Meet the Brave but Overlooked Women of Color Who Fought for the Vote

Meet the Brave but Overlooked Women of Color Who Fought for the Vote

Women of Color who did not get the vote. NYTImes

New York Times artist and journalists tell the stories of lesser-known figures in the battle to make the 19th Amendment a reality.

"It took the better part of a century to pass a law saying American women had the right to vote.

But there were tons more women who helped make suffrage a reality: African-American women such as the writer and orator Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the community organizer Juno Frankie Pierce and the journalists Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Elizabeth Piper Ensley and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who championed both suffrage and civil rights; Native American women such as Susette La Flesche Tibbles and Zitkala-Sa; queer women like the poet Angelina Weld Grimké and the educator Mary Burrill; Latina women like Jovita Idár, who protected her family’s newspaper and the rights of Mexican-Americans; and Asian-American women like Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who led thousands of marchers in a 1912 suffrage parade in New York. They all fought for the vote as part of a broader struggle for equality, but their stories aren’t nearly as well known as they should be."

Click here to read the full story in the NYTimes

Issues: 
Voting rights are under attack.