A Terrible Blot on Civilization

Black women were disappointed that white-led women’s organizations seemed uninterested in the fact that a large group of American women were being kept from their right to vote, but they did not have time to stop fighting. For them, it was a matter of life and death. Carrie Williams Clifford and other black women following the lead of Ida B. Wells-Barnett had been fighting for years against lynching and the move violence that periodically swept over black communities. Black women like Clifford understood their campaign for the vote within this ongoing struggle against white supremacists. It would give them some power to fight back against the violence of lynching and Jim Crow.