African-American Efforts

In 1912 Carrie Barnes, the president of the "colored branch" of the Equal Suffrage League of Indiana summarized the opinions of many African Americans with her words, "We feel that colored women have need for the ballot that white women have, and a great many needs that they have not."

Many African-American women and working-class white women worked diligently to gain woman's suffrage, yet their pictures and images did not appear in the pages of most white, middle-class magazines and newspapers. To hear the voices of African-American women and men fighting for suffrage, one has to turn almost without exception to the black press.