On Oct. 8 at 11 a.m., the third event of the Centennial of Women’s Suffrage Series will take place on Zoom. This event focuses on Black women and the Suffrage Movement and will be presented by Winthrop University history professor Jennifer Dixon-McKnight.
“Part of the purpose of the event is to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of women getting the right to vote and to talk about Black women’s suffrage,” McKnight said.
She wants to “shed light” on the “very distinct” experiences of “Black women and the suffrage movement.”
During the event, McKnight plans to have a PowerPoint presentation that people will be able to view while she is presenting. The presentation “will portray some of the preliminary histories of Black women’s ability to vote and their political engagement even though they did have the right to vote before the nineteenth amendment.”
The event will help inform those who want to learn more about the history of black women and the suffrage movement. The hope is that this event will continue to enlighten people about information they may have not known.
Dixon-McKnight will also talk about Black women’s work in regards to the suffrage movement.
She plans to touch on how different the experience of the members of the “Black women’s suffrage movement was from the white women’s suffrage movement and that it was often that white women suffrage organizations barred black
women from being a part of them.”
She will also explain “their experience with getting the right to vote and the struggle for the right to vote and how they were both fighting against the issue with gender and the issue associated with their race.”
The presentation will include information about the aftermath of the nineteenth amendment and “the way Black women continue to struggle even though the nineteenth amendment had been realized it did not play out for Black women as easily as they hoped it would.”
McKnight said that she will talk about how “their political engagement was not accepted and how they struggled to find a placed politically even after the nineteenth amendment.”
This cultural event is only one of the events Dixon-Mcknight has done.
”I teach on the African American experience, that is my specialty–talking about the African American experience, particularly in the twentieth century, and there will be other events.”
The event will be held via Zoom and the number of people that can attend online will be three hundred people maximum, according to McKnight. To attend the event, students must register for the Zoom event in advance. According to Winthrop’s website, students can receive credit for a cultural event and are required to “join the video session on time and enable their web cameras during the event.”
Any student can attend this event to learn more information about Black women and the suffrage movement. Be sure to register before the event fills up if you’re interested.
Photo by Emma Crouch.
