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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The History You Didn't Learn: Black Women and the Right to Vote [Watch (HLS stream): The History You Didn't Learn: Black Women and the Right to Vote](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/quG5ZZp3.m3u8) (9:13)  _Published 2020-12-08. The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school._ --- Jul 28, 2023 4:06 AM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The History You Didn't Learn: The Black Panthers' Health Programs](/video/28opNCMF/) ### The History You Didn't Learn: The Black Panthers' Health Programs [The History You Didn't Learn: The Lavender Scare](/video/7jWjdOdm/) ### The History You Didn't Learn: The Lavender Scare [The History You Didn't Learn: Latinas in the Labor Movement](/video/Y0oOfDDS/) ### The History You Didn't Learn: Latinas in the Labor Movement --- ## Transcript Kind: captions Language: en-US It's really important that we tell the truth about who contributed to the country that we live in today. That telling only a part of our history telling only a part of our narrative makes it seem as if there are only one group of people. There's only one type of person. We all know that that's not true. When students learn about women's suffrage in school, they often learn about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the so called mothers of the movement. And they are taught that it all started with a meeting in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. Oftentimes, the story of the Seneca Falls meeting is told as a kind of origin story. As the beginning of a movement for women's rights and ultimately, a movement for women's suffrage. And yet, when we realize the meeting is some 300 people, principally white, middle class women in a relatively remote upstate New York village, that is a hint that we probably need to look at some other places to get a fuller story. For Africa American women who had been organizing inside churches and other places since the 20s and 30s, this was not a particularly important moment, nor was it a meeting they would have attended. Nor were the demands that they made particularly germane to the lives of women living under the twin oppressive forces of racism and sexism. Black women are excluded at Seneca Falls, because they're not really invited. Two years later, a much bigger national convention on women's rights takes place. The 1850 meeting in Worcester, Massachusetts... Stanton and Anthony aren't even there. It was the first National Women's Rights meeting. So in some ways, that's really cohering activism that's taking place around the country in a way that Seneca Falls was just a local impromptu convention. One of the women who spoke there was famed abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Sojourner Truth will emerge later in the woman's movement as an important speaker on women's rights. She will also emerge as an abolitionist. By 1850, Sojourner Truth is very much a presence in women's rights circles really shaping the debates, but she didn't begin at Seneca Falls at all. So, with so much activity happening and women's rights in the mid-19th century, why did Seneca Falls, a small meeting with only white woman attending become one of the most talked about in history? Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was at the Seneca Falls meeting and was one of the organizers...and Susan Anthony...well, these two, along with some allies, begin to write the history of women's suffrage. And when they do, not surprisingly, perhaps, they privilege their own experiences and they settle on Seneca Falls as their origin story. Stanton and Anthony are dealing with a world where emancipation is the new reality and many people are saying to women, "Black men's right to vote must happen now," for reasons of free people's safety. And Stanton and Anthony will say "No," "women's suffrage should come first." And they are unusual in the Women's Rights Coalition that they demand this. They're staunchly opposed to Black men voting before white women... In unspeakably racist terms. And "Our movement..." they say repeatedly, "is the most important movement for human rights ever inaugurated." And they're undermining, really, the memory of abolition and the memory of emancipation in that process. It's no surprise then, that in history written by primarily white women, there are many Black voting rights activists we don't learn about. I think the world of Ida B. Wells and her activism... She's a Black woman who owned two newspapers, and she was an anti-lynching activist. And she was a founder of the Alpha Suffrage Club, which is Chicago's first black suffrage organization. While they fought and advocated for the right to vote for all women, they were mistreated within the larger suffrage movement because of their race. The Suffrage March in 1913, when Ida B. Wells showed up with the Illinois delegation and Alice Paul, who was a popular suffragette at the time, instructed them to walk to the back of the crowd. And while many of the Black women who showed up that day did... Ida B. Wells refused. The women who pushed the story of Seneca Falls died before the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920. But, the legacy of excluding Black woman persisted. "Susan B. Anthony and her followers have won, for women, the right to vote." It's easy to think of the story of women's suffrage as a kind of fully emancipatory and celebratory story that's, you know, just necessarily progressive. And in the following November, the ladies appeared at the polls on Election Day by hundreds of thousands. "The emancipation of womanhood in the United States was now complete." The 19th Amendment does not invest anybody with the right to vote. And we don't spend nearly enough time thinking about the language of the amendment, which is really key, saying you may not discriminate in voting on the basis of sex, it does not say women have a right to vote, which actually does not exist. For many white women clearing the obstacle of sex was sufficient to get them voting access. When the 19th amendment is adopted, the open secret is that too many millions of African American women in this country will not be able to vote because the amendment doesn't do anything to override the segregationist laws, the Jim Crow laws in the South, like poll taxes and literacy tests that are going to be imposed on black women, such that they won't be able to vote even after the 19th Amendment. We don't realize the ways in which the white suffrage movement threw women of color under the bus, allowed their continued disenfranchisement to go ahead, allowed their brutalization of their bodies to go ahead, and say nothing. We lose track of the fact that lots of other women are not emancipated in this story. That those women's rights are sacrificed. After 1920, African American women have to look up from the 19th Amendment to not only recognize that they are still disenfranchised, they have to look up to answer the question, "So, how are we going to win a right to vote?" That is the moment for the building of a new movement for voting rights. One that will take Black women and men until 1965, in passage of the Voting Rights Act. So, you don't win the right to vote and then that's just it. Throughout the course of history, for every expansion of voting rights, we have a backlash that seeks to make it more difficult for people to vote. That seeks to shrink the electorate and shrink the number of people that participate in our democracy. One recent and significant backlash happened in 2013 when the Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder removed some of the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even as we celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, activists like Nsé Ufot remind us that voting rights remain threatened in many places. "Georgians have an opportunity to save our democracy." The State of Georgia has closed over 10% of their polling locations. Voting rights advocates have witnessed nearly 2 million people purged from Georgia's voter pool. I'm urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully. Black voters are subject to intimidation. New Americans are subject to intimidation. The 2020 election is the most recent example of the organizing power of Black women, as Ufot and others are being credited with turning Georgia blue for the first time in 28 years. I think that it's harmful that we only learn about white suffragists because it doesn't tell the full story of how we won. And if we're going to be able to fight future oppression, knowing the real story about how our ancestors looked oppression in the face and then defeated it helps us as we build toward the communities that we want to live in. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The History You Didn't Learn: Black Women and the Right to Vote","description":"The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/quG5ZZp3/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2020-12-08T04:56:56.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/quG5ZZp3.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/quG5ZZp3/","duration":"PT9M13S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/quG5ZZp3/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```