Black Baptist women turned the Great Migration into voter mobilization despite their own disfranchisement

Evidence

Leaders of the Woman’s Convention insisted that women’s suffrage, when coupled with black northward migration, held the key to black political power. Immediately after World War I, S. Willie Layten urged blacks to turn their Great Migration into a political advantage. With- Out racist voting restrictions, northern states afforded many southern migrants an opportunity to wield the ballot for the first time. Layten challenged her sisters, although disfranchised because of sex, to educate the male migrants concerning their political rights and the potential enlargement of the black electorate because of black women voters. She urged northern urban churches to assist in the political mobilization of the migrants. The church, Layten reasoned, remained the most logical institution to promote a voter education program. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 1029

Categorization

• XREF: Shows black women acting as political educators for men while excluded from the franchise themselves; resonates with the respectability-as-resistance thesis context. — connects to: Exclusion from electoral politics drove black women to build their own representative bodies. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 690; Black women shaped collective sentiment through their two-thirds majority in the Baptist movement — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 63; Black Baptist women’s activism worked gradually and subversively, not through dramatic revolt — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 113 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The Great Migration functioned as a mass antiracist movement through escape rather than protest. #qualifies (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 807
• Black Baptist women turned pro-war patriotism into leverage for racial justice demands #expands (0.78) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 1020
• Black Baptist women’s activism worked gradually and subversively, not through dramatic revolt #complicates (0.72) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 113