BY LEE ROOP

State and local leaders dedicated a new historic marker in downtown Huntsville Wednesday marking the complicated battle of Alabama women for the right to vote.
The purple “Votes for Women” marker – purple was the color for women’s suffrage – is the first of six planned for Alabama cities and funded by the William Pomeroy Foundation. The remaining monuments will be in Decatur, Birmingham, Selma, Tuskegee and Mobile.
The fight for women’s right to vote in Alabama was caught up in the state’s fight to keep Black citizens from voting. “Since Alabama had spent so much time and energy disenfranchising its Black citizens in (the Constitution of) 1901, the last thing they wanted to do was open a door that would allow more Black people to vote through an equal suffrage amendment,” ” Historic Huntsville Foundation CEO Donna Castellano said Wednesday.
“Fortunately for Alabama, Tennessee made that decision for us,” Castellano said. That state became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment in 1920 granting women the right to vote nationwide.
Alabama did strike back with its literacy test, poll tax and requirement that voters own property. But Castellano said after the 19th Amendment “124,000 Alabama women did register to vote, more than any other state in the South.” She repeated for emphasis: “More than any other state in the South.”
That is important, Castellano said, because of how women changed Alabama with their votes. “There was legislation which restricted the employment of children in coal mines and textile mills,” she said. “Alabama women’s votes did that. There were bills passed that provided for health care facilities in rural Alabama counties. They funded education and teacher training, and they also got rid of Alabama’s convict labor lease system, which was a form of institutionalized slavery through Alabama’s prison system.
“Things began to change when Alabama women got the vote,” Castellano said. “They certainly made an impact.”
The Huntsville Equal Suffrage Association formed in 1895 when Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt spoke in the city. The movement suffered “fits and starts” because of the concerns about Black votes, she said
But there was enough interest to try again in 1912. That is when the Huntsville Equal Suffrage Association reformed, Castellano said. That happened at the old downtown YMCA, where the building still stands and the Pomeroy monument is located.
One year later, the State Women’s Suffrage Association convened in Selma. And in 1914, it convened again in Huntsville.