By Jennifer Helton 

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I have been researching woman suffrage in Wyoming for many years. Occasionally, in the primary sources, I have come across fragmentary references to Black women voting during the territorial period. I noted these down, intending to eventually investigate them. Then, one day, while attending a talk on the history of Black women in the suffrage movement, given by Dr. Martha Jones of Johns Hopkins University, it dawned on me: The Black women who voted in 1870 were likely the first Black women in US history ever to vote.

I scoured the work of other scholars, both of Wyoming history and of Black women’s history, looking for more information. As far as I could tell, almost nothing had been written about these women. Clearly, there was an untold story here. I hope that the piece I have written for WyoHistory will inspire more scholars and community members to excavate this history.

Our job as historians is to serve the truth, to tell as accurate a story as we can of our past. But this is not always easy. Historians must base their interpretations of the past on evidence. The challenge is that not all people or events leave a trail of evidence to be followed. As far as I have been able to determine, none of the Wyoming newspapers noted, in September of 1870, that Black women had voted; the only accounts we have are two very brief accounts from territorial officials. There are no election records from 1870 that survive; and as yet, no sources from the women themselves have surfaced. For my piece in WyoHistory, I have relied mostly on what the 1869 and 1870 census can tell us. But I believe there is more research to be done on these women and the communities they built. Perhaps somewhere a family has a batch of old letters or a diary that records an ancestor’s experiences in territorial Wyoming. If so, I hope those documents make their way to an archive.

What the sources tell us so far is that the majority of Wyoming’s Black women came west with their families – though some adventurous women came independently. They did hard work: washing clothes, cleaning houses, running businesses, delivering babies. Some achieved a level of security and even prosperity, owning property and businesses. My sense is that more than anything, they came west looking for the opportunity to educate their children and shape their own lives - basic human rights that been denied to them and their community when slavery was still legal. 

It is always tricky to declare a historical event a “first.” It is not impossible that Black women voted elsewhere. Prior to the Civil War, almost four million African Americans were enslaved, but 488,000 were free. Of these, some lived in states where Black men had the right to vote. And although Wyoming Territory was the first place to grant full, unrestricted voting rights to all women citizens, a very small number of women in some states and territories held the right to vote in school elections. As far as is known, no Black women voted under these circumstances – but it is not impossible that they did. But even if that is the case, Wyoming’s Black women, like all of Wyoming’s women, were the first fully enfranchised female voters.

What does it mean to be the first place where Black women were free to vote? I think it is hard for most of us today to understand the kind of courage it took for Wyoming’s Black women to vote on that September day. Slavery had only been abolished for five years, and it had taken a horrific war to end it. Tensions still ran high. An undercurrent of violence was everywhere. In Wyoming, a Black man had been lynched in at Fort Halleck in September of 1863, and Black men had been harassed when they voted in the territory’s first election in 1869.

Nevertheless, for an hour or two, these women set aside the hard work they were doing to support their families. They went to the polls to represent themselves and their community, and to make their mark on the history of democracy. To me, their courage in the face of opposition personifies the Wyoming spirit. It is a part of our history that deserves recognition and celebration.

Read Jennifer Helton’s Article on Black Women Voting in 1870

Read Right Choice, Wrong Reasons: Wyoming Women Win the Right to Vote