Chapter 6

LIFTING AS WE CLIMB

Black women’s politics did not start in a women’s movement. But when it was time for them to organize independently, the principles were already understood. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), boasted in 1895: “Our woman’s movement is woman’s in that it is led and directed by women.” Not to be confused with organizations driven by a single interest or exclusive in its goals, she noted what made her organization stand out: It was “for the good of women and men, for the benefit of all humanity.” The NACW would build upon the years Black women had spent in antislavery societies, churches, and civil rights organizations: “We want [and] we ask the active interest of our men, and, too, we are not drawing the color line; we are women, American women, as intensely interested in all that pertains to us as such as all other American women.” The women of the NACW would not, however, take a back seat to anyone: “We are not alienating or withdrawing, we are only coming to the front, willing to join any others in the same work and cordially inviting and welcoming any others to join us.” Who might accept their invitation, Ruffin did not speculate. Only time would tell.¹

THE 1890S DEMANDED nothing less than visionary leadership. Times were tough for reformers who bore witness as Jim Crow thinking became enshrined in law and policy. The US Supreme Court gave its decisive stamp of approval to this view when it decided Plessy v. Ferguson in 1897. Separate was equal in the court’s eyes. Women’s suffrage work went ahead haltingly. It won small victories in the West, but the movement was stalled. In 1875, the US Supreme Court concluded in the case of Minor v. Happersett that the Constitution did not guarantee to women, or any American, a right to vote. The Senate refused to put forth a women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution in 1887.²

In the last gasp of the nineteenth century, the nation’s future became wedded to white supremacy. Congress and the US Supreme Court lent succor and legitimacy to the countless Southern officials who ran roughshod over the rights and the lives of Black Americans. Often termed the nadir or the low point of American race relations, it was a period during which Reconstruction was turned upside down, like a feed sack, and all that had been built was scattered to the winds. Black Americans gathered the bits of Reconstruction that they could—their schools and churches—and held fast to them. Segregation was the order of the day, and it was far more than custom or personal preference. It was a way of life, in public and in private, and authorized by law. It broadcast how one race, a Black one, was subordinate to the other, white.³

Jim Crow was more than separation. Violence was its central pillar and it took public, ritual form in the practice of lynching. Kidnappings, torture, and barbaric killings were the hallmarks of this brutal brand of terrorism. Lynching was also spectacle, crowd-pleasing demonstrations of the absolute power of white over Black performed in front of dozens and even hundreds who gathered to gawk, encourage, and even grab a souvenir photo or artifact, including parts of a now dead victim’s person. The state played its own role in these gruesome scenes. Local officials turned away, juries declined to convict, and even postmasters permitted the mail to extend the reach of lynching by circulating graphic images on postcards. The fate of any one victim scarred their family, friends, neighbors, and the entirety of Black America, as news reports warned of the worst that white supremacy was capable of.⁴

Lawmakers and mobs alike rendered the polls off limits to Black men. Not only did federal courts decline to protect their voting rights, they approved state laws that disqualified many Black Americans as voters. Local officials also worked their angle, letting discretion determine who was administered which literacy or understanding test, and then who passed. They combed voters’ rolls, using discrepancies of names, addresses, or residency to strike Black men in anticipation of Election Day. They imposed grandfather clauses—meaning that a voter would have to prove that their ancestors had voted before 1867—knowing full well that no descendant of enslaved people could affirm their fathers had cast ballots before the Civil War. Poll taxes sat uncollected until a Black citizen had cleared all the other obstacles. Then, more like a fine than a reasonable demand for a tax, sums that had accumulated over many years were presented like a bill, the payment of which became one more hurdle to casting a ballot. Black voting rates plummeted, and few white Americans thought much of it.⁵

Black politics took a civil rights turn that mobilized political savvy, journalistic bite, probing research, and mass membership to challenge Jim Crow. The early organizations, such as the National Afro-American Council and the National Afro-American League, drew together leaders from education, religion, and politics to hone a critique and to strategize. By 1909, what had begun in 1905 as the Niagara Movement took hold, producing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading civil rights organization of the twentieth century, known best for its long legal campaign against Jim Crow. Its founders included men such as W. E. B. DuBois and Archibald Grimké in partnership with Black women, including Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell. It was impossible to position such women as mere helpmeets. That time had passed. Terrell was the nation’s most prominent Black suffragist, and Wells was unequivocally a brilliant journalist and the country’s most effective antilynching advocate, bar none.⁶

Women’s suffrage associations had struggled enough that leaders regrouped. The two parallel organizations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and committed to a campaign that would work state by state to win American women access to the polls. Some western states permitted women to vote, deeming suffrage an asset to state building in territories that still looked to attract white residents. Elsewhere, women voted in local elections. Still, most American women remained disenfranchised by state law.⁷

Black women referred to the years after 1890 as “the women’s era.” Although the idea was in no way ironic, it was remarkable how at the very moment that Jim Crow’s proponents purged Black men from much of public life, Black women were firming up their place in political culture. At the center of this turn was the founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). It built upon benevolent networks that stretched back at least as far as the Civil War, a long view that let Black women see what troubled the nation and fueled its inequalities. By founding an independent organization, the new pavestones on their road to political power were laid.⁸

The NACW spearheaded the conventions, newsletters, and personal connections that knit together Black women—led mostly by middle-class women but including many working women active in their local clubs and associations. The leadership bore shared characteristics: descended from slaves, educated at Oberlin or a historically black college or university (HBCU), elocution training or a talent for public speaking, and a belief that Black women would work in the interests of all humanity. At its inception, the NACW joined together nearly two hundred local clubs from across the country—North, South, West, and Midwest—under its umbrella. Incorporated as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1905, by 1924, its membership totaled nearly a hundred thousand women.⁹

Clubwomen were of many hues, but all had to develop a thick skin. Jabs born of racism and sexism were the ordinary taxes they paid as they sought alliances and influence and built new hubs of power. Not unlike preaching women before them, clubwomen endured the indignities and dangers of travel aboard streetcars, trains, and ships. Their view of suffrage reflected clubwomen’s histories and the political insight this accorded them. If neither Black churches nor the NAACP could contain them, neither could NAWSA or the later National Women’s Party. Though they became increasingly independent, the women of the NACW did not abandon the struggles of Black men. Experience had taught them not to divide themselves between womanhood and Blackness.¹⁰

THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION of Colored Women gathered under the motto “Lifting as we climb.” This philosophy brought thousands of Black women into politics and aimed to bring on board thousands more. Clubwomen were on the rise, and they intended to reach a hand out to pull all Black women up with them. Club work drew women beyond familiar settings like the schoolhouse and church, and their leadership consolidated at a national level. Their motto also admitted that the politics of the clubs was premised on inequalities in a metaphor that posited some women above others, and some women in need of help and others in a position to provide it.¹¹

James Jacks, then president of the Missouri Press Association, galvanized clubwomen when he publicly ridiculed Ida B. Wells and her antilynching campaign and then impugned all Black women, branding them prostitutes, thieves, and liars. Jacks’s words ignited a “pressing… need of our banding together if only for our protection.” The NACW was more than an emergency response. Its first president, Mary Church Terrell, in her speech “The Progress of Colored Women,” explained how Black women’s politics grew out of a history that they shared, in part, with white women: “Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony began that agitation” while millions of Black women remained enslaved, she explained. Black women had, however, come to create their own political organization “not because we are narrow and wish to lay special status upon the color of the skin.… But we refer to the fact that this is our association of colored woman, because our peculiar status in this country seems to demand that we stand by our selves.” Their needs and their ambitions could not be met elsewhere: “It was thought best to invite the attention of the world to the fact that colored women, as a unit realize their responsibility.” First, they had to combat the “false characterization and salacious slanders [that] are circulated against us every day, both in the press and by the direct descendants of those who in years past were responsible for the moral degradations of their female slaves.” In politics, Black women put themselves first, while also working for the interests of all humanity. The rising tides of Jim Crow demanded nothing less.¹²

Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954)

GETTY IMAGES

Terrell never hid her support for women’s voting rights. She made clear her commitment to winning the ballot even when it put her at odds with other leaders. Terrell organized a distinct constituency, a national network of Black women to combat lynching, secure civil rights, and even work toward the vote. She and her husband shared a partnership of mutual cooperation and equality, an industrious partnership in which they were matched in ambition and savvy. Terrell never shied away from alliances with white women, especially when it suited her aims, and she traveled nationally and internationally in circles where she was often the only woman of color. She held public office, used her status to develop working relationships with members of Congress, and knew how to exploit them to her advantage.¹³

The belief that she was the equal of any—including white women, and men of all colors—ran deep in Terrell, and it had been instilled in her at an early age. She was a child of privilege, born in Tennessee to parents once enslaved who gave their daughter a cosmopolitan upbringing filled with travel, clothing, and ideas. At Oberlin College, where Anna Julia Cooper was her classmate, Terrell had taken the more demanding “gentleman’s” course and thrived among students—Black and white, men and women—who, when they mingled, challenged conventions. As a student and later as an activist, Terrell traversed the United Kingdom and Europe, sometimes alone, where her mastery of languages, deft diplomacy, and an unflappable sureness won her many admirers. It wasn’t always clear where Terrell’s sense of confidence ended and her sense of superiority began. She was an elite, a woman of what W. E. B. DuBois termed the African American “talented tenth,” who spoke earnestly for all women and still, sometimes, talked down to those who were “ignorant and poor.”¹⁴

Washington, DC, was the place to be for a young woman of Terrell’s experience and ambition; the city fueled her talent for politics. She arrived in 1890, taking a post in the Latin Department at the city’s fabled M. Street High School, where she came to know Robert Terrell, who would soon graduate from Howard University School of Law. When the two married in 1891, Terrell was already working as an activist and public speaker. When in 1892 Terrell was a speaker at the esteemed Bethel Literary and Historical Society, she was one of only two women among luminaries such as newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune, US Supreme Court justice John M. Harlan, and minister Alexander Crummell. When her turn at the podium arrived, Terrell spoke of the subject that no one else dared broach: “The Ethics of Woman Suffrage.”¹⁵

Terrell saw the problems of “race” and “sex” as intertwined, part of one great concern for humanity. She did not privilege the so-called rights of women over the rights of Black Americans. Her women’s cause included the battle against lynching, for example. In 1893 at a Washington, DC, antilynching meeting, with Frederick Douglass presiding, Terrell introduced Ida B. Wells. The two women had known one another as friends from when they had shared time in Memphis, Tennessee. Terrell condemned what she termed “Southern Mob Rule” and lauded Wells “for her undaunted courage [and] zeal.” Going forward, Terrell would follow Wells’s lead and join a circle of activists who pressed Congress to act against lynching when state officials refused to do so. She accompanied Wells, Frederick Douglass, and others in urging the US Senate Judiciary Committee to hear them on the “lawless outrages” that “denied [Black Americans] the ordinary means of establishing their innocence by due process of law.” The two women would maintain a long, though strained, alliance through their shared commitments.¹⁶

Terrell amassed a set of distinctions along the way. She became a household name among Black Americans. And she was a “first” when, in 1895, the DC board of commissioners appointed her to the Board of Trustees of Education for the District of Columbia. There, she pressed for innovations in early childhood education. That same year, Terrell was among those who launched an early civil rights organization, the National Afro-American Council. She would go on to be elected vice president of the council’s District of Columbia branch and later direct its national antilynching bureau. As a writer, Terrell’s words won her followers among readers of the Colored American and the Black Methodist’s A.M.E. Church Review; she also reached white audiences in the Washington Post and the North American Review. She was a powerhouse.

Each spring, Terrell was a commencement speaker—one sign of her national reputation. She gave these addresses at institutions that included North Carolina Agricultural and Mechanical College; the Normal School at Albany, Georgia; Georgia State Industrial College; Livingstone College; the State College at Savannah; the Agricultural and Normal School at Covington; and scores of high schools. Terrell took part in the eighth of W. E. B. DuBois’s Atlanta Conferences of Negro Problems, giving a presentation titled “The Negro Woman and the Church.” And in 1909, she attended the inaugural meeting of the NAACP, joining its board of directors, along with Carrie W. Clifford—they were two Black women helping to launch the newest civil rights organization. When in 1912 the women of Washington celebrated Terrell, a local paper dubbed her “the peerless queen of the platform, for her valiant and effective services in behalf of humanity, her race and sex.”¹⁷

Terrell stood out and oftentimes stood alone when it came to women’s suffrage. It was a risky subject for a middle-class woman who practiced the politics of respectability. Stumping for women’s votes might have undercut Terrell’s reputation as a paragon of Victorian comportment and sensibilities. At least this was the case in the eyes of editors at the Colored American. When Terrell spoke at Washington’s Second Baptist Church Lyceum on suffrage, the paper felt the need to reassure readers: “Mrs. Terrell sacrifices not one iota of her womanly graciousness and her charming and stately attractiveness is not diminished one degree by the position she takes on this vital question.” Her ability to express provocative ideas in conventional terms enabled Terrell to draw men to her way of thinking. After her remarks, the paper reported, the “discussion grew so interesting that when the time was all gone, President Thompson announced that a continuation would be granted at an early day [and] Mrs. Terrell was given an ovation.” Terrell changed minds that weren’t always open at the start of her remarks.¹⁸

Terrell’s commitment to women’s voting rights also earned her warm regard, and even outright affection. In a light-hearted Christmas Day feature in the Indianapolis Freeman, the editors printed a list of “Desirable Presents for Well-Known People.” In Terrell’s case, they imagined a gift suited specially to her: “A woman suffrage bill passed by Congress.” It was a festive way of acknowledging how deep Terrell’s women’s suffrage commitments ran. The same editors made sure that Black women were not left in the movement’s shadows. They observed, in 1912, that white women were engaged in a bit of political theater and “making up cabinets which they would like to have constructed to advise the President.” The Freeman’s editors published their own African American slate and they nominated Mary Church Terrell for Secretary of the Interior. It was a flight of fancy that also revealed how Terrell inspired innovative thinking about Black women in politics.¹⁹

Racism ran through organizations like the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), but Terrell never avoided the suffrage circles organized by white women. She publicly expressed admiration for Elizabeth Cady Stanton and especially Susan Anthony and explained that her own work for women’s voting rights was part of a broad tradition of women’s activism that had begun with women abolitionists and had consolidated in 1848 at Seneca Falls. Terrell did not dwell long on the problems of marginalization or exclusion that plagued the Black women in these organizations. Instead, she focused on promoting the insights and interests of Black women as equally important in the past and the present.

Terrell maintained a strategic distance, however, and her engagements with NAWSA’s leaders often looked like ritual performances rather than deep collaborations. When the year 1898 marked fifty years since the women’s meeting at Seneca Falls, New York, the anniversary gave Terrell a platform. She attended that year’s NAWSA convention, and when her turn came, Terrell didn’t just speak—she flipped the script. The year was a “double jubilee,” she reminded her audience, and marked not only the anniversary of Seneca Falls. That same year marked three decades since ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment and “the emancipation of my race.” The title of her talk, “The Justice of Woman Suffrage,” called out the injustices that tainted suffrage work. Still, Terrell managed to keep her connections with white suffragists. In 1902, she represented the white-led Equal Suffrage Association at the Washington, DC, meeting of NAWSA. There, Terrell was welcomed and then elected a “life member” of the association.²⁰

Terrell’s work took her to Europe in 1904, where, in Berlin, she addressed the World’s Conference of Women in a speech called “The Progress of the Colored Women in the United States.” In many ways, this was a pinnacle of her early career. Still, her most important work in this period was with the National Association of Colored Women. Through their local clubs, Black women responded as Jim Crow drew their families, communities, and reputations as women into racism’s fray. In 1896, Terrell’s leadership had brokered a consolidation of Black women’s clubs. It was a triumph of diplomacy and a model of leadership in troubled times.²¹

Though she led, Terrell did not always drive the NACW’s agenda and in the earliest years her commitment to women’s votes was relegated to the margins. After two terms as president, Terrell stepped away from the helm and was then free to openly press voting rights onto the NACW agenda. Women like Terrell and Rosetta Lawson, an education and church activist, urged clubwomen to take seriously winning the vote, “the pioneer force for woman’s emancipation and progress.” Local clubs mirrored this view, such as in the Women’s Improvement Club of Louisville, Kentucky, where suffrage was among the topics debated at regular meetings.²²

The NACW was slow to respond. The change finally came about thanks to the persistence of women like Adella Hunt Logan, an instructor at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Logan made a full-throated plea for the NACW to join the white-led National Council of Women of the United States. The move would be a “gainer” for the NACW, bringing Black women’s politics closer to white-led organizations like the NAWSA: “Wonders have been wrought for humanity in general and woman in particular, by that grand band of women, under the leadership of the sainted Lucretia Mott, scholarly Lucy Stone, the sweet poetess, Julia Ward Howe, the brilliant Elizabeth Cady Stanton and… every woman’s champion and friend, dear Susan B. Anthony.” Logan’s thinking was tempered by the realization that gaining political rights as women could not take Black women the full distance to equality. Racism would persist: “I do not claim that woman suffrage will set the whole catalogue of wrongs right. I do see that it is one thing that will go a great way toward removing injustice and oppression.”²³

Some within the NACW determined to keep their organization at a distance from the suffrage movement, especially its most radical factions. In 1906, Margaret Murray Washington, president of the NACW and wife of Tuskegee Institute’s president Booker T. Washington, explained that Black women’s politics were distinct from those of white women: “The Anglo-Saxon woman has found her status in the affairs of men and state by the effort of the pioneer women who worked and fought for woman’s suffrage. The colored woman of the race has found her status in the home by the earnest labor of women of the race who, for the past ten years have been making a way,—raising standards for motherhood and home.” Washington promoted Black women’s right to be mothers and homemakers. This remained a valued privilege for women living just one generation from slavery. Murray was determined to defend the homes of NACW women from the indignities that their mothers and grandmothers had endured. This meant keeping Black women at a distance from radical suffrage politics.²⁴

Washington challenged the efforts of women like Terrell, who inserted voting rights into the midst of NACW proceedings. Earlier in the same year, 1906, Terrell had taken the floor during the NACW convention just long enough to introduce a resolution in honor of Susan B. Anthony, who had died some months before. It was a heartfelt tribute to someone for whom Terrell had sincere affection. It was also a subtle effort to rally other clubwomen to Terrell’s way of thinking about suffrage politics. By 1908, Terrell and other Black suffragists won a decisive victory when the NACW established a “woman suffrage department.”²⁵

Still, the distance between Black women’s clubs and the white-led suffrage movement grew in these years. Terrell was often all alone when she attended NAWSA events. For her, keeping alive the memories of how Black and white suffrage advocates had once been allies had a symbolic value. In 1908, when the sixtieth anniversary of Seneca Falls came around, Terrell made a pilgrimage to that place as part of a group assembled to re-create the original gathering. Terrell had been invited to stand in for the late Frederick Douglass, who had been the sole Black American to go on the record in the 1848 women’s convention. There was no small irony in how it had taken six decades for a Black woman to finally take part in the proceedings at Seneca Falls. Still, Terrell, who had been mentored by Douglass, was honored by this passing of the mantle to her, as an individual and as a suffragist.²⁶

Terrell was increasingly on the offensive when it came to women and the vote. She continued to present “The Justice of Woman Suffrage” to audiences, but by 1912 her remarks reflected a new impatience with those Black Americans—men and women—who spoke against women’s votes. She may have had Margaret Murray Washington in mind: “It is difficult to believe that any individual in the United States with one drop of African blood in his veins can oppose woman’s suffrage. It is queer and curious enough to hear an intelligent colored woman argue against granting suffrage to her sex, but for woman’s suffrage is the preposterous and ridiculous thing in the world.” Terrell’s primary targets were, however, Black men who stood for equal rights only until women claimed them, and she ridiculed them: “What could be more absurd than to see one group of human beings who are denied the rights which they are trying to secure for themselves working to prevent another group from obtaining the same rights?” She pointed out the parallels between voting rights for women and for men: “For very arguments that are advanced against granting the right of suffrage to women are offered by those who have disfranchised colored men.” Critics of women’s votes engaged in hypocrisy: “If I were a colored man, and were unfortunate enough not to grasp the absurdity of opposing suffrage because of the sex of a human being, I should at least be consistent enough never to raise my voice against those who have disfranchised my brothers and myself on account of race.”²⁷

Washington remained at odds with Terrell into the next decade. When news reached Washington that Alice Paul and the NAWSA were planning a 1913 women’s march in Washington, DC, she did not remain silent for long. Washington lobbed another volley in an old debate with Terrell and others in the NACW. Marching in the streets, in Washington’s view, was beyond the bounds of a clubwoman’s correct comportment: “Our attitude toward the suffrage is the conservative kind. We have not blown any houses with dynamite nor have we been engaged in parading the streets in men’s attire.” She would not march for women’s suffrage, and Washington hoped that other women would follow her lead. She was not indifferent to the question, however. Black women prepared for the likelihood that the polls would open to them: “Of one thing I am certain, we are reading and studying the great questions which are to make for the good of the country, and when the vote is given to women as it surely will be… we shall be ready to cast our votes intelligently.” Both sides of the debate agreed that once they won the vote, Black women would use it. They differed on how to get there.

MARY CHURCH TERRELL was on the lecture circuit as Alice Paul and the NAWSA’s Congressional Committee wrapped up their plans for a Washington, DC, suffrage parade in March 1913. Even in the last days, Terrell did not let on about whether she would attend. She spoke to the students of Wellesley College, just outside of Boston, on Wednesday evening, February 26. The next day, a Thursday, she had two events, back to back. In the afternoon, Terrell appeared at the Academy of Music and delivered “The Emancipation Proclamation and the Development of Christian Womanhood in the South” for the Brooklyn Institute for Arts and Sciences. She had just enough time for a quick meal before at eight joining proceedings at Brooklyn’s Concord Baptist Church of Christ, where the North East Federation of Women’s Clubs and its Department for Suppression of Lynching held a “large demonstration.” The following afternoon, Friday, Terrell spoke to the New York Women’s Missionary Society.²⁸

Busy as she was, Terrell headed back to Washington. But it was more than the women’s march that drew her there. Up ahead, she could see a political minefield. The time from 1913 to 1914 would test her political skills: Mississippi’s senator-elect James K. Vardaman would soon arrive in Washington, riding on a campaign promise to repeal the Fifteenth Amendment. A new president, Woodrow Wilson, was moving into the White House and no one could predict his position on Black officeholders such as Terrell’s husband, Judge Robert Terrell, of the Municipal Court of the District of Columbia. Terrell’s pursuit of the vote was intensified by these challenges, ones that went to the well-being of Black men as well as women.²⁹

The prospect of a parade tapped into Terrell’s attraction to political theater. In African American politics, parades had a long history, starting with mid-eighteenth-century festivals, including Pinkster, a derivation of the Dutch holiday of Pentecost, and Negro Election Day, during which Black militias engaged in public drills. With the 1808 abolition of the international slave trade came a new set of public processions, marking a step forward in the overall movement to end human bondage. August 1, also known as West Indian Emancipation Day, honored the liberation of enslaved people in the British Empire. By the end of the Civil War, Black men and women punctuated major victories with parades, such as in 1870 when, in Baltimore, there was a national celebration of the Fifteenth Amendment. In many cities, the Fourth of July was an occasion for marches that filled city streets.³⁰

Still, Paul’s 1913 parade—planned and peopled by women—was something new. And the prospect of Black women participating unsettled the organizers. The NAWSA had long worked by way of a dirty compromise with white supremacy that put the interests of Southern white women above those of Black women, no matter where in the country they were from. Paul later recalled that she had deployed an organizer to encourage the “college woman” at Howard University to attend the parade, and she settled the matter of precisely where they would march by assigning them to the “college section,” adjacent to a delegation of men, and where Paul herself would march. Objections to the Black women’s participation poured in, and Paul nearly balked.³¹

The parade was tainted by the ambivalence that surrounded the prospect of Black women marchers. Terrell’s NACW collaborator Carrie Clifford noted that the local suffrage committee had been “reluctant” to encourage Black women to join in. Black suffragists faced “conflicting rumors” that “disheartened many” who had good reason to stay away. NACW president Margaret Murray Washington worried that Black women would be discredited if they marched. They risked unsexing themselves by joining an event that she likened to civil unrest. Julius Taylor, editor of the Broad Ax, a Chicago weekly, mocked the women as unattractive, disorganized, and generally without a purpose.³²

In the few days she had between lectures in New York, Terrell headed back to Washington. She made her way to the parade that morning along with dozens of Black women who shared education, vocations, and middle-class circles of philanthropy and sociability. There was Clifford, a poet and Terrell’s ally in the NACW, the NAACP, and antilynching work. Sculptor May Howard Jackson, whose husband taught in the city’s local schools, appeared. Director of the Washington Conservatory of Music Harriet Gibbs Marshall and Howard University–trained pharmacists and drug store owners Dr. Amanda Gray and Dr. Eva Ross joined the parade. There was a contingent of so-called college women that included Oberlin College graduate and advocate for early childhood education Anna Evans Murray, M. Street School French instructor Georgia Simpson, and Smith College graduate Harriet Shadd. Howard University students—sorority members—joined the procession decked out in caps and gowns. At least three Black women marched with their state delegations, a Mrs. McCoy with Michigan, a Mrs. Duffield with New York, and Ida B. Wells with Illinois: “Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, proudly marched with the head officials or with the head Ladies of the Illinois delegation showing that no Color line existed in any part of the first national parade of the noble women who are in favor of equal suffrage.” After much strife within the Illinois delegation, Wells marched alongside the state’s white women and ended the day satisfied with their joint presence.³³

Some concluded their thinking about the march by sweeping the tensions under the rug. Looking back, Julius Taylor at the Broad Ax judged that racism had been kept at bay during the 1913 march: “No color line existed in any part of it. Afro-American women proudly marched right by the side of the white sisters.” Black women warranted special credit, in Taylor’s assessment. They had been present and, perhaps despite his fears, they “were accorded every courtesy and did nothing to reflect discredit on the race.” It was an odd assessment given how much strife Black women had faced in the weeks before the march.³⁴

Black men also had a role to play that day, especially when violence descended upon the marchers. Thousands of spectators confronted the five thousand women paraders, and the scene devolved into a near riot. The city police were charged with maintaining order, but while the crowd jeered at, spit upon, and assaulted the women, officers left the them to fend for themselves. Everyone acknowledged a small group of heroes: African American police officers who stepped between the mob and the marchers. Elizabeth Balloch, a government stenographer and suffragist marcher, explained: “I observed the efforts of a colored policeman, which I thought were quite conspicuous.… As I went along I noticed the policemen, as a rule, stood quietly. There was very little said or done. But the only efforts really actively made, as I happened to notice, were by this colored policeman.”³⁵

For Black Washingtonians, there was irony in the stories marchers later told about the efforts of Black officers during a Senate hearing. Committee members learned what Black women already knew: the presence of Black officers on the city’s streets enhanced women’s safety during parades and on any given day. Despite this, their appointments had fallen off in recent years, leading Black activists to call out city administrators who failed to make new appointments and promote rank-and-file officers. When Black men left their posts, white police replaced them, and when they arrested white suspects, Black officers risked being brought “up on charges” by Southern senators. The presence of Black officers on Washington’s streets was a civil rights matter, a special concern for Black women who could not travel far without “being insulted by white men.” Their safety and, it turned out, the safety of white suffragists depended upon it.³⁶

Terrell hardly had time to catch her breath after the women’s parade before she confronted the prospect of Black men losing federal protection for their voting rights. On his way to Washington was Mississippi’s newest senator, James Vardaman, the state’s former governor. Black news outlets did not avoid Vardaman’s arrival, or its implications. The Democrat had been elected on a platform built almost exclusively on the promise that he would bring about the political death of African American men. His state had already gone a long way toward this end by using its authority over voter registration and the polls to exclude Black men from election days. As a newly elected member of Congress, Vardaman proposed to take disfranchisement to the national level and called on federal lawmakers to repeal the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and wipe away federal provisions for equal protection, due process, and voting rights. He aimed to stop the “Black peril.”³⁷

Vardaman’s views had a history. As governor of Mississippi, he had, as far back as 1904, urged his party to repeal the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Failing to persuade, Vardaman put the idea in his “pocket and returned to his home in Mississippi, at the same time vowing that at no distant date he would be elected [to the] US Senate and would introduce the same resolution and deliver the speech of his life against the Colored Race.” With the start of the Sixty-Third Congress in March 1913, Vardaman’s moment had arrived. And he had fellow travelers, Southern senators who promoted anti-Black legislation when exercising their power over the District of Columbia. Senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia, for example, had recently introduced a bill to prohibit the “intermarriage of Whites with Negroes and Mongolians, etc., in the district.”³⁸

African Americans disagreed about how to regard Vardaman’s threat. Some were sure that the new senator was little more than a man who had bamboozled white voters into thinking he could fulfill their dreams of unbridled white supremacy. From this perspective, Black Americans had so many friends and allies in Congress that Vardaman, although a distraction, was little more than that. Editors of the Washington Bee mocked the senator: “Vardaman stands as much chance of receiving a serious hearing on the ‘issue’ he represents as he would were he attempting to bring about the abrogation of the Declaration of Independence.”³⁹

Others were less sure. They counseled caution as Vardaman took his seat in the Senate chamber. He was not a lone radical white supremacist in Congress. Instead, Vardaman was part of a faction committed to building consensus around repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, even if it was an uphill battle. St. Louis lawyer Walter M. Farmer spoke to Black activists at the Bethel Literary Society about men like Vardaman: “I owe no apology for calling these men the leading statesmen of the country. For no one will deny that these men have more influence in forcing their views of the Negro on the American people and on the world for that matter, than all the other statesmen North, West and East combined. The pendulum seems to have swung back, and it looks as if liberty was about to suffer defeat.”⁴⁰

It’s not clear that suffragists saw it coming when, in March 1914, Vardaman stepped into the debate over a women’s suffrage amendment. For months, the Senate had been back and forth over whether to put forward a new voting rights amendment to the Constitution. Those exchanges had always been influenced by fears that, if the law guaranteed women the vote, Black women might be enfranchised, strengthening the influence of African Americans and the Republican Party. When the issues stalled, Vardaman was among those who pressed forward with a compromise: the repeal of Black voting rights in exchange for women’s suffrage. It was classic political horse trading and a crude attempt to exploit anti-Black racism to further white women’s political empowerment. Vardaman promised that even Southerners, long known to be indifferent, if not hostile, to women’s voting, could be brought on board in support of the so-called Anthony Amendment if it would win them unbridled white supremacy without federal interference. Vardaman was no feminist; he was not even a suffragist. But he was a dealmaker, and the prospect that he might carry the day set off alarms for women like Terrell.⁴¹

Rather than repeal the Fifteenth Amendment, Vardaman proposed that Congress enact an end run around it. He took the floor of the Senate on March 5, 1914, to promote the amendment drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton nearly forty years earlier. Yes, he conceded, the Constitution should provide that “the right of citizens of the United States shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” To these words, he added a new clause: “but in all other respects the right of citizens to vote shall be controlled by the state wherein they reside.” There was no question as to Vardaman’s purpose. With this addendum, he aimed to empower the individual states to disenfranchise Black voters by whatever means they chose. Directly at odds with the Fifteenth Amendment and the rights of Black voters, Vardaman invited the Senate to join in a dirty alliance with those advocates of women’s suffrage who had long been willing to sacrifice Black women’s political power.⁴²

Suffragists filled the Senate galleries during the debate, and at least one commentator was sure he could detect their astonishment when Vardaman proposed that women’s votes might win at the expense of Black men. Vardaman had supporters and they were not limited to Southern representatives. Idaho senator William Borah took the floor in a twisted promotion of the Anthony Amendment. He advocated for women’s votes, but then “declared it was impracticable and impossible to obtain through constitutional amendment so long as the fifteenth amendment remained unrepealed.” Suffragists had “loaded themselves down with the color question, the Japanese question and a dozen other States’ rights problems.” Borah was an ally to white suffragists, and he was prepared to do business with Vardaman and “vote for the repeal of the fifteenth amendment, if only by so doing could equal suffrage be obtained.” Vardaman chimed in: The Fifteenth Amendment had been “a blunder.… Time has not shown the colored man’s capacity to participate in government or to rule the white man. While he has made some improvement, he is today as incompetent and unreliable as fifty years ago.”⁴³

Two weeks passed before a final vote and on that day Vardaman failed. He was, he told the Senate and the women who filled its galleries, planting a seed, staking a claim, and otherwise making one small step toward the political evisceration of Black men. At Vardaman’s flank was his fellow senator from Mississippi, John Sharp Williams, who at the last moment proposed his own addendum to the women’s suffrage amendment: the word white. That, too, failed. Still, when the clerk tallied the yeas and nays, “nineteen members of the United States Senate—all Democrats—voted to repeal the Fifteenth Amendment… and at the same time forty eight Senators—31 Republican, 15 Democrats, and 2 Progressives voted against the repeal of said amendment.” It was a correct but hardly reassuring outcome for Black Americans.⁴⁴

Black women had not missed one episode in this political drama. Its ins and outs revealed where Black men and women stood in political culture. Maggie Lena Walker—publisher of the St. Luke Herald and founder of the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia—let the facts speak for themselves: “This is interesting reading, and will doubtless cause some of us to stop and think a little while, if only for a moment. Our two U.S. Senators, Martin and Swanson voted to repeal the 15th Amendment.” Walker placed a great deal of confidence in the view that if Black women built their economic power, they would control the destinies of their families and communities. Still, she knew that any attack on voting rights also did not bode well for Black women’s political futures.⁴⁵

Teacher and social worker Cecilia de Nellottz saw a bit more promise in Vardaman’s defeat and doubled-down on the view that women’s full political rights were in reach: “The voting strength of the world is about to be doubled and the new element is absolutely an unknown quantity. Does any one question that this is the most important political fact that the modern world has ever faced?” She put men like Vardaman on notice that Black women not only intended to vote but when they did they would use the ballot for their own ends: “The modern thinking, planning, self-governing woman came into a world which is losing faith in the commercial ideal and endeavoring to substitute in its place a social ideal. She became one with a nation which is weary of wars and hatreds, impatient with greed and privilege, sickened of poverty, disease and social injustice.” The concerns of all humanity, an agenda pioneered by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Anna Julia Cooper, showed de Nellottz the way forward: “What will women do with their votes? The answer is simple: They will do with their votes precisely what they do, or try to do, without their votes.… The Woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or sink together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free. If she be small, slight-natured, miserable, how shall men grow?”⁴⁶

Mary Church Terrell remained uncharacteristically quiet during the critical days when Vardaman’s amendment was pending. There is, however, little doubt that she paid attention to every twist and turn of the Anthony Amendment—from its emergence from a Senate committee to its defeat by a floor vote. Why was the ordinarily forthright Terrell so circumspect? Her household was being hit by Vardaman’s direct fire. Terrell’s husband, Judge Robert Terrell, and his future had been caught up in the Mississippi senator’s efforts to quash Black political power. Vardaman not only opposed Black voting—he also objected to office holding and aimed to use his power in the Senate to defeat Robert Terrell’s reappointment to the bench. The Terrells together worked their connections to save Robert’s career. While Vardaman was blustering in the Senate chamber, Mary Church Terrell went to work behind the scenes.

The Terrells had good reason to worry. Vardaman aspired to influence the new Wilson administration. The president and Southern senators had already clashed over the appointment of a Black American during summer 1913 when Adam Patterson was proposed as register of the US Treasury. Patterson, a Democrat, had been recommended by Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma and was Wilson’s first African American nominee for a presidential appointment. Vardaman and his allies pounced. They were indifferent to Patterson’s record as a Democratic Party loyalist and, some said, even an accommodationist on race relations. In a matter of days, support for his confirmation failed to materialize and Patterson withdrew. Wilson let it happen. The president was susceptible, if not sympathetic, to the color line that Vardaman sought to impose on federal office holding. Those commenters who had deemed Vardaman impotent had egg on their faces.⁴⁷

Thus, when Vardaman aimed to put Robert Terrell off the bench, it was one part of a broader campaign to purge federal offices of Black men. That winter, Vardaman broadcast his plan to put forward a series of bills “the ultimate effect of which would be to expel Negroes from all government positions.… Holding of office is the symbol of sovereignty and the Negroes must not exercise sovereignty.” Vardaman went public with his opposition to Terrell and preemptively “served notice on the President that he will oppose the appointment.” Wilson was undeterred and, over Vardaman’s objections, he moved to reappoint the judge, sending his name to the Senate for confirmation. This, of course, left Robert Terrell vulnerable to the senators who aimed to defeat him.⁴⁸

Mary Church Terrell later recalled that she had “suffered much more than [her] husband” in this period. This she attributed in part to their differing personalities. Judge Terrell was “an optimist from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet,” while she confessed to being sent to the “depths of despair.” Terrell watched as Vardaman promoted an analogy between her husband and a fictional rapist. She witnessed a cruel caricature portray the judge as more animal than human. Privately she raged. But publicly Terrell composed herself and headed off to lobby men she had come to know through her work on education, women’s suffrage, and lynching: “I would sometime go to the Senate and talk with the Senators who, I was sure, believed in a square deal. Without exception, they always received me cordially and pledged me their support.”⁴⁹

Terrell understood there were ties that might transcend the color line when it came to the judge’s appointment. Her letter to Ohio senator Theodore Burton sheds light on how Terrell worked in Washington—building on commonalities and connections. Burton was, she knew, like her, an Oberlin graduate. In her letter to him, she put the judge’s plight and her own despair on full display. Burton had an opportunity to oppose racism’s arbitrary capacity to unseat a deserving professional and crush his spirit. The judge was an innocent, and still his case turned on a “great principle”: opposition to the view promoted by Vardaman that African Americans “no matter how able, worthy or successful… shall receive no recognition [and] shall be driven from any position of honor or trust.” Terrell also appealed for the assistance of “newspaper men,” especially those for whom she had done “favors” by giving information.⁵⁰

The Terrells quietly declared victory at the end of March 1914. As one headline put it: “Vardaman Gets a Very Rude Jolt. U.S. Senate Refuses to Regard His Anti-Negro Measures Seriously. Terrell to Be Confirmed… No Fifteenth Amendment Repeal.” The Mississippi senator had been bested in a yearlong contest in which suffrage, civil rights, and the future of Terrell’s family had all been violently tossed about. Terrell remained a deeply committed suffragist throughout. But the demands on her time and her politics extended well beyond any one cause. Terrell belonged to a world that demanded her politics be as multifaceted and nimble as they were ambitious.⁵¹

THE POLITICS OF clubwomen like Terrell were often hard edged—they lived at the podium, in newspaper columns, at congressional hearings, and in politicians’ back rooms. At the same time, they operated within a world of Black women’s history, enveloped in a cloak of decades-long movements. Clubwomen adopted naming practices that tell another story, one of how they derived from the women who came before them inspiration, strength, and sureness of purpose. Clubwomen gathered under the auspices of luminaries who had preceded them, an atmosphere that went beyond the podium or the pen.

For example, among the hundreds of clubs that affiliated with the NACW were the Sojourner Truth Club in Montgomery, Alabama; the St. Joseph, Missouri, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper League; and in St. Louis, the Phillis Wheatley Club. Pittsburg and Alleghany, Pennsylvania, combined, were home to the Frances Ellen Watkins Harper League, whereas Nashville, Tennessee, named its club for Phillis Wheatley. Adrian, Michigan, dedicated its club to Anna Murray Douglass, the wife of Frederick Douglass. Battle Creek, Michigan, her one-time home, named its club for Sojourner Truth. Fort Worth, Texas, was home to the Phillis Wheatley Club. Jacksonville, Florida, named its club the Phillis Wheatley Chautauqua Circle, and New Bedford, Massachusetts, deemed Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin its namesake. In February 1905, Terrell spoke to the Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Literary and Social Circle in Savannah, Georgia.⁵²

Into the twentieth century, a crop of clubs named for Terrell herself flourished across the country: in St. Louis, Missouri; Albany, New York; Des Moines, Iowa; Los Angeles, California; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; New Orleans, Louisiana; Natchez, Mississippi; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Nashville, Tennessee; Oakland, California; Marshall, Texas; Camden, New Jersey; and Akron, Ohio. These gestures were grand, weaving Terrell—her ideas and her activism—forever into Black women’s political culture. She understood the impulse. Years before, Terrell had named her youngest daughter for the great eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley, ensuring that the young woman knew her place in the world was linked to the tradition of Black women’s firsts. When her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral debuted in 1773, Wheatley had been the first Black woman poet to be published. Their political history was written in the names Black women gave themselves and one another.