"Negro Women Will Secure Ballot if Suffragists Win"
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Title
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"Negro Women Will Secure Ballot if Suffragists Win"
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Description
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Negro Women Will Secure Ballot If Suffragists Win
Advocates Furnish Information to This Effect, But Claim White Supremacy Is Not Endangered
By Hugh W. Roberts
Washington, August 11 (Special)
From information furnished local correspondents by the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, there is no longer a doubt but that the suffragettes are planning to put the ballot into the hands of negro women.
The information is prefixed by the starting statement that "the maintenance of white supremacy in the south is absolutely dependent on the enfranchisement of the women there." Without attempting to prove that assertion - and through indirection proving the intention of their union to enfranchise negro women - the suffragettes cite census figures to show that there are more white women in the south than negro women.
Mrs. Helena Hill Weed, research chairman of the Congressional union, compiled the figures to disprove an assertion alleged by the union to have been made by President Wilson - that his fear that the enfranchisement of women would render more complex the negro problem alone deterred him from declaring for the Susan B. Anthony amendment.
As illustrative of the foregoing, the following interview with Mrs. Weed will prove of interest:
"In Mississippi and South Carolina the problem would not be changed any way by equal suffrage. In all the other states it would add largely to the white vote. In Oklahoma, for instance, the white voting supremacy would be increased from 339,000, its present figure, to 620,000, if women voted; and in North Carolina from 358,000 to 430,000. In other states the votes of the white women would bring big gains, for in all the states except the two already mentioned the white women far outnumber the negro women, and in a number of the states the entire negro population, men, women, and children combined. All told, the white women of the south outnumber the negro women by more than 6,000,000, and the total negro population by 2,000,000 or more.
"It is idle, therefore, to argue that the negro problem is a reason for opposing the federal amendment. The only answer needed is to show the census figures. They dispel all useless fear."
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Date
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August 12, 1916
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