Black Women Dominate African-American Higher Education, but Black Men Still Hold a Majority Position in the Study of Physics

This essay reframes both the woman suffrage narrative and narratives of African American voting rights struggles by focusing on the experiences of southern African American women between the 1870s and the 1920s. It argues that the Fifteenth Amendment remained central to their suffrage strategy long after the failure of the “New Departure” to win court sanction caused white suffragists to abandon it. As white supremacists in the South worked at the turn of the century to disfranchise black men, leading African American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Adella Hunt Logan called for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the enfranchisement of black women. After the federal woman suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, many southern African American women encountered the same barriers to voting—obstructionist tactics, threats, and violence—that black men had faced a generation earlier. In short, for aspiring African American voters in the South, the failure of the Nineteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black women constituted a sad sequel to the failure of the Fifteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black men.This interpretation offers three significant interventions. It pairs the Reconstruction-era Amendments with the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing their shared focus on voting rights. It connects the voting rights struggles of southern African Americans across genders and generations. Finally, it finds that, for some women, the canonical “century of struggle” for voting rights continued long after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

Download Full-text

How California's Proposition 209 Created a Crisis in African-American Higher Education

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education ◽

10.2307/25073173 ◽

2005 ◽

pp. 59 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Robert J. Birgeneau

Keyword(s):

Higher Education ◽

African American ◽

Proposition 209 ◽

American Higher Education

Download Full-text

“Latter-Day Slavery”

California History ◽

10.1525/ch.2020.97.4.137 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 97 (4) ◽

pp. 137-143

Author(s):

Susan D. Anderson

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Black Women ◽

African Americans ◽

Political Culture ◽

Black Men ◽

Voting Rights ◽

Women's Suffrage ◽

White Led ◽

Men And Women ◽

Women’S Suffrage

My research highlights little-known aspects of African American participation in the mobilization on behalf of women’s suffrage in California, an issue of vital importance to African Americans. The history of suffrage in the United States is marked by varying degrees of denial of voting rights to African Americans. In California, African Americans were pivotal participants in three major suffrage campaigns. Based on black women’s support for the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted black men the right to vote, black men and women formed a critical political alliance, one in which black men almost universally supported black women’s suffrage. Black women began and continued their activism on behalf of male and female voting rights, not as an extension of white-led suffrage campaigns, but as an expression of African American political culture. African Americans—including black women suffragists—developed their own political culture, in part, to associate with those of similar culture and life experiences, but also because white-led suffrage organizations excluded black members. Black politics in California reflected African Americans’ confidence in black women as political actors and their faith in their own independent efforts to secure the franchise for both black men and women.

Download Full-text

Interracial Activism and African American Higher Education

Schooling Citizens ◽

10.7208/chicago/9780226542515.003.0003 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 44-62

Keyword(s):

Higher Education ◽

African American ◽

American Higher Education

Download Full-text

The Challenge to White Manhood

10.5406/illinois/9780252040054.003.0008 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Stephen Meyer

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Black Women ◽

Black Men ◽

African American Men ◽

White Men ◽

Traditionally White ◽

Workplace Equity ◽

White Manhood ◽

Gain Access

This chapter considers how the increase in numbers of African American men at the workplace brought differing and contentious visions of manhood to the automotive factory. White men, who had long dominated the better jobs, divided into two groups: those who strove for the respectability of high-paid union jobs and those who resented others, fearing the loss of their exclusive white privileges. When black men fought for workplace equity, the more conservative whites conducted racial hate strikes to protect traditionally “white” jobs. In reaction, African American workers conducted what might best be labeled “pride strikes” to gain access to better jobs and later to improve the inequitable situation of black women in the automobile factories. These workplace struggles involved robust clashes over differing visions of manhood.

Download Full-text