Challenges Black Women Faced in Registering and Voting in 1920

Eighty-one-year-old Adèle Clark, a white woman suffragist from Richmond, speaks about the particular difficulties that African American women faced in registering to vote and in casting their ballots in the 1920 national election. In this excerpt from an interview conducted on February 28, 1964, by Winston Broadfoot for the Duke Oral History Project, Clark notes the role of African American activists such as Ora Brown Stokes who worked to help overcome the barriers Black women faced.

Clark was a founding member of the all-white Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, a president of the all-white Virginia branch of the League of Women Voters, a university administrator, a New Deal–era field worker, and an accomplished artist and arts advocate.