The 19th Amendment Did Not Liberate Black Women
Assessing the Roles of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman
“This week marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment. And we celebrate the women who fought for that right,” Harris said. “Yet so many of the Black women who helped secure that victory were still prohibited from voting, long after its ratification.” — Kamala Harris (Tensley 2020)
The heroes a society accepts say a lot about the values they share. The original American heroes, the Founding fathers, were white men who never regarded Black people or women equally. Despite their violent, sexist, and racist ideology, Americans continue to put these men on pedestals, capitulating to their determination to commit genocide against Indigenous people and exalting them despite their embrace of slavery. These men are not heroes to Black people, and they should not be heroes to many Americans. Turning a blind eye to tyranny is not chivalrous; it’s obscene.
Forced to endure low wages, high maternal mortality rates, and overt acts of racism and sexism, Black women and women of color still find themselves at the bottom of the social pecking order. Long before Black women gained representation in Congress through Shirley Chisholm’s historic run in 1968, women like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth fought for…
