“When the ballot is put into the hands of the American woman the world is going to get a correct estimate of the Negro woman. It will find her a tower of strength of which poets have never sung, orators have never spoken, and scholars have never written.” Nannie Helen Burroughs, remarks from a 1915 speech
August 2025 marks the 105th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. The suffrage movement was a hard-fought battle that included well-known and unsung Black women who played significant roles in securing the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment by Congress. However, because of Jim Crow laws and other voter suppression tactics, Black women could not vote until well beyond 1920, and some didn’t live to see the realization of their vision and hard work.
There are very few children’s books by Black authors—or none at all—that tell the suffrage stories of women like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the women of Delta Sigma Theta, and countless other Black women who knew they would not see the fulfillment of their vision but fought anyway. The fiction and nonfiction titles include Evette Dionne’s Lifting as We Climb and Veronica Chambers’ Finish the Fight!, which highlight various BIPOC women.
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Wade Hudson | Don Tate | Nancy Paulsen Books | July 9, 2024 | PB
2. Ida B. Wells Marches for the Vote
Dinah Johnson | Jerry Jordan | Little, Brown/Ottaviano | January 2, 2024 | PB
Leah Henderson | Keisha Morris | HarperCollins | December 19, 2023 | PB
4. The Walk
Winsome Bingham | E. B. Lewis | Harry N. Abrams | September 12, 2023 | PB
5. Stacey Abrams and the Fight to Vote
Traci N. Todd | Laura Freeman | HarperCollins | August 30, 2022 | PB
6. Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer: The Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement
Carole Boston Weatherford | Ekua Holmes | Candlewick | August 4, 2015 | PB
7. Ida B. Wells: Let the Truth Be Told
Walter Dean Myers | Bonnie Christensen | Amistad BYR | October 28, 2008 | PB
8. The Story of Fannie Lou Hamer
Margeaux Weston | Simone Douglas | Callisto Kids | January 7, 2025 | Chp Bk
9. Mary Church Terrell: Speaking Out for Civil Rights
Cookie Lommel | Enslow | January 1, 2003 | Chp Bk
10. VIP: Stacey Abrams: Voting Visionary
Andrea J. Loney | Shellene Rodney | HarperCollins | January 18, 2022 | MG
11. Finish the Fight!: The Brave and Revolutionary Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote
Veronica Chambers | The Staff of The New York Times | Versify | August 18, 2020 | MG
12. Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box
Evette Dionne | Viking BYR | April 21, 2020 | MG
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