How White Suffragists Excluded Black Women In Their Fight For The Right To Vote

In this June 1920 file photo, Chairwoman Alice Paul, second from left, and officers of the National Woman’s Party hold a banner with a Susan B. Anthony quote in front of the NWP headquarters in Washington.

Associated Press file

One hundred years ago on Aug. 18, three-quarters of the states voted in favor of giving women — selectively white women — the right to vote, and the 19th Amendment was formally added to the Constitution.

But that was no thanks to Georgia, which was the first state to reject it.

In the years after the Civil War and Reconstruction, Georgia’s white political elite used all means to keep a movement tied to the North, and abolitionism, from taking shape. The women’s suffrage movement that took off more than 70 years earlier in Seneca Falls, New York, historically excluded the efforts of Black women.