Washington Lawyer - March/April 2020 - 52

SPECIAL SEC TION
SUFFRAGE continued from page 51
Despite the personal risk, Wells-Barnett never dialed down her outspokenness, and she continued to speak out and write about civil rights
and women's suffrage. At 24, she wrote, "I will not begin at this late day
by doing what my soul abhors; sugaring men, weak deceitful creatures,
with flattery to retain them as escorts or to gratify a revenge."
A gifted orator, she traveled internationally as a speaker and openly
confronted white suffragists who ignored lynching. Consequently, she
was frequently ridiculed and ignored by women's suffrage organizations
in the United States. Most notably, she had a public feud with Frances
Willard, the president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (who
was a large organizing force for women's suffrage). Wells-Barnett's answer
to these snubs was to create her own women's political and social organizations. She started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913 with the
purpose of teaching black women how to engage in civic matters and
get African Americans elected to city offices. Wells-Barnett also founded
the National Association of Colored Women's Club.
Ten years after women won the right to vote, in 1930 Wells-Barnett ran as
an independent for a seat in the Illinois Senate. She lost but blazed the way
forward for countless other women in public life. Today, her Chicago home
is a National Historic Landmark, and her legacy continues with numerous
investigative journalism awards and scholarships established in her honor.

ADELLA HUNT LOGAN
(1863-1915)

Undeterred, Logan carried on for women's suffrage. Among other accomplishments, she penned the protest song "Just as Well as He."
Every man now has the ballot;
None you know have we,
But we have brains and we can use them
Just as well as he.
If a home that has a father
Needs a mother too,
Then every state has men voters
Needs its women too.
The final years of Logan's life were tragic, with rumors of her husband's
infidelities and hints of Logan's heartbreak. In 1915 she set a small fire
in her husband's office, and she was committed to the Battle Creek
Sanitarium in Michigan where she was forced to undergo electroshock
treatment. The same year, the Alabama legislature refused to allow a referendum on votes for women even to appear on the ballot.
That December, at Tuskegee, Logan jumped to her death from the fifth
floor of a campus building. Fewer than five years later, women finally won
the right to vote.
Tracy Schorn is a writer based in Washington, D.C.
Frances Wright, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Adella Hunt Logan, Public Domain

ogan was an African American writer,
educator, administrator, and suffragist.
A highly educated woman of her day,
she graduated from Atlanta University at
the age of 18 and later earned a master's
degree. ("Honorary" only, as there was no
school accredited for advanced degrees
for African Americans at the time.) Logan
became a teacher, and for three decades
she taught at the Tuskegee Institute.
Advocating for education and suffrage for women of color, Logan's writings
were published in the most prestigious black publications of the time such
as W.E.B. DuBois's The Crisis.
Because Logan was a light-complexioned woman (her mother was
a free mixed-race woman and her father was a white farmer), she was
able to "pass" and travel widely through the segregated South, attending
white women's suffrage meetings, bringing back political tactics and
materials to her community in Alabama. She was the only African
American lifetime member of the National American Woman Suffrage
Association (NAWSA).
In 1895 Logan wrote to Susan B. Anthony, "I am working with women
who are slow to believe that they will get help from the ballot, but
someday I hope to see my daughter vote right here in the South."
Shamefully, despite Logan's organizing abilities and educational stature,
Anthony had some reservations about Logan's competence to address an
NAWSA meeting in Washington, D.C. Anthony wrote to a fellow suffragist:
"[U]nless you really know that Miss Logan is one who would astonish the
natives, just let her wait until she is more cultured and can do the colored
race the greatest possible credit."

52 WASHINGTON LAWYER

MARCH/APRIL 2020

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