Voting Rights
Under the 1796 Tennessee Constitution, all free men who met property and residency requirements could vote and bear arms. Even though this applied to the relatively small number of free men of color, it was overturned by the Tennessee Constitution of 1835, which no longer used property ownership as a requirement for white voters, instituting a poll tax to guarantee that the state collected revenue from every voter. The most momentous impact of Tennessee’s 1835 Constitution was that it left slavery intact and also rescinded the previous rights of free persons of color, who could no longer vote or bear arms. The post-Civil War passage of the fifteenth amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted suffrage to African American males, extended the franchise to Tennessee’s black citizens in the 1870 Constitution but left intact the poll tax, which was designated to pay for public education.
For a period of fifteen years, from 1872 to 1887, Tennesseans elected some of the best and brightest African American legislators to the General Assembly. However, as historian Connie Lester has written, a series of laws passed in 1889 imposed special voting registration requirements and attempted to circumvent laws protecting federal elections, which resulted in the disfranchisement of many African American, as well as poor white, voters. These laws paved the way for the passage of regulations that implemented a long period of injustice and “Jim Crow” segregation, when African Americans had virtually no representation in the elected government of Tennessee and very little claim to the rights they deserved as citizens. In 1953, Tennessee finally did away with the poll tax, which had been ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, but the right to vote for African Americans would not become a federally-protected mandate until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Tennessee women of both races were actively involved in the national right to vote campaign for women. Memphian Mary Church Terrell, President of the National Association of Colored Women, delivered a speech to the National American Women’s Suffrage Association in Washington, D.C., in 1898. Former Memphis School Teacher Ida B. Wells founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913 and broke ranks with the segregated unit to march with white delegates in the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C. In 1914, Jackson legal assistant Sue Shelton White led the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association in advocating for a “Fourteenth Amendment” granting the right to vote to women, just as the original 1868 amendment had granted “all privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” to African American men. White was active nationally, as well; she edited the Suffragist for the National Women’s Party and was among the protestors who were arrested for picketing the White House in February 1919.