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Lula Murry knew her rights. After the Jefferson County, Alabama Board of Registrars rejected her voter registration application in the fall of 1923, Murry, a woman in her fifties whose roots reached back to Georgia and whose husband made a steady living as a mattress maker, took the problem straight to President Calvin Coolidge. Her family had fulfilled its obligations to the nation; she expected the federal government to fulfill its obligations to her. Two of her brothers had answered the nation's call to military service in its “time of … Greatest necessity,” she wrote, one giving his life “in the defense cause in [the] time known as the world war to elevate to safe democracy.” Her complaint? That, in Birmingham, “safe democracy” was nowhere to be found. “Here I stand denied the constitution rights in Article XIV and XV … [and] I being a woman[,] the 19th Amendment of the Constitution of U.S.” Murry was as fearless as she was firm. In Jim Crow Alabama, she wrote her name and return address on the envelope and sent the letter by registered mail.1
Like many American women in the early years after the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Lula Murry found that she still could not vote.2 Like many African Americans of her day, she connected the success or failure of the Nineteenth Amendment in securing voting rights for African American women to the history of the Fourteenth and especially the Fifteenth Amendments in the years after Reconstruction. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, established that African Americans were citizens and, for the first time, expressly protected voting rights for adult male citizens. Two years later, the Fifteenth Amendment proclaimed that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Backed by these amendments, in the living memory of many of her contemporaries and quite possibly within her own, vast multitudes of African American men in the South had in fact voted in elections supervised by the U.S. military and then in the reconstructed states. Black men's turnout peaked at perhaps 90 percent in...