Ida B. Wells And Whit White Suffragists

On March 03, 1913, thousands of women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. as a form of protest in order to gain suffrage rights for women. Before the march, however, one of the parade organizers, Alice Paul, urged black suffragettes including Ida B. Wells to not march with Caucasian women. She feared white suffragists may have not wanted to participate in the parade if they had to march with African American women. People within and outside of the suffrage movement including the government often discriminated against black suffragettes on the account of race, which could have made obtaining voting rights for them more difficult. As a way of combatting exclusion from the suffrage movement, Ida B. Wells established and participated in numerous organizations that supported people of color such as the Alpha Suffrage club, which was the first black female suffrage association in Chicago. Multiple African American newspapers reflected black women in the movement by writing about the efforts of black suffragettes. Wells and other women of color influenced the women’s suffrage movement with the help of black organizations and positive representation in African American media in a time where they experienced pushback from white suffragists and government officials.

For instance, many white suffragists in northern United States believed excluding black women from the suffrage movement would have helped in gaining support from the South, which opposed African American suffrage. In order to ensure that the movement gained momentum and suffrage would be granted to them, white women focused on issues only pertaining to gender and often excluded race. The Washington Post expressed this divide within the suffrage movement in a cartoon of white women excluding black woman in a