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Let's Talk About It: Women's Suffrage

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June 2022 Program

"Vanguard" Book Cover

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

NSU-Broken Arrow Liberal Arts Building, Room 114

3:00 PM

LTAI: Women's Suffrage is a humanities discussion project from the American Library Association (ALA) and is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

About the Book

Further Reading

Discussion Questions

Use the questions below to guide your reading and prepare for the session. (All discussion questions provided by the ALA.)

  1. Vanguard begins by introducing us to several Black women preachers. Whose life and career most interested or surprised you? Why?
  2. What was the role of Black churches in facilitating the rise of civil rights activism?
  3. What conflicts did women preachers face in Black churches, and how did they respond to them?
  4. What are some of the reasons Black women voters were seen as a larger political threat than white women?
  5. What role did Black newspapers like The Crisis and The Chicago Defender play in the suffrage movement?
  6. How did historically black colleges and universities (HBCU's) factor into the fight for suffrage?
  7. Vanguard shows that the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment did not mean the end of Black women's activism for civil rights. What obstacles to Black voters did activists like Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells have to fight once the vote was ostensibly granted?

Additional Resources

Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman's Suffrage Movement in the United States