Color Us Connected: Together, we vote, and you can take part

This column appears every other week in Foster’s Daily Democrat and the Tuskegee News. This week, Guy Trammell, an African American man from Tuskegee, Alabama, and Amy Miller, a white woman from South Berwick, Maine, talk about women’s suffrage and our privilege and responsibility to vote.

By Guy Trammell Jr.

On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the last state needed to pass a Constitutional amendment for women to vote. The 19th Amendment was added to the Constitution on Aug. 26, 1920. However, on Sept. 22, 1919, Alabama passed a bill to prevent women from voting, and only ratied the woman’s right to vote on Sept. 8, 1953.

In 1892, Alabama’s rst women’s voter rights club formed in Decatur. In 1895, Margaret Murray Washington, Booker T. Washington’s third wife, organized the Tuskegee Women’s Club, with 13 of Tuskegee Institute’s female faculty and wives of male faculty. This became Alabama’s most prominent colored women’s club, which fought for suffrage even though colored women were excluded from reaching the promised land of voting.

In 1905, Tuskegee Women’s Club’s Tenth Annual Report stated: “There has been greater interest in the study of the suffrage movement during the past year than ever before.” The report further noted: “The leader of the suffrage department of the Tuskegee Woman’s Club is sincere and enthusiastic.”

Who was this leader? “Mrs. Logan, whose excellent library on the subject has also been placed at the service of all interested members of the club.”

Adella Hunt Logan, born during the Civil War, was daughter to a free black Cherokee woman and a white plantation owner who paid for her education. She became a teacher at 16, nished college, and began working on a masters degree when Tuskegee Institute hired her as its rst librarian and an instructor of English, humanities and social sciences.

One of the most educated southern woman, she lled the library with books on many controversial subjects and highly intellectual thought. Her discussion partner for inspiration and debate was Dr. George Washington Carver.

Adella Logan joined the Tuskegee Women’s Club in 1895, and attended the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s (NAWSA) convention, in Atlanta, Georgia. Her light complexion gained her entrance, even though the event was strictly segregated. She liked Susan B. Anthony’s talk and signed up, making her the rst Alabama suffrage activist, black or white, the rst life member of the NAWSA, and its only black member.

It was too late to keep her out of the organization. However, when Adella was to address the NAWSA, Susan B. Anthony said: “I cannot have speak for us a woman who has even a ten-thousandth portion of African blood who would be an inferior orator in matter or manner, because it would so mitigate against our cause . . . Let your Miss Logan wait till she is more cultivated, better educated, and better prepared and can do our mission and her own race the greatest credit.”

Adella’s activism grew, through organizing protests and debates, writing and speaking nationally. She wrote on suffrage in relation to black women for NAWSA’s Woman’s Journal, NAACP’s Crisis Magazine, and the Colored American, sometimes authoring with the pseudo-name “L.H.A.”, writing: “If we are citizens, why not treat us as such on questions of law and governance...”

On National Voter Registration Day, Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2020, at 6 p.m. CST (7 p.m. EST), Tuskegee and our sister city of South Berwick are hosting “Together We Vote,” celebrating our right to vote. Please join us live on Facebook. Remember: Adella Logan was never able to vote, so should we have any excuse not to?

By Amy Miller

Why don’t you vote?

Maybe you are a college student who hasn't taken the time to ask for an absentee ballot.

Or you’re a mother with no one to take care of three young children while you head to the polls.

Perhaps you’re an elderly man with no transportation.

Or you think the entire system is rigged and don't want to participate.

Well, almost every one of the 200 people asked about voting on the streets of South Berwick, Maine, and its sister city of Tuskegee, Alabama, said voting is important. Although the vast majority of people interviewed in both cities stressed the importance of voting, the differences in the responses from the two communities was sobering.

“Many people fought for us to be able to vote,” said a student at Tuskegee University. “I remember talking to my grandfather who was 90 at the time, and he was just saying how he didn’t have the opportunity always to vote and his parents didn’t have the opportunity so he just feels that it’s very important.”

Asked what obstacles they may have faced to voting, residents of South Berwick, which is more than 95 percent white, talked about weather challenges, long work hours or the lack of information on the candidates or referendum questions, while Tuskegee folks one after another recalled (dis)qualifying questions, legal fights, gerrymandered districts and threatened violence that kept them from voting.

If you are woman, you wouldn’t have had the right to vote until 100 years ago last month. If you are a Native American in Maine, you didn't get to vote in Maine until 56 years ago. If you are Black, many people still alive risked and often lost their lives fighting to give you this opportunity that was supposed to be granted in 1865.

This Tuskegee student whose grandfather didn't always get to vote was one of 200 people interviewed for a project on voting done jointly by citizens in South Berwick and in Tuskegee. The Together We Vote Project, as we called it, let our two towns work together on an issue we agreed is central to our nation’s strength.

But it also highlighted in stark relief one version of how race affects us in America.

A video with highlights from the 200 interviews will be released in a virtual event on Sept. 22. Town residents will be invited to join the Zoom event; everyone will be invited to watch on Facebook live. And anyone can buy the book with all 200 interviews.

Whatever the reason you think you don’t want to vote, or campaign, or help get out the vote, you and more than 200 million other Americans have an opportunity to cast a ballot and have a voice in the direction this country is taking. Only about half of us typically do so.

There are a million reasons NOT to do something. There is only this one chance every four years to make your voice heard in a presidential election. Big or small as your influence may be, this is your chance.

Whether or not you come to our video launch, or buy our book, vote! Tell your friends to vote. Then again, why not see what our towns had to say in our Together We Vote launch on Sept. 22 at 7 p.m. EST, 6 p.m. CT.

Write togetherwevote@gmail.com for more information or just follow us on Facebook live at https://www.facebook.com/events/316403389730906

You can contact Guy and Amy at colorusconnected@gmail.com.