Strange Fruit at the Ballot Box: Tracing the Roots of Black Disenfranchisement
Introduction
Alice Walker’s womanism, as both an ethical framework and epistemology, provides a salient lens for examining the suffrage movement in the United States and its legacy of racial exclusion. By foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of African American women, a womanist approach reveals the deficiencies within the mainstream White feminist movement while underscoring voting rights as an ongoing site of inequality. This analysis interweaves the womanist concept of intersectionality with critical race theory to interrogate the multivalent operations of systemic racism that have continually suppressed Black political participation across history.
The Mythology of White Suffragists
Mainstream suffrage history propagating myths of courageous White heroines obscures the foundational contributions of African American women and their communities. Ida B. Wells, journalist and anti-lynching crusader, fervently organized for Black women’s enfranchisement amid pervasive indifference from White suffragettes. Her contemporary Anna Julia Cooper, distinguished Black feminist scholar, delivered searing critiques of the exclusionary tenets binding White women together, arguing that “the White women of this country need to be lifted from their White supremacy.” Their insight on the indivisibility of race and gender foreshadowed Kimberlé Crenshaw’s seminal scholarship on intersectionality.
The Violence Undergirding Disenfranchisement
This nation’s lengthy record of obstructionism continues to undermine Black voters’ rights, seen recently in the 2021 raft of voter suppression laws enacted after record turnouts in 2020. The 2013 Supreme Court ruling neutering the 1965 Voting Rights Act enabled such legislation to proliferate once more. Thus the seeds sown by Jim Crow poll taxes and literacy tests yield the latest bitter crop curtailing voting accessibility for communities of color. This unbroken chain manifests how White supremacy adapts to each era’s conditions to sustain its dominion.
The Complicity of White Suffragists
In her groundbreaking text “Ar'n't I a Woman?", historian Deborah Gray White documents the myriad ways in which White suffragists and White women writ large actively participated in the disenfranchisement of African Americans. She spotlights the frequent relocation of polling stations to areas inaccessible to Black voters. Moreover, White reveals how Black men embraced their hard-won vote as a “family vote” to uplift their entire community – an orientation aligning with womanist principles. Yet White women suffragists remained mute to the rampant suppression and violence sabotaging Black ballots across the Jim Crow South, indicative of their investment in White supremacy trumping any professed belief in universal equality.
The Façade of Sisterhood
The quest for woman suffrage forged tenuous alliances across racial boundaries at times. However, the incessant torrent of anti-Black terrorism – lynchings, arson, massacres – during the nadir of race relations following Reconstruction provoked little outrage from White suffragists. Such silence speaks volumes, unveiling the façade of interracial sisterhood. The ultimate granting of women’s suffrage failed to slow the acceleration of policies curbing Black voting rights. This history casts doubts upon using electoral politics as the primary vehicle for actualizing racial justice or gender justice.
Conclusion: Womanism as Praxis
Ida B. Wells proclaimed that “the way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” In lifting suppressed narratives to light, womanism functions as revelatory practice and liberatory praxis—the unity of reflection and action. The suffrage movement’s complex ramifications illustrate why an intersectional, womanist lens stays vital for exposing ongoing threats to political participation as well as charting the unfinished route to genuine universal enfranchisement. Please see the enclosed “Untold Stories of Black Women in the Suffrage Movement” for additional insights. We would love to hear your thoughts.
The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2024
Resources
Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: an Introduction, Second Edition, JSTOR, 2012
White, Deborah Gray, Ar′n′t I a Woman? Rev: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, W.W. Norton & Co., 1999