Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Ph.D., president and national chair of the National Council of Negro Women Inc., is in Pasadena, California, to participate in the 131st Rose Parade on New Year’s Day.
Cole and about a dozen women representing the American Association of University Women, League of Women Voters, Ms. Foundation and other organizations will ride on the women’s suffrage float in the parade, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.
Cole, the seventh president of NCNW and former president of Spelman and Bennett colleges, and legendary farmworker organizer Dolores Huerta will be among those riding on the float as hundreds of other women from across the country dressed in white and period costumes walk alongside it.
The 19th Amendment went into effect in 1920. Although it outlawed sex discrimination in voting, it would be decades before Black women in the South voted routinely. Reactionaries erected myriad barriers to the ballot box, a misguided trend that is echoed in today’s voter purges and ID laws.
Since its founding in 1937 by Mary McLeod Bethune, the National Council of Negro Women has worked to expand voting rights and economic opportunity to all people, especially women of African descent.
—janice l. mathis, executive director, National Council of Negro Women Inc.
