Historian's Corner: Seeking and Seeing Black Women: Hester C. Jeffrey and Woman Suffrage Activism

To the best of our knowledge, Hester C. Whitehurst Jeffrey, a prominent African American suffragist in New York, did not leave papers, letters, journals, a memoir, or notes for an autobiography or speeches.² No published conversations with any of her friends or colleagues have yet come to light. We have only one photograph that positively identifies her, and that is a formal portrait of her alone, not situated among a network of her colleagues.³ Some newspapers recorded a few lines of her public addresses, and because Susan B. Anthony befriended her while they both lived in Rochester, New York, Anthony requested that Jeffrey eulogize her. Even today, a century after women won the right to vote in New York State, there is a mistaken sense that white women won the right to vote, and that black women served only in an ancillary way to the movement, if at all. As Nanci Caraway points out, we tend to think that because black women had a "historical role as objects of exploitation … [it] meant that they lacked the requisite political agency to be significant in the early feminist struggle."⁴ The story of Jeffrey's activist life challenges the oppression of silent archives, revealing a dynamic woman who sought universal social justice and human rights.

Those who write about woman suffrage and the social activism of the past often focus their energies on those who left written records—usually elite white women—readily available in libraries and archives.⁵ Furthermore, white people and black men rarely wrote about the contributions or involvement of black women in their activist organizations.⁶ Only relatively recently have archivists, such as those at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City and the Moorland Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington, DC, actively sought the records of black women. For historians seeking information about black women of the woman suffrage era, records are distressingly scant.

Black women themselves may have doubted the importance of keeping their own records. For example, Grace Nail Johnson, wife of James Weldon Johnson and the only African American member of the radical (white) Greenwich Village Heterodoxy, preserved her husband's papers, donating them to Yale University Archives after his death. Despite her social activism and known support for women's voting rights, her papers are not collected.⁷ Some women's records are surely contained in the papers of black men's collections, but even the records of black men of the suffrage period, other than Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, remain tantalizing. It is quite possible that records of black women's activism from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries remain in private collections. Surely most scholars of women's social movement history dream of finding a cache of papers in the attic of the descendent of some suffragist. Hopefully, as scholars persist in digging more deeply into the lives of those people excluded from mainstream histories, and more people realize their intrinsic value, those records will surface and be made public.

The greatest boon for revealing black women's social and political activism is, of course, the Internet. Increasingly, rare books, pamphlets, and other documents are being scanned and made widely accessible.⁸ Virtually all sizable cities in New York had at least one African American newspaper, although many of those that are extant remain to be scanned and made available online.⁹ We need to demand that these resources be made widely available. Journalists, census takers, and other officials of the suffrage era (usually white males) often underreported or incorrectly recorded women's names (or simply noted them as Mrs. husband's name), dates, or activities.¹⁰ Nevertheless, as more African American newspapers are scanned and made keyword searchable, using them may suggest new avenues to help illuminate the lived experiences of activists like Hester Jeffrey.

Black women activists in New York State organized in their own groups as early...