On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was certified as ratified. The amendment reads: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

The amendment had been introduced in Congress every year from 1878 to 1919 — forty-one years — before passing. It had been preceded by a movement that had organized, demonstrated, been imprisoned, been force-fed in prison, been dismissed as lunatic, been dismissed as unfeminine, been dismissed as dangerous, and had kept organizing.

The story of the suffrage movement is usually told as the story of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton — two white women whose 1869 split with Frederick Douglass over the Fifteenth Amendment's failure to include women fractured the movement along racial lines for fifty years. The standard narrative moves from Seneca Falls (1848) to the Nineteenth Amendment (1920) with the racism of the mainstream movement treated as a regrettable side note.

It was not a side note. The National American Woman Suffrage Association accepted the disfranchisement of Black women as a political necessity to win Southern white women's support. Ida B. Wells was asked, at the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., to march at the back in the "colored" section rather than with the Illinois delegation. She marched with the Illinois delegation anyway, walking into the middle of the parade as it passed.

On August 26, 1920, the amendment took effect. Black women in Southern states were immediately subjected to the same literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and violence used to exclude Black men from voting. The Nineteenth Amendment did not protect them. The Voting Rights Act — passed forty-five years later, in 1965 — did.

The 1920 suffrage victory was real for some women. The women who had organized the movement in large part, and who were excluded from its gains in large part, were Black.