Adele Logan Alexander

Adele Logan Alexander (born January 26, 1938) is an American academic and author who is a history professor at George Washington University. She is known for her work on family history, gender, and social issues in African American families.

Quotes

• Can I add something about time? Clearly this year’s centennial is a significant landmark, but it’s not the only date we should be thinking of. The federal Voting Rights Act, which became law in 1965, was incredibly important too, because the passage of that legislation supposedly guaranteed the franchise to African-American women — since even after ratification of the 19th Amendment, stifling Jim Crow regulations throughout the South had kept the vote from women, as much as they did for Black men.
  • One of the things The Times is aiming to do in its coverage of the centennial — and in an upcoming book — is overturn some of the misconceptions about the path to voting rights in this country, and present readers with a more complete story. Where would you begin?
• To me, there is an emotional connection to it. I have a visceral memory of the first time I went into a voting booth with my mother. I couldn’t have been more than 3, because the muscle memory says I was reaching up for her hand. We went down into the bowels of the Washington Heights Library, in Upper Manhattan, and there was the voting booth with its old-fashioned pull curtain. This was long before anybody ever said the word “suffrage” to me. But nearly 50 years later, when I started studying this stuff seriously in graduate school, I thought, “Yes, that’s what I remember.” Both of my grandmothers were Black Southern suffragists in the early 1900s, and their beliefs and activities remained important family legacies through several generations
  • There is a misconception that drives us nuts, which is that women were “given” the right to vote — not that they fought for and won it. How do you describe what drove these women?
• I would say it is not one person nor one event, but the scarcely recorded efforts of anonymous women of all races, educational and economic levels who, for decades, talked with neighbors, held meetings, challenged their fathers, sons, husbands and employers — often putting themselves in physical and economic jeopardy to do so. They are the unknown heroes of the movement.
  • Those who learned anything about the suffrage movement in school probably learned about a handful of white, middle-class women from the Northeast: Stanton, Anthony, maybe Alice Paul. Who are some of the characters we may not know but should?
• One of the things that you see in many movements is that there is sort of a simplistic assumption that we must avoid, which is that progress moves forward in straight lines. And boy, does it ever not go in straight lines. It twists back, it doubles over itself. And it crosses many categories, such as economics, gender and race. That’s something that we may forget, and perhaps it goes against Dr. Martin Luther King’s precept that the arc of justice always bends forward
  • Adele, your grandmother, the suffragist Adella Hunt Logan, was once denied the opportunity to speak about the plight of Black women at a conference honoring Susan B. Anthony — because Anthony feared her presence might offend some white politicians. How should we think about the flawed, complicated — and sometimes flatly racist — figures like Anthony who were also critical parts of a movement?
• I often think of the women, my grandmother among them, who wore white dresses to protest the denial of their political empowerment. There were echoes of that symbolic garb during the campaigns of Shirley Chisholm, and in the glorious display of white pantsuits worn by the record number of multiracial, multicultural women who went to Congress as result of the 2018 election. I smiled when I saw them!
  • So much of this history feels so utterly relevant. How do you see the parallels of what these women were fighting for and what is happening today?
• My suffragist grandmother feels close to me today because her portrait still hangs in my apartment. The poster from the first “Afro-American Women and the Vote” conference also hangs on my wall, a testament to Adella and others like her.
  • Many of you have talked about how the visual artifacts of suffrage — pins, posters, tea sets — have become a way of keeping the movement alive. Which artifacts are most meaningful to you?