When Susan B. Anthony visited New Orleans for the World’s Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1885, she was surprised to find a new ally. A woman named Caroline Merrick was leading a suffrage campaign on behalf of white, propertied women to fight “taxation without representation.” After learning about Merrick’s work in New Orleans, Anthony asked her to testify before a congressional committee in Washington to prove that women’s suffrage was “more than a Northern women’s craze.” Indeed it was not, and in 1892, Merrick founded Louisiana’s first women’s suffrage organization: the Portia Club.
The tax assessment book of the City of New Orleans published by the Era Club. (Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection)
The tax assessment book of the City of New Orleans published by the Era Club. (Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection)
Nathalie Brou’s 1926 poll tax certificate. (Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection, gift of Miss Effie M. Stockton)
Nathalie Brou’s 1926 poll tax certificate. (Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection, gift of Miss Effie M. Stockton)
A press photo of police arresting a voting rights protestor at New Orleans City Hall in September, 1963. (Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection)
A press photo of police arresting a voting rights protestor at New Orleans City Hall in September, 1963. (Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection)
The New Orleans campaign for women’s suffrage was marred by white supremacy from the beginning. Unwelcome in the Portia Club (or the affiliated Era Club, created for younger women and led by sisters Kate and Jean Gordon), Black women in New Orleans founded their own club in 1894. Sylvanie Williams founded the Phyllis Wheatley Society to promote education, child welfare, and the inclusion of Black women in the suffrage debate. When Anthony returned to New Orleans in 1903, this time for the all-white National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) convention, Williams invited her to the Phyllis Wheatley Club. After welcoming her, Williams delivered the speech from which the exhibition under review took its name: “The colored woman has a crown of thorns continually pressed upon her brow, yet she is advancing. And sometimes you find her further on than you would have expected.”
At The Historic New Orleans Collection, curator Elizabeth Neidenbach has gathered compelling evidence of Black and white women’s suffrage work in New Orleans. Its most significant contribution, however, is that it brings to the fore lesser-known episodes in Black women’s long struggle for political equality. “Yet She Is Advancing” asks visitors to lean into the myriad strategies employed by white and Black women to overcome discrimination and disenfranchisement. The exhibit also offers a view into the fascinating material culture of women’s activism. It includes, for instance, the book of tax assessments published and sold by the Era Club in 1900 to document the first time women legally voted in Louisiana—specifically, women who owned property. The book illustrates women’s power as voters (women’s names were accompanied by an asterisk) and their simultaneous activism on behalf of transparency in city government: “In presenting the copy of the assessment books of the entire City of New Orleans to the public,” Jean Gordon wrote, “the Era Club has three objects, viz: to prove the claim that there are more women taxpayers than men; to give the citizens of New Orleans an opportunity to compare their assessments with their neighbors, and to see if there are any inequalities, as has been repeatedly and openly charged by the different newspapers.”1
Katie’s School of Beauty Culture and Barbering, located at 2100 Dryades Street, was an important organizing spot for Black women’s voting rights activism in New Orleans. (Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection)
Katie’s School of Beauty Culture and Barbering, located at 2100 Dryades Street, was an important organizing spot for Black women’s voting rights activism in New Orleans. (Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection)
Women’s suffrage work in New Orleans also promoted greater voter participation citywide. For instance, in the 1920s and 1930s, when few Black women in New Orleans could exercise their right to vote, they organized in other ways. This included joining the local NAACP chapter (with women forming the core, if not the leadership) and encouraging Black people to pay their poll taxes. In fact, some of the most affecting objects on display in the exhibit are the receipts for poll taxes paid, even though only a small percentage of Black voters were able to cast a ballot in Orleans parish. In 1942, white society women organized the League of Women Voters (LWV), which is still active today. The LWV developed “citizens guides” to educate voters about the issues and initiatives on the ballot for each election. Black women’s activism around suffrage continued into the civil rights era. Most of the original founders of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) in New Orleans were women. They renewed efforts to register Black voters, fought to desegregate public schools, and participated in sit-ins. New Orleans women also helped secure passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Dorothy Mae Taylor on the floor of the Louisiana state legislature. (Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection)
Dorothy Mae Taylor on the floor of the Louisiana state legislature. (Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection)
Lindy Boggs Election Day flier, 1973. (Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection)
Lindy Boggs Election Day flier, 1973. (Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection)
Although the YWCA was an interracial organization, most women’s voting rights activism remained segregated into the 1960s. This meant that Black women did not have the same access to organizing spaces that white women did. One of the most fascinating stories in the exhibit is that of Katie E. Wickham. Wickham was one of many Black women in the South who used their beauty parlors—spaces that were Black-owned, woman-owned and not dependent on white employers—as places to gather, organize, and get out the vote. Katie’s School of Beauty Culture and Barbering became the home of the Metropolitan Women’s Voters League (MWVL) with the aim to register “every eligible woman who desires to become a voter.” After the Brown decision, prominent Jewish women in New Orleans used their influence to lobby officials and organize in public support of integrated public schools. After decades of struggle, women made steady strides with the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s. It was difficult for this visitor not to cheer out loud at the photo of Dorothy Mae Taylor—the first Black woman elected in 1971—on the floor of the state legislature and the campaign poster of Lindy Boggs—the first woman from Louisiana elected to the US Congress in 1973.
“Yet She Is Advancing” was a product of the global pandemic. The virtual exhibit (still available online) came first. Given the opportunity to install a physical exhibit in a small upper gallery in The Historic New Orleans Collection’s Tricentennial wing, Neidenbach added artifacts (such as the Tax Assessment book from 1900) that could not be included in the digital version as well as additional photographs borrowed from other archives. She also created two interactive displays. One took the form of an analog voting machine, asking visitors to vote yes or no to the question: “Is voting the most important right in a democratic society?” (When I visited the yeses were winning.) The second was a digital quiz version of the lengthy 1963 voter registration test, which included questions about whether the applicant had children out of wedlock and required convoluted calculations about the applicant’s age. (For a full description of this chicanery and activists’ strategies for getting around it, listen to the oral histories of Raphael Cassimere Jr. and Katrena Ndang.) Both interactives work because they ask viewers to reflect on their own access to the ballot and whether they take that access for granted. Above all, “Yet She is Advancing” reminds visitors that having one’s vote count has been hard won by many. Defending that right is as important now as it has ever been.
Note
The tax assessment book of the City New Orleans: The Era Club, 1900, p. 2.