Clinton Presidential Center Presents “Votes for ALL Women: Women of Color and the Fight for Suffrage”

Clinton Presidential Center Presents “Votes for ALL Women: Women of Color and the Fight for Suffrage” on Thursday, October 6th, at 6:00 p.m. Dr. Cathleen Cahill, Dr. Cherisse Jones-Branch, Dr. Marjorie Spruill, and Latonya Wilson will explore the vital, but often overlooked, work done by women of color to ensure votes for all women. This program is presented in conjunction with our special exhibition, “Women’s Voices, Women’s Votes, Women’s Rights.”

The program will be held in-person at the Clinton Center and streamed live online at live.clintonpresidentialcenter.org.

Clinton Presidential Center Presents is a partnership between the Clinton Foundation, Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, and Clinton Presidential Library.

This program is supported in part by the National Archives Foundation as well as the Arkansas Humanities Council in conjunction with the Bending Toward Justice lecture series.

Dr. Cathleen D. Cahill is the Walter L. Ferree and Helen P. Ferree Professor in Middle-American History at the Pennsylvania State University who earned her PhD at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Federal Fathers & Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 and Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (2020).

Dr. Cherisse Jones-Branch is the James and Wanda Lee Vaughn Professor of History, Dean of the Graduate School at Arkansas State University-Jonesboro, and a 2021-2022 American Council on Education/Lumina Fellow at the University of Central Arkansas. A native of Charleston, South Carolina, she received her B.A. and M.A. from the College of Charleston, and a doctorate in History from The Ohio State University.  Dr. Jones-Branch is the author of Crossing the Line: Women and Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II and the co-editor of Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times.   A second manuscript, Better Living By Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1913-1965, is now available from the University of Arkansas Press.  Jones-Branch is currently working on a third book project titled “. . . To Make the Farm Bureau Stronger and Better for All the People: African Americans and the American Farm Bureau Federation: 1920-1966″. She is additionally a U.S. Army Persian Gulf War Veteran.

Dr. Marjorie J. Spruill is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of the University of South Carolina. She is known for her work on women’s movements in the United States from the woman suffrage movement through the modern feminist and antifeminist movements and the history of the American South. Spruill is the author and editor of numerous books and shows including, Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (2017), the second edition of One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (NewSage Press), and New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (Oxford University Press).

Latonya Wilson is a native Arkansan, having spent her childhood in both Marianna, Arkansas and Little Rock where she graduated from John L. McClellan High School. She earned a Psychology degree from Hendrix College, a M.A. in Missions and Intercultural Studies with an emphasis in Urban Studies from Wheaton Graduate School, and a M.A. in Public Service from the Clinton School of Public Service. She also studied comparative social and civic movements between African Americans after desegregation and South Africans post apartheid at the University of  Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. While working for the education department of the Old State House Museum, Latonya researched African American Arkansas history with a bulk of her focus on the lives and work of Arkansas’ African American legislators who served between 1869-1893, African American women’s suffrage, and slavery and reconstruction in Arkansas. Most recently, her work with the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites and their partnership with the William G. Pomeroy Foundation resulted in the installment of a physical marker honoring Black Arkansan suffragist, Mame Stewart Josenberger. In Latonya’s free time, she enjoys following politics, traveling, reading, cooking and spending time with family.