Hallie Quinn Brown, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Republican Party Politics

Hallie Quinn Brown, a suffragist, educator, and noted elocutionist who had taught school in South Carolina and Mississippi, was living in Ohio when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Fannie Barrier Williams was a suffragist, educator, artist, and noted lecturer who fought for African American women’s representation at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition and within the NAWSA in the early twentieth century. Like many other African Americans, Brown and Williams supported Warren G. Harding and the Republican Party in the 1920 election, but because of the party’s weak antilynching stance, the National Association of Colored Women, of which Brown was then vice president and Williams had been a founder, withheld a formal endorsement of him. In 1924, Brown was director of Colored Women’s Activities for the Republican national campaign.