"THE MEMORY OF AUGUST"

“THE MEMORY OF AUGUST”

            August is a month of many anniversaries.   Some are great memories, like the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, which ended neo-slavery in the United States.  Some are horrible, like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and like the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which basically authorized the Vietnam War.  There are many others, but two more are coming in these next two weeks, one a work of justice and the other a disaster.  This week marks the 99^th anniversary of the ratification of the 19^th Amendment, and next week marks the 400^th anniversary of Africans being brought as slaves to the English colonies in Virginia (one year before the Mayflower arrived).  This week, it’s on to the 19^th Amendment, which gave white women the right to vote.

            This work was a couple of centuries in the making, but its official beginning is marked as the Seneca Falls Convention in New York in 1848, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.  At this convention, attended by 300 delegates, a “Declaration of Sentiments” was adopted, urging that women be given the vote.  The three Amendments passed after the Civil War (13-15^th) basically re-wrote the U.S. Constitution, but they did not address the rights of women.  There was a bitter fight over the 15^th Amendment, which basically gave the right to vote to black men.  Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass argued against including women in this amendment, because he did not think that the votes would be there for both.  Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and others argued strongly that women should be included in the voting rights amendment.  Women were not included in the Amendment, and they began the work for passing a new amendment to the Constitution.

            A new Amendment to grant the vote to women was introduced into Congress in 1878, but it got nowhere.  Stanton and Anthony were joined by a new generation of leaders like Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Ida Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Carrie Chapman Catt to work for this amendment.  The same struggles ensued – some like Burns wanted to approach the problem by going through the state constitutions.  Some, like Paul and Catt and Wells, wanted to get the federal constitution changed.  As always, the issue of race was central too – would they address voting rights for all women, or just women classified as “white?”  Like the struggle over the 15^th Amendment, this would be a hard struggle, and although there is no racial classification mentioned in the 19^th Amendment, there was no guarantee for votes for all women.

            After much hard work, especially by the National Women’s Party, President Woodrow Wilson agreed to call a special session of Congress in 1919 to press for the passage of the 19^th Amendment.  It passed the House on May 21, passed the Senate on June 4, and thus this is the 100^th anniversary of congressional passage of the 19^th Amendment.  But, it could not become law until three quarters of the states passed it.  It was sent to the states for ratification, needing 36 to pass.  Many states passed it quickly, although states such as Vermont, Delaware, and Connecticut declined to ratify it.  That process moved it into 1920, and states began to pass it.  The state of Washington passed it, becoming the 35^th state to do so.  That pushed the struggle to the state of Tennessee, which became the symbol of the last hope, because the remaining states were all in the former Confederacy, and those prospects did not look good, although Arkansas and Texas had already passed it.

            There was a harsh and difficult battle in Tennessee over the 19^th Amendment (for a good history on this, see “The Women’s Hour” by Elaine Weiss).  The votes needed to pass it were hard to come by, though initial procedural votes to move it were tied at 45-45.  Still, with a tie vote, it could not be moved.  A final vote would be held the next day, and in the meantime, one of the legislators who had opposed it had a change of heart.  Harry Burns found a note from his mother, which indicated that he should vote for ratification.  The next day he shocked everyone by changing his position and voting for ratification, and the 19^th Amendment moved to ratification by that one vote.  After his vote, Harry Burns had to flee the building to save his life, but on August 18, 1920, the 19^th Amendment was ratified.  On August 26, the U.S. Congress certified the vote, and the 19^th Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution.  

            That margin of one vote indicates the tenuousness of human rights in the “land of the free.”  One of my early conversations with Caroline’s paternal grandmother, Sophie Leach, was about the 19^th Amendment.  She indicated that she did not think that women should have gotten the vote as a young mother, but when they got the right to vote, she was always going to vote.  And she did vote in every election until her death in 1978: 58 years of voting.  In our day when many hard-won rights are once again in contention, let us remember this story.  Let us celebrate the hard work of those who helped us attain some human rights in this country, but let us also remember how tenuous they are.  Hate, like kudzu, has deep roots, and it is always resprouting and seeking to spread.  Let us be those tenders of the garden who seek to uproot the weeds of hate and oppression and who seek to grow the flowers of equity and justice.  We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.