08/19/2026
On this day, we remember: it took generations, and it wasn't finished in 1920.
August 18, 1920. The 19th Amendment was ratified, guaranteeing that the right to vote could not be denied on account of s*x. That day was the culmination of a fight that had been building for well over a century, and one that Black women helped lead even as they were pushed to its margins.
In 1776, Abigail Adams urged her husband John, then helping draft the young nation's laws, to "remember the ladies." He laughed it off. Decades later, Sojourner Truth stood before a women's rights convention in 1851 and demanded that the movement reckon with both racism and s*xism. Women organized in earnest at Seneca Falls in 1848, and Susan B. Anthony was arrested and put on trial in 1872 simply for casting a ballot.
Black women organizers like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell fought for suffrage alongside white women while also fighting the racism within the movement itself. In the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, organizers tried to force Wells-Barnett to march in a segregated unit at the back. She refused, and marched with her Illinois delegation instead (pictured below, under the Illinois banner).
But 1920 and the ratification of 19A did not deliver on its promise for everyone. Black women had fought for the vote alongside white women for decades, yet in the Jim Crow South, poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright violence and intimidation kept the ballot out of reach. It took another 45 years, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, before Black women could actually exercise the right that white women had won in 1920.
The work of building a fuller, more inclusive democracy didn't end in 1920, and it isn't finished today. Delaware Democrats honor the generations of women of every race who fought, marched, and sacrificed for the vote by continuing that fight to ensure every voter's voice is heard. 🗳️
Pictured: suffragists from colleges across the country (Kansas, Missouri, Stanford, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, Vassar, Oberlin, and more) picketing outside the White House in February 1917, demanding President Wilson answer for how long women would have to wait for liberty. Also pictured: Ida B. Wells-Barnett marching with the Illinois delegation at the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington.
Photo 1: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=790966)
Photo 2: 1913 Chicago Daily Tribune photograph of Ida B. Wells, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80147255)
