Frederick Douglass

What were the struggles of African Americans and women to gain the right to vote?

The definition of suffrage to most white men in the 1800’s was simply the right to vote, but to the African American’s and women of this time it was so much more. African Americans and women both struggled to achieve the right to vote. Prior to the Civil War, black abolitionists and white women rights’ activists were strong allies who anticipated that a victory for either cause would be a victory for the other. In 1839, more than 14,000 women signed a petition to the Massachusetts legislature demanding the repeal of laws that discriminated against Blacks and prohibited interracial marriage. Frederick Douglass returned the favor by being a vigorous defender of women’s rights. ‘Right is of no sex,” declared the first issue of his abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, in December 1847. The black abolitionist leader Francies Maria Steward insisted that the struggles for racial and sexual equality were the same. But after the Civil War, in 1866, Republicans proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, penalizing any state that denied suffrage to its male citizens, and in 1868, the Fifteenth Amendment, which forbade states from denying suffrage “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” (http://teacher.scholastic.com/researchtools/researchstarters/women/).

 

States tried to stop blacks from voting. Some of these things were poll taxes; fees were charged at voting booths and were expensive for most blacks, and the literacy test. Since teaching blacks were illegal, most adult blacks were former slaves and illiterate.  Many African Americans died trying to exercise the right to vote. Segregation was supported by the legal system and police.  But beyond the law there was always a threat by terrorist violence.  The Ku Klux Klan murdered thousands of blacks to prevent them from voting and participating in public life (http://www.kawvalley.k12.ks.us/brown_v_board/segregation.htm). Many years’ later women finally gained citizenship. On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising and declaring for the first time that all American women, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. It took activists and reformers nearly 100 years to win that right, and the campaign was not easy. On Election Day in 1920, millions of American women exercised their right to vote for the first time. (http://www.history.com/topics/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage).

Many African American’s and women fought years to get the right to vote. In the 2008 presidential election 16,416,000 African Americans voted. Women have voted in larger numbers than men since 1980. In the 2008 Presidential race, nine million more women than men voted. So, African Americans and women still do exercise their right to vote, but it is nothing like it was for them a hundred years ago.