizen, and what does it mean to be a lady," because I think that's also important is the race and gender components of that since many in Northern society are not going to look at what these Black women are doing as respectable, even though it's critical to the war effort. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, I believe calls it like, this Antebellum and warts Civil War era sit-ins. Right? So, we can help honestly push this conversation even earlier, if we talk about the long Civil Rights era. Like what they're doing in many ways does connect to what individuals much later will do.

Eleanor Mahoney: This Civil War era activism and service carried directly into the demands for voting rights that Black men and women would make after the war. Dr. Pinheiro says Black Americans saw their wartime contributions as an investment in their citizenship, and they expected this sacrifice to be recognized.

Holly Pinheiro: One could argue that, without the service, the support of the families that many of the calls that are going to be made for suffrage rights, and the demands to equalized society, they're connected, right? For example, the Iowa 60th, a United States Colored Infantry, those Black soldiers will make demands for the right to vote because of their service.

There are many, what are called colored conventions, they're going to happen immediately after the Civil War nationwide. There's actually an edited volume on that, in which they're going to say, "We as Black men," and then it will evolve to include Black women, all have earned this right because of the Civil War and what these individuals have sacrificed.

Eleanor Mahoney: When it comes to the story of voting rights, there is no guarantee that access to the ballot will expand over time. In the decades before the Civil War, for example, many state legislatures in the North and West of the United States repealed laws that had granted suffrage to African American men. In Pennsylvania, for example, a new state constitution ratified in the 1830s, restricted the franchise to white free men only - a change that African Americans in the state vigorously protested.

As soon as they could, tens of thousands of Black men enlisted in the Union Army, with the support of their family members. By serving in the USCT, and by aiding soldiers at sites like Camp William Penn in Philadelphia, Black men and women made a powerful claim to full citizenship through their sacrifice, rebutting the racism that animated laws like the Pennsylvania constitution. The revolution of Reconstruction would, in fact, witness a tremendous expansion in the franchise, but the gains would be short-lived. Across the county, white Americans could take violent action to curtail these newly won civil and political rights, with Black codes, vigilantism, and Jim Crow all serving to restrict voting once again.

In the next episode, we’ll hear about an African American woman, Mary Church Terrell, who was born during the Civil War but grew up in a different world than the women of Camp William Penn. She fought for racial justice and for women’s rights around the world and challenged the white-led hierarchy of the women’s suffrage movement. Ballot Blocked is produced and hosted by me, Eleanor Mahoney. Dr. Sylvea Hollis conducted research and interviews and helped plan this podcast. Drew Himmelstein is our producer and editor. Our music is by Podington Bear. This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part through a grant from the National Park Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This episode explores the service and sacrifice of Northern African American families during the Civil War. Dr. Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. discusses the toll that enlistment took on soldiers, their relatives, and the broader community in and around Camp William Penn in Philadelphia. He also highlights how a lack of voting rights did not stop African American women from asserting their civil and political rights before, during, and after the Civil War.

Contact Us

Episodes

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Tags