African-American women's suffrage movement

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African-American women began to agitate for political rights in the 1830s, creating the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and New York Female Anti-Slavery Society.^[1] These interracial groups were radical expressions of women's political ideals, and they led directly to voting rights activism before and after the Civil War.^[2] Throughout the 19th century, African-American women such as Harriet Forten Purvis, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper worked on two fronts simultaneously: reminding African-American men and white women that Black women needed legal rights, especially the right to vote.^[3]

After the Civil War, women's rights activists disagreed about whether to support ratification of the 15th Amendment, which provided voting rights regardless of race, but which did not explicitly enfranchise women. The resulting split in the women's movement marginalized African-American women, who nonetheless continued their suffrage activism.^[4] By the 1890s, the women's suffrage movement had become increasingly racist and exclusionary, and African-American women organized separately through local women's clubs and the National Association of Colored Women.^[5] Women won the vote in dozens of states in the 1910s, and African-American women became a powerful voting block.^[6]

The struggle for the vote did not end with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920,^[5] which expanded voting rights substantially, but did not address the racial terrorism that prevented African Americans in southern states from voting, regardless of sex. Women such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Diane Nash continued the fight for voting rights for all, culminating in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.