On August 26, 1920, the amendment was certified and added to the Constitution, granting millions of American women the legal right to vote. And while Black men got the right to vote 50 years before, when the 19th Amendment became law, the right to vote was still left unfulfilled for many Black women. However, they refused to be sidelined. Black women organized, educated, and pushed forward:
📌 Ida B. Wells co‑founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, offering crucial civic education and activist organizing to Black women excluded from mainstream suffrage groups.
📌 Estelle Hall Young founded Baltimore’s Colored Women’s Suffrage Club, launched voter education classes, mobilized through churches, and helped Black women navigate and access the ballot box.
📌 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper co-founded the National Association of Colored Women, which provided a vital platform where Black women advocated for suffrage and racial justice when other organizations excluded them.
📌 Historians like Martha S. Jones remind us that Black women always understood the voting rights struggle as part of a broader fight — one that would stretch from the 19th Amendment through the Civil Rights era and into today.
This legacy is alive today, from Stacey Abrams’ groundbreaking voter registration efforts in Georgia to grassroots organizers across the country who continue to dismantle barriers to the ballot. Let’s honor their legacy by recognizing that the right to vote was hard-fought — and is worth fighting for — every single day.
