Rodney Square, 10th and Market Streets, Wilmington
Site of Rally
Delaware’s first major suffrage parade ended with a rally at 10th and
Market Streets, now the site of the city’s central square, on May 2,
1914. The display was part of a nationwide undertaking, designed to call
attention to the need for a federal amendment to the U.S. Constitution,
allowing suffragists to shift their energy from the time-consuming
undertakings of convincing individual state legislatures to amend their
voting laws.
“The site’s significance can hardly be overstated,” Boylan and her
colleagues wrote in the site’s application for recognition. The parade’s
marchers included a group of African American suffragists. Delaware was
unusual among segregated states in that it did not disenfranchise Black
men. When the 1897 revision of the state constitutions removed existing
restrictions, Black men could vote in Delaware. Therefore, if women
were given the right to vote in the state, the electorate would include
Black women.
The Wilmington Equal Suffrage Study Club, a Black suffragists group,
paraded in a separate “colored” unit with members of the (white)
Delaware Equal Suffrage Association and the Congressional Union for
Women’s Suffrage (later the National Woman’s Party). This showing
included a homemakers division, the Newport suffragists’ float, the
mortarboard-wearing College Women’s group, the Men’s Equal Suffrage
Club, the doctors’ and nurses’ section, the children’s division, as well
as the Wilmington Fife and Drum Corps, representatives of the Arden,
Delaware single tax colony; the YWCA; some socialists; and a “boys
section.”
1310 N. French Street, Wilmington
Home of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)
A poet, journalist and teacher, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was Delaware’s
leading African American suffragist. She co-founded the Wilmington Equal
Suffrage Study Club in 1914 and served as the Black women’s advocacy
group’s first president. In 1920, during the ill-fated effort to
convince the Delaware General Assembly to ratify the 19th Amendment,
Dunbar-Nelson made joint appearances with the state’s National Woman’s
Party chair, Florence Bayard Hilles. The appearance of an African
American suffragist and a white suffragist together in Black churches
and schools was deeply controversial. Some racist legislators, bent on
defeating the ratification, used the inclusion of Black women on the
voting rolls as a scare tactic. A comment from Delaware’s recently
defeated U.S. Senator Willard Saulsbury exemplifies the tone. Saulsbury
referred to his African American constituents as “a dense mass of black
ignorance.”
Following ratification, Dunbar-Nelson began canvassing the city,
registering Black women in preparation for the 1920 elections. Then, in
early 1921, she joined a delegation of 60 Black clubwomen and suffrage
leaders protesting the National Woman’s Party’s unwillingness to press
for federal action to defend the voting rights of Black women in the
states of the former Confederacy. She spent the rest of her life as an
advocate for civil rights, peace and women’s international cooperation.
(The University of Delaware Library holds Dunbar-Nelson’s papers. The collection has recently been digitized, offering easier access to scholars worldwide.)