The Women Will Be Factors in the Present Campaign

This chapter examines black women’s national politics in the 1920s. For years, African American women had been organizing in their churches, mutual benefit associations, the Phyllis Wheatley Young Women’s Christian Association, and clubs. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and pending presidential election in 1920 inspired women to connect their existing alliances with partisan causes. Black women seized on their location in the nation’s capital to advocate on behalf of African Americans living across the country. Black women across the city formed eight, distinctive political organizations, using them as instruments to lobby for economic justice, protest southern disfranchisement, express opinions about Supreme Court nominations, and weight in on which monuments and memorials would grace the national mall. While elite and middle-class women dominated the leadership of most political organizations, the National Association of Wage Earners attracted a working-class membership through its unique recruitment strategies and mission of economic justice.