(Photo courtesy of Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division)
As
Encyclopedia Virginia director Peter Hedlund recently noted here on the
EV blog, we are committed to revising existing entries to eliminate racial bias and better reflect new historical understandings of key moments in Virginia history.
One such entry that needed revision was our entry on Woman Suffrage in Virginia, which failed to adequately note the contributions of Black women to the suffrage fight. As Brent Staples noted in the
New York Times, white suffrage leaders intentionally obscured the contributions of Black women to the movement and “looked away from the racism that tightened its grip on the fight for the women’s vote in the years after the Civil War.”