Evette Dionne - Lifting as We Climb: Black Womens Battle for the Ballot Box

On November 8, 2016, it seemed inevitable that America would finally elect its first woman president. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a former lawyer, first lady, senator, and secretary of state, seemed like a shoo-in for commander in chief. It was the first time that Americans would be able to cast a ballot for a female president on the ticket of a major political party, so many women around the United States were buzzing with excitement. I was one of those women. I was living in New York City at the time, and working as a senior news editor at a website for women. Everywhere, the atmosphere was thick with anticipation; women who didnt know each other smiled as we boarded the subway, passed by each other at voting locations, and thought about the history unrolling in real time. Wed one day be able to tell the young people in our livesour children, our nieces and nephews, our little cousinsabout the day that a woman first became president of the United States. Happiness vibrated through the air, almost as if we could reach out and touch it.

On that second Tuesday in November, thousands of women traveled to Rochester, New York, to visit the grave of the prominent suffragist Susan B. Anthony, who fought for sixty years to help women gain the right to vote. Visitors plastered I Voted stickers on her grave. Many of them wore white clothing, the color associated with suffragists, to honor their foremothers who lobbied, marched, and made sacrifices to ensure that women in the United States could vote without any obstacles.

Susan B. Anthony died fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, was ratified on August 26, 1920. And yet, some women saw Hillary Clintons presidential run as a reward for all of Anthonys hard work. Clinton embodied Anthonys dream, not only for women to gain the right to vote, but for women to run for officeand win. On Election Day 2016, Deborah Hughes, the executive director of the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House, said that there were more visitors at her grave than ever before. This is so powerful, Hughes said. Someone asked me if theres ever been a line this longtheres never been a line. There is no doubt that Anthony deserved all that love. However, there were other suffragists whose contributions to the cause were erased and forgotten; their graves were bare on November 8, 2016. Black women also fought, were beaten or jailed, and faced serious, sometimes violent opposition to gain the right to voteeven after 1920. Where were their stickers?

So after Id cast my ballot for president, written and edited stories about the ongoing election, and settled in to watch the results, I began tweeting. I urged people to place I Voted stickers on the graves of Black suffragists like Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Shirley Chisholm, and Fannie Lou Hamer, who have fought for generations, from the end of legal enslavement in the United States to the present day, to help secure voting rights for Black people. Whether it was creating organizations that helped elect Black congresspeople, as Anna Julia Cooper did when she cofounded the Colored Womens League, or running for office, as Chisholm did when she became the first Black woman to be elected to Congress, or encouraging Black people to register to vote during the Civil Rights Movement, as Hamer did, Black women have put themselves in the line of fire over and over again. Yet, when people learn about the long fight for womens suffrage in the United States, its often an incomplete lesson. Students hear about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but not much about Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin or Mary Church Terrell.

To my surprise and delight, several people who follow me on Twitter heeded my suggestion. They traveled to the graves of some of these Black suffragists, put their I Voted stickers on the womens tombstones, and sent me pictures and videos through e-mail and direct messages on social-media sites. Though Clinton lost the 2016 election, it was an important moment for generations of women. It was also an important moment that allowed me to shed light on the work that so many Black women have done for centuries to guarantee that all Americans can exercise their right to vote. But unfortunately, this history is still not taught as often as it should be, and many of us dont know about it until we seek out the knowledge on our own as adults.

Once upon a time, I was a precocious child who read a lot of books and asked a lot of questions. Back then, I was often the only Black child in classes led by white teachers, and we would spend months discussing US history. We learned about the thirteen original colonies, protesters tossing tea into Boston Harbor to oppose Britains tea tax, and the subsequent American Revolutionary War, which resulted in the colonies separating from Great Britain and becoming an independent nation. We read about slavery, abolition, and the Civil War. We heard about great white inventors, including Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, and sometimes, my teachers even snuck in information about people who fought for women to gain the right to vote. Black American history, however, was rarely, if ever, taughtexcept, of course, in February. In the twenty-eight days of that month each year, all my teachersfrom kindergarten through high schoolstumbled over hundreds of years of history, squeezing it all into a truncated timeline that only told the stories of already notable historical figures, like abolitionist Harriet Tubman, inventor George Washington Carver, and Civil Rights Movement activist Martin Luther King Jr. I felt the lack of understanding of my own history; those lessons left me wanting as a child. I wasnt able to fill in all the gaps that those teachers skipped over until I took an African American history course in college.

August 2020 marks the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. More women participated in the effort to win the race for Americas president or vice president in the centennial year than in any other presidential election prior. Its more urgent than ever to ensure that young people know the full history of how they got there: the long and hard battle women fought for the right to vote in the United States. It didnt begin with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, which is considered the first womens rights convention in the United States; it didnt end in 1920; and for women of color in particular, it wasnt just about voting. This is a book about the myriad issues that Black women had to overcome as they fought to secure voting rights, including lynching, sexual violence, segregation, and being ignored or abandoned by white suffragists. It is a battle that still wages on as some states continue to erect barriers that make it difficult for all Black people and other people of color to exercise their voting rights, including laws that require people to present certain forms of ID and pay off fines before being eligible to register or vote.