African American Women Voters in Lexington's School Suffrage Times, 1895–1902: Race Matters in the History of the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Movement

In January 1902, Anna Miller, the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA) corresponding secretary, sent a request to a respected clubwoman in Henderson to organize a local event for a statewide campaign for woman suffrage. Mary Atkinson Cunningham, recently appointed state regent to the Daughters of the American Revolution, regretfully declined, saying that the recent events in Lexington had seriously hurt the cause. Cunningham wrote in some detail about how white people in her small town in western Kentucky feared the rising expectations of the black community in Henderson, declining even to support the building of a Carnegie library if it would be open to blacks. Cunningham wrote: "There are very few who believe in equal rights here and we would find great difficulty in getting a crowd [at a suffrage event]." She had heard about Lexington's school board elections in the fall of 1901 and that "twice as many negro women exercised the right of franchise as white and practically the board of education was controlled by negroes. If that is the case now, I do not think we would better ourselves for it seems to me to be infinitely preferable to have the board controlled by men than by negroes and a few white women, and I never believed in slavery. It is this black cloud that hangs over the South that prevents its progress in so many ways, especially in public enterprise and improvements."¹

Cunningham's reluctance to take action for woman suffrage in 1902—to support a progressive agenda for expanding the franchise to women—stemmed from her sense of social order. She, and so many others like her across the nation, agreed to live in a republic that restricted access to democratic processes of self-government. She asserted, "We will have to give up any rights that will give additional rights to the negro." Kentucky's partial suffrage law of 1894, granting the women in three cities the right to vote in the annual school board elections, was revoked in 1902 for the reason of restricting black women's right to vote. When black women in Lexington turned out in an organized bloc to register as Republicans to vote in the fall 1901 school board elections, the overwhelming numbers of eligible black women voters startled the Democratic Party leaders as well as white communities across Kentucky. The ensuing tactics of intimidation and violence in a city already roiled with partisan rancor resulted in a 50 percent loss of Republican voters, and the Democrats won the 1901 school board elections. The local representatives immediately led the campaign in the state legislature to revoke the partial suffrage law, and they succeeded in January 1902. The brief window of time in which both white and black women could vote in this former slave state exposed rifts in the woman suffrage movement, and it gave us an example that today pulls our analysis of suffragism out of a master narrative of an inevitable march toward a federal amendment. It also provided a glimpse into how segregation and ideals of white supremacy so strongly affected the history of suffragism and of our nation.²

Black leadership, including by women reformers in Kentucky, tended to support the Republican Party, and as an organized bloc, especially in the 1901 school board elections, Lexington's African American women used the vote to fight against the conservative Democratic Party's control of segregation, Jim Crow culture, and for their children's future. Lexington's mayor had recently promoted Green P. Russell, a black principal and supporter of the Democratic Party, to "Superintendent of Colored Schools," and the white Democratic Party's preferment for Russell threatened the Republican-leaning leaders of the black community. This controversy gave Senator J. Embry Allen and Representative William Klair, both Democrats from Lexington, the excuse they needed to lead the process of revoking the law granting partial suffrage for women. Only after Jim Crow laws and policing strategies established de facto disenfranchisement of most black voters, and after much...