National Geographic - USA (2020-08)

prohibit states from denying the franchise to

eligible voters, who were explicitly defined for

the first time as male.

Stanton and Anthony refused to support the

15th Amendment because it removed race but

not sex as a barrier to voting. Turning away

from longtime friends and allies such as Fred-

erick Douglass, Stanton decried granting the

franchise to “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and

Yung Tung” rather than to “women of wealth

and education,” whom everyone understood to

be native-born whites.

Not all white suffragists took that route. Some

saw an opportunity in the 14th Amendment,

which was ratified in 1868 and granted citizen-

ship to “all persons born or naturalized in the

United States.” That included recently freed

slaves. Arguing that citizenship should include

the right to vote, hundreds of women, along with

Anthony, showed up at the polls in the early

1870s, with uneven results. After her arrest for

voting in Rochester, Anthony hoped to take her

case to the Supreme Court, but a technicality

squashed that plan.

Of all the attempts to exercise the franchise,

Virginia Minor’s bid to register to vote in St.

Louis proved to be the most significant. When

she was denied, the Missouri suffrage leader

sued the election official in charge—or rather,

her husband sued him because, as a woman, she

did not have the legal right to do so. Her case,

Minor v. Happersett, made it to the Supreme

Court, where the Minors argued that the state

of Missouri had violated the 14th Amendment

by abridging her privileges as a citizen, which

included the right to vote.

The outcome was devastating. The court ruled

that “the Constitution of the United States does

not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone.”

If suffragists’ interpretation of the amendment

had been a

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THE 15TH AMENDMENT

REMOVED RACE AS A BARRIER

TO VOTING, BUT IT EXPLICITLY

DEFINED VOTERS AS MALE.

SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUMCARL VAN VECHTEN COLLECTION/GETTY IM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE (BANNER); LOC (WAGES (BETHUNE); OMEN’S ARMY LOGO,
ROW HOUSE); STATE ARCHIVES OF FLORIDA (CABIN); NATIONAL ARCHIVES (PHOTOGRAPH, BUST)

Mary

MCLEOD

BETHUNE

Educator and civil rights activist

registration drives,

defying threats

by the Ku Klux Klan.

She advised President

Franklin Roosevelt

and was the only black

woman at the UN’s

founding conference.

Born to former slaves

in 1875, she became

the most politically

powerful black Ameri-

can woman of her time.

After the 19th Amend-

ment passed, she

organized black voter