Women of Color and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage

This activity can be used an as introduction to primary sources and photograph analysis, when learning about the women’s suffrage movement, or while discussing the importance of the right to vote. For grades 4-8. Approximate time needed is 30 minutes.

Introduce the activity and photograph to students. You can work as a full class to answer the questions provided, or assign students to complete the activity individually, in pairs, or in small groups.

Lead students through the photograph analysis questions. As with any primary source analysis, ask students to go through the following progression as outlined in the activity:

• Meet the document.
• Observe its parts.
• Try to make sense of it.
• Use it as historical evidence.

When students have answered all of the analysis questions, they should respond to the questions under “When You’re Done”:

• Why do you think women of color were not part of the suffrage parade on March 3, 1913?
• Write two reasons why it is important that all citizens who are 18 and older have the right to vote.

Provide students with the following background information (reinforcing what they read about the photograph during the activity) and conduct a class discussion based on the details they observed in the photograph, their answers to the final questions, and their reactions to this information:

This parade for women’s suffrage took place in Washington, DC, on March 3, 1913, the day before the inauguration of a new president: Woodrow Wilson. More than 5,000 suffragists (people trying to get the right to vote, most of them were women) from around the country paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue, from the U.S. Capitol to the Treasury Building.

 

The national organizers of the parade advised the state contingents that their groups should be “entirely white,” and that Black women were to march at the end of the parade, because they feared that white women wouldn’t march alongside them. Several women of color, including investigative journalist and civil rights leader Ida B. Wells, stepped in with their state contingents despite the directive from the national leaders.

 

After the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 that legally granted women the right to vote, women of color were still often kept from the polls. They faced racial and ethnic discrimination, and were often discouraged from voting through tactics such as poll taxes and literacy tests.