and alice dunbar nelson was so mad about that she went over to the democrats. she said the republicans can't do better than that then we're leaving them be and she left and became the organizer of african-american women for the democratic party which had its headquarters in new york. and more and more across the 1920s, african-americans in cities in the north began to reconsider. they claimed that democrats in the north were not the same as democrats in the south. and given the disappointment that republicans had been, maybe it made sense to go to the democrats. hardly anyone went with her in the 1920s themselves in the decade of the 1920s itself. it's not until the second election of franklin roosevelt that massive numbers of african-americans moved to the democratic party. she a harbinger of things to come. i thought it would be good if we read together one of her poems. she was married to paul dunbar. but she was, herself, an important poet. i thought you might want to stand up. this is our halftime break. you might want to stand up and jiggle around and get

alice dunbar nelson is rejecting domesticity here. she would rather be on the battlefield than in her home. this is a very different kind of claim from political women than we have seen in the main before the 1920s. and there it is. all right. i want to shift gears a little bit to talk about some of the most important legislation and sort of causes that women fought for in the 1920s. but first i want to say a word about some organizational changes that occurred right around 1920, around the time of the amendment. first, the national american woman sufferage association which had been the largest of the sufferage organizations transformed itself into the league of women voters in 1920. an organization with which you are very family and the league of women voters and a slue of other national womens organizations joined together to form the women's joint congressional committee. it was an umbrella organization that was the will be bying arm of progressive women's organization. and one of the first things that they went after was women's

it's at that point that alice dunbar nelson says to heck with republicans i'm becoming a democratics. very few people followed her at that moment. it was a crushing defeat for women and men who worked so hard and had so much hope in the 1920s that maybe an anti-lynching bill will pass. it's not a surprise given everything we have been talking about but the ku klux klan was very visual in the 1920s. the clan had chapters in every state. had people elected to local offices from the klan. women were really active in the klan in the 1920s. one of the interesting thing about the activism of women of the klan in the 1920 is that although they're pressing an anti-catholic, anti-semetic, anti-black racist agenda they're for the equality of white women and white men. so the women who are active in the klan in 1920s are working women, not a majority of them are, but a solid minority were. there are women who were physicians, stenographers, small business owners and covered the whole range of women workers. they are very important in organizing boycotts against businesses that were owned by jews