Black women suffragists holding sign reading “Head-Quarters for Colored Women Voters” in Georgia

African American women participated in the suffragist movement despite efforts to exclude them solely because of their race, but visual evidence of their involvement is rare. The women in this photograph stand in front of the “Colored Women Voters” headquarters in Georgia. Madeline Shivery (fourth from right), whose family preserved this image, was a schoolteacher and community leader in Savannah, Georgia, who was active in the suffragist movement. About a year after this photograph was taken, the United States of America amended the Constitution with the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women of all races the legal right to vote. Many states and local communities, however, instituted policies that effectively barred people of color from voting up until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which continues, to some degree, to protect those rights today.