Women of color in Arkansas witnessed black men’s achievement of the franchise with the 15th Amendment’s ratification in 1870. Earlier in Reconstruction, northern reformers had discussed whether to push for the voting rights of either all women or of black men. Frederick Douglass publicly debated the question with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Douglass debated in favor of the right to vote for black men, while Anthony and Stanton argued for the franchise for women. Revealing the rift racism created between white and black women suffragists, Stanton notoriously declared that she preferred not to allow “ignorant negroes” to make laws that she must obey without her own voice.
African-American women would continue to be held at arm’s length or excluded altogether from the activities of white women suffragists. African-American women across the nation organized for themselves.
Blocking Progress
The prospect that the franchise for black men would then lead to the vote for black women in Arkansas became bleak, however. Led by white Democrats pushing for election “reform,” the Arkansas General Assembly passed an election law in 1891 that barred much of the African-American electorate from voting. The measure created a de facto literacy test by empowering only appointed election officials to assist illiterate voters in marking their ballots (after clearing all other voters from the polling place). This measure effectively discouraged participation by illiterate voters, as they might suffer embarrassment at the polls or might not be able to trust that their intended selections were made on the ballot. A poll tax requirement followed. Finally, the Democratic Party in Arkansas instituted new primary elections in 1898 and excluded African-Americans from those elections in 1906. Whites looking to prevent African-American men from voting did not stop at legal measures, however, and employed a campaign of violence and intimidation to reduce black turnout at the polls. For African-American families, more barriers to political participation were being created over time, not fewer.
Women's Clubs
African-American women meanwhile worked within the growing club movement to act as politically as possible without access to the formal ballot, even at a time when their men were being denied their constitutional right to vote. Charlotte Stephens, a teacher in Little Rock, for example, served as a founding member of the capital city’s chapter of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1897.
Club life remained an important part of black women’s community activism throughout the Progressive Era, although women of color were barred from participation in white women’s clubs. In fact, African-American women’s political potential became imminent enough that the presence of black women as political actors figured into white men’s opposition to the woman suffrage movement in Arkansas, including fears that African-American women would become a large enough block of the electorate to cancel out or outdo the votes of white women.
According to one state senator from south Arkansas, this unwanted political activity on the part of black women would result in the need for white men to “take the law into their own hands.” Although party primaries in Arkansas opened to women votes in 1917, the restriction against black voters in those elections remained. Despite the opposition that white supremacy represented, however, African-American women stood poised to exercise their right to vote when Arkansas became the twelfth state to ratify the 19th Amendment. This is evidenced by the ability of the Women’s Political League, an organization of African-American women, to mobilize more than 100 African-American women at a time to pay the poll tax in preparation to vote in Pulaski County in 1920.
The passage of the 19th Amendment far from signaled the end of black women’s political challenges. While the amendment removed the major obstruction to the franchise for white women, black women had to continue mobilizing for voting rights. The barriers of the secret ballot, poll tax, and all-white primary continued to suppress the ballots of African-American women in Arkansas for decades.
Kelly Houston Jones, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of history at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. She received her doctorate in history from the University of Arkansas in 2014. Her work appears in the journals Agricultural History and the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, and in the volumes "Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas," edited by John Kirk; "Competing Memories: The Legacy of Arkansas’s Civil War," edited by Mark Christ; and "Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times," edited by Cherisse Jones-Branch and Gary Edwards.