How racism almost killed women's right to vote

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

How racism almost killed women’s right to vote

Women’s suffrage required two constitutional amendments, not one.

By Kimberly A. Hamlin
Kimberly A. Hamlin is an NEH Public Scholar and an associate professor of history at Miami University in Ohio. Her biography of suffragist Helen Hamilton Gardener will be published in March 2020.
June 4 at 6:00 AM

Today, senators will assemble in the Capitol to mark the 100th anniversary of congressional passage of the 19th Amendment, which made it illegal to bar citizens from voting on the basis of sex. They will offer moving tributes to pioneering suffragists, speeches that will no doubt be markedly different in tone and content from those that senators delivered on June 3 and 4, 1919, as they were preparing to vote on the Susan B. Anthony Amendment for the third time in nine months. On those days the debate was not about gender. It was about race.

Why? Because, in many ways, the 19th Amendment was a debate about the 15th Amendment, which decreed that a citizen’s right to vote could not be “denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” On a swelteringly hot June day 100 years ago, senators invoked states’ rights, their hatred of the 15th Amendment and their desire to keep African Americans from the polls as reasons to oppose the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.

As we approach the second presidential election after the Shelby Co. v. Holder decision that dismantled a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the law that truly made the 15th and 19th Amendments reality across America — we should reflect on the intertwined histories of these two amendments. Their histories highlight the intersections between race and sex, as well as the promise and failures of our democracy.

-snip-

On June 3, 1919, the Senate began two days of debate on the amendment. Senator Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina expressed the sentiments of the opposition most succinctly when he thundered “the southern man who votes for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment votes to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment.” White leaders like Smith feared that not only would the Susan B. Anthony Amendment enfranchise black women, at least on paper, but that it would also compel the federal government to enforce the 15th Amendment, which it had not done since the end of Reconstruction. Senator Pat Harrison (D-Miss.) even offered an amendment to limit the franchise to white women. Other Senators, such as James Wadsworth (R-New York) and William Borah (R-Idaho), justified their “no” votes by claiming, in part, that the 19th Amendment would make a mockery of Constitution because everyone knew Southern states would void it, just like they had with 15th Amendment, by imposing poll taxes, literacy tests and even violent intimidation.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/04/how-racism-almost-killed-womens-right-vote/

[Dennis Donovan]

1. Borah was Alice Roosevelt Longworth's lover (and father to her child). Both were married...

...to other people at the time. No wonder he took a misogynistic tack.

[appalachiablue]

2. K & R. Always trying to keep everyone down but white males, sigh

> "White leaders like Smith feared that not only would the Susan B. Anthony Amendment enfranchise black women, at least on paper, but that it would also compel the federal government to enforce the 15th Amendment, which it had not done since the end of Reconstruction.
Senator Pat Harrison (D-Miss.) even offered an amendment to limit the franchise to white women. Other Senators, such as James Wadsworth (R-New York) and William Borah (R-Idaho), justified their “no” votes by claiming, in part, that the 19th Amendment would make a mockery of Constitution because everyone knew Southern states would void it, just like they had with 15th Amendment, by imposing poll taxes, literacy tests and even violent intimidation."