Lifting as We Climb: Black Women's Battle for the Ballot Box

by Evette Dionne

For them, ending slavery wasn’t just about being on the right side of history or taking a moral stance. For Black women, abolition meant the difference between living freely and without fear and being sent back to plantations where they would surely be tortured for escaping and their children could be sold away from them at any time. Many of these women were active abolitionists because they had a firsthand understanding of how high the stakes were for themselves and their families.

They realized that in order to achieve their goals, they needed to move away from treating slavery as a moral conundrum. They needed to make slavery a political issue, and in order to do that, they needed to be involved in the political process. Women needed to be equal members of organizations. They needed be able to vote, to run for office, and to be elected—all elements of public life that had long been denied to American women, including and especially Black women.

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

“And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long,” she said at the end of her speech. “Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.”

In 1957, Dorothy Irene Height became the president of the National Council of Negro Women, and she turned the organization’s focus toward the next phase of what was becoming the Civil Rights Movement: integrating housing and securing the right to vote. Height was the only woman invited to be on the administrative committee for the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech.

Much like the original suffrage movement, the Civil Rights Movement sidelined Black women, relegating them to the background even as they contributed so much to the fight for civil rights.

It is estimated that there will be more people of color than white people in the United States by 2045, so guaranteeing that all people can exercise their right to vote is one of the only ways to ensure that equality continues being a part of America’s future.