Member-only story
White Women Owe Thanks to Black People
The quiet winners of Black-led movements
Three times in the last 100 years, major pushes for Black civil rights ended up producing their greatest gains not for Black people — but for white women.
The first wave came in the early 1900s.
Black Americans were actively organizing, protesting, and agitating for full citizenship — not just freedom from slavery, but access to voting, protection from lynching, quality education, and economic opportunity. Groups like the Niagara Movement (founded in 1905) — a forerunner to the NAACP — called for racial equality and full suffrage for both Black men and women.
Black women were especially active, building political associations through the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and pushing for justice within organizations like the NAACP and YWCA. Leaders like Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper risked everything to demand not just women’s rights — but Black women’s rights.
Yet when the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, it was white women who reaped the benefits. Black women in the Jim Crow South still faced poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, and outright violence at the ballot box. The civil rights momentum — driven in large part by Black organizing — was rerouted…
