Billie Jean King celebrates anniversary of women’s voting rights, noting there’s more to be done
She adds that many women of color had to wait for the right to vote.
Tennis legend and activist Billie Jean King celebrated Women’s Equality Day Monday with a post on X.
“104 years ago today, the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was certified, granting white women the right to vote,” the out sports icon wrote. “Black and Brown women had to wait decades. We’ve made progress toward equality in so many areas, but we’re not done yet.”
Actually, the 19th Amendment technically granted all female U.S. citizens aged 21 and older the right to vote, but discriminatory state laws stood in the way for women of color, especially Black women in the South.
“Poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud and intimidation all turned African Americans away from the polls,” as the Library of Congress notes. “Until the Supreme Court struck it down in 1915, many states used the ‘grandfather clause’ to keep descendants of slaves out of elections. The clause said you could not vote unless your grandfather had voted — an impossibility for most people whose ancestors were slaves.”
It took the Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, to ban the other methods used to keep Black Americans from voting. Before its passage, an estimated 23 percent of Black Americans were registered to vote; by 1969, the figure was 61 percent, according to the Library of Congress.
President Joe Biden made a proclamation for Women’s Equality Day. “The 19th Amendment marked a critical milestone in our Nation’s history, but it did not guarantee the right to vote for all,” the proclamation reads in part. “For many women of color, that right would not be secured until decades later when the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Today, our Nation is still facing relentless assaults on the sacred right to vote freely and fairly and to have every vote count. At the same time, women’s fundamental rights are under attack, which undermines our democracy and our freedoms. These challenges serve as a critical reminder that our work as a Nation is never done — realizing the full promise of the 19th Amendment is as important today as ever before.”
A women’s suffrage amendment was first proposed in Congress in 1878, but it failed to pass several times. (It should be noted that some suffragists were loath to include women of color in their movement.) Supporters of voting rights for women were still trying in the 1910s, when President Woodrow Wilson first opposed and then embraced the amendment. In 1919, he called a special session of Congress to vote on it, and it finally passed. Like all constitutional amendments, it had to be ratified by legislatures in three-quarters of the states to go into effect. This finally happened on August 18, 1920, with Tennessee’s ratification, and on August 26 of that year, U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the ratification, making the amendment part of the Constitution.
“My Administration is committed to upholding the vision of suffragists, who understood that equality at the ballot box was a critical step to advancing rights and opportunities for American women,” Biden’s proclamation continues. “Over the past three and a half years, Vice President Harris and I have leveraged the full force of the Federal Government to protect those rights and remove barriers that prevent women and girls from reaching their full potential. We are defending reproductive freedom, delivering the highest women’s prime-age labor force participation and the narrowest gender pay gap on record, making historic investments in the care economy, fighting to end violence against women, increasing access to educational opportunity, and promoting women’s representation, leadership, and human rights here at home and around the globe.”
Now Vice President Kamala Harris, a Black woman of Jamaican and Indian heritage, is the Democratic nominee for president — with a chance to shatter the highest glass ceiling hovering over American women.