Baltimore's African American suffragists

Augusta T. Chissell (Courtesy of Mark Young)

Johns Hopkins Medicine and Nursing excluded African Americans from their ranks in the early twentieth century, as did Maryland's white-run suffrage groups. Elizabeth King Ellicott’s Equal Suffrage League of Baltimore proposed voting criteria, such as literacy tests, that were known tools for disenfranchising people of color. Edith Hooker’s Just Government League was relatively more liberal, supporting political equality but social segregation. Black suffragists challenged the racist tactics of these prominent groups while also doing their own organizing.

Church groups and women's clubs, which coordinated through the National Conference of Colored Women, had long been central to the struggle for Black rights. Baltimore’s network of African American women’s clubs took up suffrage alongside urgent issues such as education, housing, and health care. They promoted the vote as a tool for combatting racist policies. Leaders were often connected to the Black medical community. Augusta T. Chissell and Estelle Hall Young, the wives of prominent Black physician Dr. Robert G. Chissell and pharmacist Dr. Howard E. Young, helped form the Progressive Women’s Suffrage Club.