How Black women have continued the fight to vote 100 years after suffrage

A century after the 19th Amendment was ratified, Black women are still on the forefront of voting rights and access in America.

By P.R. Lockhart

      The 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which barred states from considering a voter’s sex in determining eligibility, is commonly credited with expanding the right to vote to women, but the amendment didn’t actually guarantee all women the right to vote. Although the amendment, which was ratified 100 years ago Tuesday, eased the obstacles some women faced at the ballot box, Black women still faced legal barriers.

“For Black women, our right to vote is only secured with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” said Valethia Watkins, an associate professor of Africana studies at Howard University. “Black women have only had the legal protected vote for half the time of some other women.”

The centennial, coming the same year as the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment — the amendment that granted Black men the right to vote — marks just one of several major anniversaries in America’s complex voting rights history. But to Watkins and other Black women, the high-profile nature of this particular anniversary also serves as a reminder of the ways the suffrage movement fell short for women of color, many of whom found themselves facing discrimination from the very women alongside whom they were hoping to secure rights.

Inside the Black suffrage movement

The anniversary also comes the same year in which Black women are running for office in record numbers, Black organizers continue to protest and demand racial justice across the country and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., is making a historic run for vice president. The fight of Black suffragists stands as a reminder of how Black women’s fight for the ballot has been and continues to be about a more fundamental issue: access to political power.

Black women have only recently begun to receive credit and mainstream attention for their outsize political and voting power, and their work within the suffrage movement and the broader fight for Black voting rights is a part of history that has often gone unrecognized. While history recalls contributions of women suffragists