Racial and Ethnic Tensions in Minnesota's Suffrage Movement

When the Suffrage Movement Sold Out

By A. J. Hanson, Grant Berg, and Jacqueline deVries

Minnesota's suffrage movement struggled with racial, ethnic and class prejudice.

When Jamar Clark died after being shot by Minneapolis police in November 2015, hundreds of people gathered in the square outside Minneapolis's City Hall to demand justice. #BlackLivesMatter, then only two years in existence, led the march.

The fight for racial justice has been long and arduous. Sadly, the women's suffrage movement did not do as much as it could to uplift women of all backgrounds.

While women were campaigning for suffrage in the 1910s, the Mexican Revolution was propelling Mexican immigrants to search for a better life. Some came to Minnesota, finding work on area farms. Their presence was viewed with suspicion by some suffragists. Mrs. Walter Thorp, a close associate of Clara Ueland and secretary of the Political Equality League, remarked that they were “alien voters whose loyalty is in doubt” and “Mexican Peons ... are easily exploitable”.

Native Americans were also marginalized in the movement. While local suffragists idealized Native American culture for its matriarchal organization, they often shared the view that Indigenous peoples were degraded savages in need of rescue. In what today would be labeled cultural appropriation, one St. Paul suffrage group took the name the Sacajawea Club. It aimed to celebrate the brave Shoshoni woman who guided Lewis and Clark. But during its existence from 1904 to 1910, the group focused little on the rights of Native Americans.

African American residents of Hennepin County also took an active interest in the suffrage movement, but they were unlikely to join the overwhelmingly white and middle-class organizations. Nellie Francis organized the Everywoman Suffrage Club in St. Paul to provide a safe and supportive space for Black women to work for voting rights. During World War I, the Everywoman Suffrage Club helped Black people who were orphaned or aged at the Crispus Attucks Home at 469 Tedesco Street in St. Paul.

For more information:

Brenth Staples, "When the Suffrage Movement Sold Out," New York Times, February 3, 2019.

Ellen Gruber Garvey, "Black Suffragists Finally Begin to Get Their Due," Star Tribune, March 31, 2019.

MNHS Minnesota Women Suffrage Association, Press Releases, undated 1913-1918 “Women Want a Loyal Vote,” February 6, 1918

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Ione Wood Gibbs (1871-1923) and African-American activism: African-American residents of Hennepin County took an active interest in the suffrage movement. Minnesota's Black newspapers, such as The Appeal and The National Advocate, provided regular positive coverage of both the local and national movements, featuring complimentary portraits of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Such coverage looks ironic and even painful to us today, now that we've learned more about the racism in the mainstream movement. Minnesota's Black press took an accommodationist stance and was not quick to call out discrimination. Minneapolis's African-American activists included Ione Wood. She moved to Minneapolis in the 1890s from Kentucky, where she had been a teacher and writer. She had also been on the editorial staff of Our Women and Children, a Baptist women's magazine run by her uncle. Wood had already built a reputation as an outspoken leader. The 1893 edition of Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities observed that she "ranks today among the foremost of our women, first, from the standpoint of acknowledged intellectual ability to write; second, as an earnest educator and race advocate." Wood married restaurant owner Jasper Gibbs in 1890 and had five sons. She became active in the Ada Sweet Pioneer Club, a literary and musical club in Minneapolis. When Minnesota's (predominantly white) women's club movement denied entry to African-American organizations, she clicked into action. In 1905, the Minnesota Federation of Women's Clubs voted to deny membership to the Adelphi Club, an African-American women's organization in Minneapolis. In doing so, it was following the lead of Susan B. Anthony, who had urged the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)to adopt a “separate but equal” membership policy. This stance formed part of their “southern strategy,” which aimed to gain support in the South. The prominent black intellectual and suffragist W. E. B. DuBois warned that this position “represents a climbing of one class on the misery of another.” White suffragists were not exempt from contemporary prejudices. They struggled to reconcile noble ideals with political pressures. In response, Minnesota's African-American women formed their own federation. Gibbs served as the first president of the Minnesota State Federation of Afro-American Women's Clubs. She went on to national roles as vice-president of the National Association of Colored Women between 1912 and 1914. Like other African American women, Gibbs chose to work for racial uplift rather than for women’s suffrage exclusively. Her essay "Woman's Part in the Uplift of the Negro Race" (1907) is still in circulation today.

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A. J. Hanson, Grant Berg, and Jacqueline deVries, “Racial and Ethnic Tensions in Minnesota's Suffrage Movement,” Augsburg Digi-Tours, accessed September 12, 2024, http://digitours.augsburg.edu/items/show/71.

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