Adella Hunt Logan

Title

Adella Hunt Logan

Description

Years before W.E.B.DuBois devoted a special issue of The Crisis to women’s suffrage, Adella Hunt Logan published a comprehensive argument for the vote in The Colored American, the most widely read African-American publication of the day. 🧵

Adella Hunt Logan was an active and influential suffragist for 20 years. She was the only African-American life member of NAWSA. When NAWSA barred Black women from conventions, she and Georgia Stewart, who could also pass, went and reported what transpired.

Adella taught for years at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. She was a mainstay of the Tuskegee Woman’s Club, founded by Margaret Murray Washington. As both a clubwoman and a professor, Adella initiated extensive suffrage activities at Tuskegee.

She gave lectures; she organized “lantern shows” about suffrage foremothers like Sojourner Truth; she coached the debate team, so suffrage was their topic. S

he was training them to be emissaries, explains Rosalyn Terborg-Penn.

Voting in Alabama couldn’t have felt imminent to Adella’s students at Tuskegee. But many of them would live and work outside the South, in places where women were winning some voting rights. She made sure they were prepared.

Her 1905 essay in the Colored American asked bluntly:

“If white American women, with all their natural and acquired advantages, need the ballot....how much more do Black Americans, male and female need the strong defense of a vote to help secure them their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”

Tragically, Adella died by suicide in 1915 at the age of 52.

Historian Adele Logan Alexander is Adella’s granddaughter, and the source of much of the rich detail on her suffrage activity. We can read more in her new book, Princess of the Hither Isles.

The cover is a haunting portrait of Adella by the African-American painter William Edouard Scott, completed posthumously. #Suffrage100 #BlackSuffragists #CenturyofStruggle 

Creator

Daily Suffragist

Date

17/05/2020

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Citation

Daily Suffragist, “Adella Hunt Logan,” Daily Suffragist, accessed March 28, 2024, https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/384.

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