“Scared from the Polls”: Boston African American Women, Disenfranchisement, and the 1920 Massachusetts Legislative Elections

In December 1920, two defeated African American Republican candidates of Roxbury, Massachusetts, publicly announced their intention to challenge the election of two white Democrats in Ward 13 of Suffolk county. They suspected members of the Democratic party of having written letters to African American women of the ward, warning them that they were “illegally registered, and that [they] would be liable to punishment if [they] voted.” This accusation of discrimination in an election, on the basis of race and gender, challenged a long-held, if problematic, image and reputation of Boston as a abolitionist haven. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Bostonians worked to maintain and perpetuate the image of racial openness built on the abolitionist legacy. The Republican representatives hoped to garner the support of black voters by working to secure voting rights and personal security for African American citizens federally. Democrat leaders worked to gain the support of African American voters by trying to prevent the establishment of a strong Ku Klux Klan front in Massachusetts.Contrasting these political campaigns, the Massachusetts anti-suffragists and suffragists left the racial discourse aside to focus on "unbiased" concepts of class and gender. For this reason, these 1920s challenges to black women's voting rights seemed uncharacteristic and illiberal of the city and its white inhabitants, who composed nearly 97% of the city's population.This presentation will study the ramifications of the newly unveiled voting discrimination within the context of the elections, the attempts of the defeated candidates to challenge the election of the Democratic candidates, and the conclusions drawn by the legislative committee convened to investigate the circumstances of this turn of events. It will focus the discourse and pragmatic reasons which urged the Democratic party to “disqualify” Roxbury African American women's voting rights.