When Was It Legal For Black Women To Vote?

The 19th Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, granted American women the right to vote. However, most Black women would wait nearly five decades more. When the amendment became law, 26 million adult female Americans were nominally eligible to vote. Full electoral equality was still decades away for many women. In the 1950s and 1960s, securing voting rights for African Americans in the South became a central focus of the civil rights movement.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally granted voting rights to African Americans in the South. The 19th Amendment legally guaranteed American women the right to vote, but it took decades for Black women to gain the vote. The campaign for the 19th Amendment, often termed women’s suffrage, was part of Black women’s broader advocacy for the voting rights of all African Americans, women and men.

Educator and political advisor Mary McLeod Bethune formed the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 to pursue civil rights. Tens of thousands of African Americans worked over several decades to secure suffrage, which occurred when the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. The passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, which celebrates its 55th anniversary in 2020, symbolizes a century of work from the Black community.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified granting the right to vote to African American men. Some Black women suffragists, like Mary McLeod Bethune, played a significant role in the fight for voting rights for all African Americans.