Fulton Lecture Examines the Narrow Scope of the Nineteenth Amendment
Speaking at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in support of the Voting Rights Act, organizer Fannie Lou Hamer invoked the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments—they proved, she said, that the Jim Crow refusal of Black ballots at the polls violated the United States Constitution. Notably, Hamer never mentioned the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibits individual states from denying the right to vote on the basis of sex, Johns Hopkins legal historian Martha S. Jones told a University of Chicago Law School audience during the 2021 Fulton Lectureship in Legal History, which was held via Zoom on April 16.
“The Nineteenth Amendment was a thin promise of women's equality before the Constitution, if it was a promise at all,” said Jones, who is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. “Indeed, the amendment was so thin that it excluded Black women from Mississippi from its protections. [According to] Mrs. Hamer, there was no promise, no protection, no recourse in the amendment of 1920 for Black women.”
Examining the Nineteenth Amendment from the perspective of Black American women, Jones said, it is clear that many believed it would apply to White women but not necessarily to them. Politicians in favor of disenfranchising Black voters banked on the narrow scope of the amendment as well.
“We see how paper-thin the amendment was,” Jones said. “Thin because it permitted racism—by law and by violence and intimidation—to persist, unabated and unchecked, and [because it] denied their access to the ballot box. Even as lawmakers and suffragists alike anticipated how the amendment would leave Jim Crow laws and violence untouched, its language took the thinnest possible form.”
Turning back to 1872, Jones told the story of a Black woman from Louisiana named Josephine DeCuir. Traveling on a Mississippi River steamship, DeCuir was barred from the ladies cabin, leaving her vulnerable to the elements as well as unwelcome attention from staff and passengers.
DeCuir brought a lawsuit to the Louisiana Supreme Court, invoking the state’s constitution, which guaranteed that “all persons shall enjoy equal rights and privileges upon any conveyance of a public character, without distinction or discrimination on account of race or color,” Jones said.
But the steamboat operators didn’t view DeCuir as lady, Jones added, and when the operators appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court, the Court ruled in their favor, not hers.
“[DeCuir] knew well how Black women relegated to smoker cars and steerage endured harassment, denigration, threats of assault—including sexual assault—and scenes in which conductors, brakemen, and police, put their hands on Black women,” Jones said. “These cruel encounters […] sat at the core of Black women's politics as women. They aimed to win the vote precisely to cure the circumstances that the Supreme Court had failed to remedy for Josephine DeCuir.”
Experiences like these pushed Black women to campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment, Jones said—for them, it was a campaign informed not just by their standing as women, but specifically as Black women. Today, we would refer to this as intersectionality, she added, but long before that term was coined in 1980s, it was already informing Black women’s approach to voting rights at the end of the 19th century.
“Yes, Black women of the [National Association for Colored Women’s Clubs] were suffragists,” Jones said. “And yes, they were as committed to winning federal anti-lynching legislation. The fight for women's votes and the struggle against Jim Crow went hand in hand for these women. A constitutional amendment was only words on paper, they asserted, if state laws along with intimidation and violence kept them from the polls.”
As debate over the Nineteenth Amendment continued into the 20th century, James K. Vardaman of Mississippi was elected to the United States Senate on a platform of White supremacy and Black disenfranchisement. Fearing that the Nineteenth Amendment would give Black women the right to vote, Vardaman proposed a compromise: the repeal of Black voting rights in exchange for women’s suffrage. He was ultimately unsuccessful, but his suggestion planted a seed, Jones said—Vardaman and his supporters lost the battle, but they may have won the war.
“Mississippi Senator Pat Harrison, who inherited Vardaman's seat on the eve of the amendment’s approval, moved that it include the word “White” to make clear it applied only to White citizens,” Jones said. “It was a gesture at the political theater, by which the 16 senators who voted in favor of Harrison's amendment telegraphed how their states were likely to regard the Nineteenth Amendment, whatever its final terms.”
Indeed, some southern states rejected ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Others doubled down on existing requirements or tightened Jim Crow voting restrictions, including literacy tests. The Nineteenth Amendment proved to be far less than self-executing, Jones said.
“In Daytona, Florida, Mary McLeod Bethune was organizing Black women in 1920 only to be met with organized Ku Klux Klan violence,” she said. “She resisted, and Black women in Daytona voted that year. But by 1922, the violence had persisted so much so that Mrs. Bethune gave up on voting rights.”
As Black women continued to organize around voting over the decades, very few invoked the Nineteenth Amendment, choosing instead to lean on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments when discussing their rights. For Jones, the absence of the women’s suffrage amendment in these discussions proves that it figured little in the fight to secure voting rights for Black women in the United States.
“Fannie Lou Hamer and James Vardaman appear to have agreed about the thin nature of the Nineteenth Amendment,” Jones said. “Neither thought of the amendment as extending to Black women […] when it came to voting rights. The difference, as we all know, however, lies in that normative matter that so importantly animates the work of legal scholars of the amendment. Vardaman believed it should be just that way, while Mrs. Hamer knew well that it should not.”
A full video of the Fulton Lecture can be viewed above.