Anne Dallas Dudley led suffrage

movement
DavidEwing5:25a.m.CDTApril27,2014

Inspired by Susan B. Anthony's speech at the Tennessee

Centennial Exposition in 1897, Dudley led the efforts to get
women the right to vote.

On the first Saturday of May 1914, Nashville became center of suffrage movement

Anne Dallas Dudley organized Nashville women and sparked Tennessee women to turn
out with their families.

Four years later, Tennessee became the state that ratified the 19th Amendment.

The events in Nashville on May 2, 1914, inspired a movement that changed

Tennessee and America.
On that day, 100 years ago, the women of Tennessee took to the streets and
paraded for their right to vote.
Almost 60 years before the brave, nonviolent African-American college students
sat at lunch counters to change Nashville's openly practiced segregation, these
women showed the way. They were organized and ready to take on unequal
practice by government.
Nashville was one of several major cities across the country where parades were
scheduled for the first Saturday in May. Anne Dallas Dudley, daughter of
Trevanion Dallas, a wealthy cotton mill owner, and great niece of George Dallas,
who was James K. Polk's vice president, organized the Nashville parade; it was
the first suffrage parade in the South. Anne, who served as president, and eight
other women formed the Nashville Equal Suffrage League.
Sixty automobiles, decorated with yellow banners, paraded from the Capitol to
Centennial Park. To counter the criticism that suffragists ignored their families,
Anne Dallas Dudley was joined in the lead car by her husband, Guilford Dudley,
co-founder of Life & Casualty Insurance Co., and their children, Trevania and
Guilford Jr.

Businesses along the parade route decorated their displays with yellow, the
suffrage movement's official color, and banners shouting "Votes for Women."
Mayor Hilary Ewing Howse declared an official half-day holiday, and those
women who could not leave work showered the cars with flowers from the
windows of their offices.
More than 2,000 people greeted the caravan when it arrived at the Parthenon
and listened to Anne Dudley's speech. She had been inspired, when she was a
volunteer during Tennessee Centennial Exposition in 1897, by Susan B.
Anthony's speech in the Woman's Building.
It was the largest rally Nashville had seen for women's suffrage, and observers
recalled her speech as the first outdoor speech by a woman in Tennessee in the
presence of a large audience.
Anne Dudley exhorted her audience with a populist message, saying, "Every
reform is started by a minority." She continued by hoping her native "Tennessee
would be the first Southern state to enfranchise women."
The successful parade and rally fueled Anne Dudley's invitation to the American
Woman Suffrage Association (the group founded by Susan B. Anthony) to hold its
national convention in Nashville. Two weeks after the parade, the group
committed to come.
Thousands of delegates descended on Nashville six months later, in November.
During convention sessions at Ryman Auditorium, sometimes lasting until 3 a.m.,
delegates learned organizing techniques and strategies, and how to lobby their
legislatures.
The momentum from this convention carried throughout the state and
empowered and grew the suffrage movement in Tennessee.
Nashville women held suffrage parades in 1915, and in 1916, they left their cars
at home and marched in the streets. The state became a major part of the
suffrage movement, and Anne Dudley became a member of the national suffrage
movement's board of directors.
On August 18, 1920, after all the other Southern states had rejected the 19th
Amendment, Tennessee was again at the center of the suffrage movement by
the narrowest of margins. Rep. Harry Burn, after getting a letter from his mother,
changed his vote to yes for suffrage, and the legislature made Tennessee the

deciding state to ratify the 19th Amendment. Burn's single vote granted suffrage
to 20 million women.
We should remember and honor these courageous women who took to the
streets to get the right to vote.
I urge the Metro Council to rename Capitol Boulevard "Anne Dallas Dudley
Boulevard" in honor of the woman who led the parades down the boulevard that
sparked the suffrage movement in Tennessee, and led to the passage of the 19th
Amendment.