"Yet She Is Advancing"

Galvanized by the injustice she witnessed at St. Anna’s Asylum, Caroline Merrick joined Elizabeth Lyle Saxon in petitioning the Louisiana Constitutional Convention to include women’s suffrage in the 1879 state constitution. In their 400-signature petition, Merrick and others argued that property-owning women faced taxation without representation.

While the convention’s Suffrage Committee supported the petition, the constitution ultimately did not grant women the right to vote. It did, however, include several provisions that limited the number of African American male voters.

The Woman’s Department at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition offered New Orleanians exposure to the nation’s leading female activists and their ideas on suffrage, education, labor, and temperance. In March 1885, Susan B. Anthony, renowned leader in the women’s suffrage movement, arrived in the city to attend the exposition.

She toured the Woman’s Department, where she addressed a crowd and spoke to several white women’s organizations in town. Caroline Merrick believed that Anthony’s visit “made a permanent impression on public thought.”

When she met Caroline Merrick in New Orleans, Susan B. Anthony found an important ally of women’s suffrage in the South. In a September 1885 letter, Anthony asked Merrick to speak before a congressional committee to prove that the cause was more than “a Northern women’s craze.”

Merrick confirmed this sentiment when she, along with nine other “strong, progressive, and intellectual women,” founded the Portia Club in 1892. The Portia Club was Louisiana’s first women’s suffrage organization.

While progressive in their focus on women’s and children’s rights, the Portia and Era Clubs were staunchly whites-only. African American women in New Orleans, however, created their own organizations, like the Phyllis Wheatley Club. Founded by Sylvanie Williams in 1894, the Phyllis Wheatley Club advocated for female political agency, education, healthcare, and childcare.

Williams and the Phyllis Wheatley Club were some of the earliest, loudest voices highlighting the need to include African American women in discussions of suffrage.

Because African American women were not allowed to attend the NAWSA convention, Sylvanie Williams, pictured center, invited Susan B. Anthony and other national suffrage leaders to address the Phyllis Wheatley Club. Williams presented Anthony with a bouquet and delivered this speech.

Williams was to represent the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) at the National Council of Women’s executive meeting in New Orleans, which followed the NAWSA convention. She was forced to decline attendance when prominent local white suffragists threatened to boycott the meeting. Although members of the local Council of Women spoke highly of Williams, they maintained, “We could not possibly let her sit in our presence.”

Williams wrote a letter to the president of the National Council of Women, which was published in The Woman’s Journal, requesting that the NACW’s membership in the council be made a matter of public record. “In justice to the 10,000 intelligent colored women comprising the National Association,” she wrote, “I can do no less. My self-respect demands that I do no more.”

NAWSA’s demurral on the “Color Question” understated the vitriolic debate over African American enfranchisement that a potential women’s suffrage amendment raised in the South. One of New Orleans’s most vocal opponents to the suffrage of black people was Kate Gordon.

In 1913, she founded the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference (SSWSC) with the express goal of giving individual states control over expanding suffrage. Gordon and other white supremacists feared that a federal amendment would extend the vote to black women. Gordon and the SSWSC hoped that African Americans could continue to be denied the vote at the state level.

After the 19th Amendment passed, the national NAACP recognized “that much necessary work must be done to instruct the new voters,” particularly in the South, where “not only would no effort be made by the white women’s organizations to train colored women voters but also efforts would be made to prevent colored women from voting.”

Founded in 1915, the New Orleans branch of the NAACP served as the city’s primary civil rights organization in the first half of the 20th century.

After working with the Women’s Committee of Louisiana to challenge Huey P. Long’s political rule, Martha Robinson founded the Woman Citizen’s Union (WCU) in 1934. The WCU sought to “educate the woman voter so that she may intelligently bring pressure to bear upon all officials in all civic and political matters.”

The group’s membership consisted of elite white New Orleanians like Robinson herself. In 1942, the WCU officially disbanded to become the New Orleans branch of the League of Women Voters, with Robinson as president.

While its roots can be traced to the late 1930s and anti–Huey Long sentiments, the Independent Women’s Organization (IWO) formed out of the campaign to elect deLesseps “Chep” Morrison as mayor in 1946.

Cofounder Rosa Keller Freeman and others worked to increase voter registration and held a March of Brooms down Canal Street. Their efforts paid off when Morrison defeated incumbent Robert Maestri, a Long ally, by 4,000 votes.

As a member of the Ninth Ward Civic and Improvement League, Leontine Luke, pictured left, participated in voter registration drives, describing the work as “a marvelous effort.”

The league was originally founded to help black residents of the Ninth Ward register to vote, but it played a significant role in the fight to integrate New Orleans public schools with Luke as its leader from 1956 to 1975.

In 1954, Katie Whickam, a member of the NAACP and the interracial YWCA, organized a monthlong voter registration drive. To support this effort and because the LWVNO remained an all-white organization, Whickam and other African American women founded the Metropolitan Women’s Voters’ League (MWVL).

The MWVL knocked on doors to promote registration, organized voter education workshops, and concluded its campaign with a public meeting at the YWCA. A Louisiana Weekly article pointed to the MWVL’s work as proof that “women of the community are going to participate like never before.”

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring the principle of “separate but equal” unconstitutional served as a turning point for many New Orleanians. While segregationist politicians passed new laws to obstruct the Supreme Court’s decision, women in organizations including the NAACP and Ninth Ward Civic and Improvement League mobilized behind the school-integration effort.

They petitioned the Orleans Parish School Board to implement the Brown ruling and provided support for the families involved in desegregation.

To avoid federally mandated public school integration, Governor Jimmie Davis attempted to close the schools. In 1959, Rosa Keller and Gladys Cahn helped found Save Our Schools (SOS) to keep the city’s schools open.

SOS members included women from the NCJW, YWCA, IWO, LWVNO, and the Urban League. They distributed information to challenge segregationists’ school-closure arguments and organized carpools to escort the few remaining white children enrolled in the desegregated William Frantz Elementary School.

In addition to demonstrations and sit-ins, New Orleans CORE members participated in the Freedom Rides and organized voter-registration and education campaigns in rural parishes throughout Louisiana.

CORE activists engaged in dangerous work, often experiencing imprisonment and physical violence. Protest songs, sung at marches and in jail cells, provided solace and inspiration.

Unable to join the still-segregated LWVNO, Sybil Morial founded the Louisiana League of Good Government (LLOGG) in 1963 to improve African American voter registration.

Following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the integrated women’s group turned toward educating newly registered voters to improve the political literacy of the expanding electorate. The LLOGG was active for more than 40 years before it disbanded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Although they did not agree on the best methods or who should be included, New Orleans women played an important role in the suffrage movement. The passage of the 19th Amendment was a major victory for the movement, but it did not secure access to the ballot for African American women in Jim Crow Louisiana. Many white women, upon receiving the vote in 1920, increased their political participation through going to the polls, creating organizations, and joining political campaigns. As community activists and civil rights leaders, African American women continued to fight for their constitutional right to vote between 1920 and 1965. 

By 1970, the majority of registered voters in New Orleans were women.

Today, in the face of voter-suppression measures, “much necessary work” remains to be done to make sure all Americans can exercise their right to the ballot.

Our democracy depends on it.