Then
Black women faced racial exclusion within much of the suffrage movement while being denied meaningful electoral power.
On January 30, 1913, Ida B. Wells founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. Working with suffrage ally Belle Squire and a circle of Black women organizers, Wells created a political organization that would not make Black women choose between racial justice and women’s voting rights.
The club’s purpose extended beyond winning a legal right in the abstract. Members studied candidates, held meetings, published the Alpha Suffrage Record, and organized women to support officials who would answer to the Black community. By 1916, the club claimed nearly 200 members. Its work helped build support for Oscar DePriest, elected in 1915 as Chicago’s first Black alderman.
Illinois enacted presidential and municipal suffrage for women in June 1913. That was a major opening, but not full voting equality: women still could not vote in every contest, and discriminatory systems continued to obstruct Black voters. The Alpha Suffrage Club treated enfranchisement as both a right and a practice—one requiring information, organization, candidates, and sustained accountability.
Wells brought decades of investigative journalism and organizing to the club. Her anti-lynching campaign had demonstrated that public lies could sustain violence, so collecting facts and building independent Black institutions were political necessities. In suffrage work, she challenged white organizations that asked Black women to subordinate racial justice for the sake of a supposedly unified women’s movement.
That conflict became visible at the national suffrage parade in Washington in March 1913. Organizers attempted to segregate Black participants. Wells refused to accept a position at the rear and joined the Illinois delegation during the march. Her action showed that women’s voting rights could not be pursued credibly through racial exclusion.
The Alpha Suffrage Club converted principle into local power. Members learned the mechanics of registration and elections, evaluated candidates, communicated through their own publication, and mobilized neighborhoods. Supporting DePriest showed how Black women could influence government even before federal ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
January 30 honors organization as a technology of democracy. A ballot has little force when citizens lack information, access, or candidates responsive to their concerns. Wells and her colleagues built the relationships and knowledge needed to turn voting into accountability. Their work reminds us that equal suffrage was never only a story of sex; Black women confronted racism and sexism together because both shaped whether their political voices would count.
The club made political education a shared community practice rather than a privilege reserved for party insiders.