Why the South nearly blocked the Nineteenth Amendment, as one historian tells it

When the Nineteenth Amendment went to the states in 1920, nine of the ten states that refused to ratify, or passed resolutions denouncing it, lay south of the Mason-Dixon line. Only four southern states broke ranks: Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky and Tennessee, whose vote supplied the last state needed. This account summarizes an essay by historian Marjorie J. Spruill, carried by the National Park Service. Her argument is that the region's hostility came largely from race and racism.

An old link between women's rights and abolition

After the Civil War, white southern conservatives wanted first to restore and then to preserve white supremacy in politics, and they knew the women's rights movement had grown out of abolitionism. Two of its earliest voices, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, came from a slaveholding South Carolina family and moved north to oppose slavery. During the war, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton paused their work to petition for the amendment that ended slavery, which tied the two causes together in southern minds further.

Reconstruction deepened the fear. Southern conservatives were enraged by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which they considered an intrusion on a state's right to set voter qualifications, and some later insisted the states had been coerced into accepting them. Suffragists were disturbed by the same amendments for another reason: they protected the voting rights of formerly enslaved men and enfranchised no women. In 1869 the dispute over the Fifteenth Amendment split suffragists into two rival associations. When a federal woman suffrage amendment was introduced in 1878 with similar wording, white southern conservatives again objected that Congress had no business deciding who could vote.

A small movement in the South

A few southern women, Black and white, worked for women's rights in the 1870s, but their groups only strengthened the conservatives' disdain. In Virginia, a woman from New Jersey led a state association that included a notorious Union spy, which undermined Susan B. Anthony's attempt to win over white southerners. In South Carolina, the Black Rollin sisters, who had ties to legislators in the only state with a Black majority, held a women's rights convention and founded a state suffrage group. There was no organized suffrage movement in the region until the 1890s, and its associations were white only.

Public advocacy of Black voting rights, for women or men, was dangerous in the South, so the best-known southern-born Black suffragists worked from the North. Ida B. Wells-Barnett settled in Chicago after a mob destroyed her newspaper office over her exposé of a lynching in Memphis. Mary Church Terrell, a Memphis native living in Washington, D.C., was one of the few Black women invited to speak at national suffrage conferences and became the first president of the National Association of Colored Women. Adella Hunt Logan promoted suffrage at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, though barred from the state suffrage association and from NAWSA conferences held in the South.

Mary Church Terrell. Collections of the Library of Congress.

The failed "southern strategy"

From the 1890s the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) mounted a drive to win the South, with Laura Clay of Kentucky as a key link. It reasoned that, with white women outnumbering Black women in the South, southern politicians could restore white control by enfranchising women instead of disfranchising Black men. It sent recruiters and speakers, and held national conferences in Atlanta and New Orleans from which African Americans were barred. By 1903 most suffragists saw that the plan had failed, since southern politicians found other means, such as literacy tests, poll taxes and "understanding clauses." Later campaigns in the Deep South for a "white women only" amendment to the Mississippi constitution drew a refusal from NAWSA's president, Anna Howard Shaw, who said such actions would contradict the organization's spirit and suggest that suffragists did not believe in justice.

Laura Clay. Collections of the Library of Congress.

1910 to 1920: on the defensive

In the next decade, with most Black men effectively disfranchised, white suffragists had nothing to gain from raising race, and mostly did not. Anti-suffragists raised it constantly. They recalled the movement's ties to abolition, publicized Susan B. Anthony's friendships with Black leaders and circulated statements by NAWSA's president, Carrie Chapman Catt, as supposed proof that she was an enemy of the South. They also pointed to a pro-suffrage resolution of the Black women's clubs, and warned that a federal amendment would reopen the question of Black voting. Suffragists answered that race was irrelevant.

Carrie Chapman Catt. Collections of the Library of Congress.

Most southern suffragists still favored winning the vote state by state. A minority, led by Kate Gordon of New Orleans, rejected the federal amendment altogether and founded a separate southern conference. Most did not follow, and state organizations in Tennessee and Alabama rebuked Gordon. Only Gordon and Clay, among the leading suffragists, ended up opposing the amendment. Most rallied behind Catt's "Winning Plan," even though it treated every southern state as hopeless.

One vote in Tennessee

After Congress sent the amendment to the states in June 1919, southern suffragists fought each other as well as the anti-suffragists. When the final fight came in Tennessee, the governor agreed to call a special session, under pressure from President Woodrow Wilson. The anti-suffragists urged legislators to "save the South" from federal force bills and a new period of Reconstruction. Tennessee ratified on August 18, 1920, by a single vote. Opponents tried parliamentary tricks, pressured members who had voted yes and some left the state to deny a quorum, but Tennessee confirmed its vote, and Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the amendment on August 26 in the early morning, before opponents could seek an injunction.

After ratification

Even then, Spruill notes, the amendment's victory had been wrung from reluctant leaders, as Catt observed. Georgia and Mississippi allowed no women to vote in 1920, refusing to hold the special sessions needed, and Mississippi's all-male electorate rejected woman suffrage in a referendum on election day. Where Black women in the South did try to register, they met the same obstacles used against Black men. They formed voters' leagues and, with the NAACP, gathered evidence of discrimination to bring to Congress, which declined to act. It took 45 more years and a mass movement in which Black women were leaders for Congress to use its power to enforce the Nineteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Sources

• National Park Service, Nemesis: The South and the Nineteenth Amendment, by Marjorie J. Spruill, originally published by the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The author's quotations and bibliography are not reproduced.