The Black VOte
One hundred years ago today … With Election Day less than three weeks away, The New York Age dedicated most of its front page to issues around Black voters, including much non-local concern.
New York Age, 16 October 1920, p. 1. Chronicling America.
Note: NY1920 first featured the Age, edited by James Weldon Johnson, in our January 3 post, and has returned to it repeatedly,
The headline blared the surprising news that James B. Dudley, a highly respected Black leader in Greensboro, South Carolina, had urged Black women, in the first year they were theoretically enfranchised, to sit out the election altogether. Dudley’s “bombshell” did not go over well. Black women had fought for women’s suffrage for years. Of course, the Nineteenth Amendment did not remove most obstacles, particularly in Dudley’s region, the south. As a 2007 report from the National Landmarks Department puts it:
The Nineteenth Amendment provided limited opportunities for African American women to enter the electoral arena, as they faced the same problems as did African American men with respect to poll taxes and literacy requirements. Those relatively small numbers that did join black men on the suffrage rolls also found themselves effectively excluded by the white Democratic primary from voting in the South’s key political contests. (“Civil Rights In America: Racial Voting Rights,” p. 16)
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. "Black women suffragists holding sign reading "Head-Quarters for Colored Women Voters," in Georgia." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1910-1920.
The strategy of voter suppression made the October 16 news via some Florida shenanigans.
New York Age, 16 October 1920, p. 2. Chronicling America.
Less overtly, the idea of voter suppression made it to the Age front page (top image, above) via Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding’s vocal support for the right of Black people to vote unimpeded, the headline just below the one about Dudley.
Harding’s courtship of Black votes links to the question of whether the Democrats or Republican party was more responsive to Black concerns. “Many Democrats will vote Republican State Ticket,” says the page one title (top image).
The October issue of the Crisis considered the two major parties.
The Crisis, Vol. 20, No. 6, October 1920, p. 272. Modernist Journals Project.
Ernest R. McKinney details at length both major parties’ disappointing treatment of Black people, and offers approving consideration of the Labor Party and the Committee of Forty-Eight.
Note: See our several previous posts featuring the Crisis, the monthly journal of the N.A.A.C.P., edited by W.E.B. Du Bois.
As for NYC’s non-black press, it did not overly concern itself with the Black vote, though some of its readers did.
made it to the Age front page, via Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding’s vocal support for the right of Black people to vote unimpeded.
New York Tribune, 19 October 1920, p. 10. Chronicling America.
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, OCTOBER 16, 2020
TAGS: Black history, African American history, elections, voters, Democrats, Republicans, Labor Party, press, journalism