Building on work by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and others, this paper explores the failure by the League of Women Voters (the successor organization to NAWSA) and the National Woman’s Party to advocate for disfranchised Black women in the South. Between 1920 and 1929, African American women such as YWCA leader Addie Hunton repeatedly appealed for support through testimonials, reports, and petitions, but the organizations, with few exceptions, either sidestepped their appeals or explicitly declined to help.
The repeated failure of white former suffragists to defend southern Black women’s voting rights after 1920 illuminates the racial tensions of both an earlier generation of suffragists and a later generation of feminists. Descriptions of the racist arguments in favor of woman suffrage articulated by Stanton, Anthony, and others in the 1890s and later as “strategic,” as an unfortunate but temporary concession to powerful forces of white supremacy, must be reassessed given that the disregard for Black voting rights by suffragists continued even after 1920. It also helps to explain the tepid response by many Black feminists to appeals by white feminists to collaborate more closely in the women's liberation movement of the 1960s. Southern Black women had struggled to win white women's backing in their voting rights fights since ratification; no wonder activists of different races forged “separate roads to feminism.”