Indiana Little

Indiana Tuggle Little (born April 15, 1897 in Wyatt, Georgia; died September 22, 1970 in Birmingham) was Black suffragist in 1920s Birmingham.

Tuggle was the 8th of 9 children born to George and Harriet Tuggle, who were farm laborers in Georgia. She attended school through 7th grade. She married Terrell Little in 1918 and had two daughters with him in Georgia before the family moved to Birmingham in 1923. Terrell took a job at a foundry as a riveter.

On January 18, 1926, several years after ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Little led a group of applicants (reported variously as "25" or as "many hundreds", and mostly women) to register to vote at the Jefferson County Courthouse. A contemporary account quoted her statement to registrar Luther Bowen: "I am a free-born citizen of America and by the fourteenth amendment of the U.S. Constitution I shall not be denied the right to vote because of race, color, or sex, and I will not move until I have been registered."

According to one account, Bowen told her that they would not be able to qualify under the educational test provided in the Alabama Constitution of 1901, and Little retorted by shouting that, "it is only red tape to keep us from voting," and that, "we demand our rights as American citizens". Bowen was quoted by the Birmingham News as saying that voting should be, "a white man's business" and that "too many"

Bowen claimed to have allowed the applicants to fill out the proper forms which she would turn over to be graded by the board of registrars, and that if qualified they would then be registered to vote, as many other Black citizens had already done.

Courthouse officials charged Little with "being boisterous and raising a disturbance in the county court house,". The charge was changed to "vagrancy" and "resisting arrest" when she was booked into the Jefferson County Jail. She was released on $300 bond by Judge H. B. Abernethy. Ohio Bell, president of the Ex-Soldiers' Cooperative Association, led a collection to pay her bond.

In an affidavit, Little claimed to have been "beat over the head unmercifully and ...forced upon the officer's demand to yield to him in an unbecoming manner." She named Chief Deputy Henry S. Hill as her assailant. County officials claimed to have insufficient manpower to investigate her allegation.

It has been suggested that Little's march was planned to coincide with the arrival of W. B. Poole of the U.S. Justice Department, who had been invited by District Attorney C. B. Kennamer to review the voting registration process in Jefferson County. Poole disavowed any specific federal investigation into registration drives such as Little's.

Little's action inspired follow-up marches that were equally unsuccessful. She also inspired Bell's organization of former soldiers to petition Governor William Brandon to protect the rights of Black citizens to be qualified as voters due to their status as having served the country in war (a provision of the 1901 Constitution intended to further disenfranchise African Americans). Brandon declined.

Little was finally registered to vote in 1957. She remained active as a community leader and as a Sunday School and Training Union teacher at 23rd Street Baptist Church.

References

• "Registry Office is Quiet After 'Suffrage' Row" (January 19, 1926) The Birmingham News, p. 1
• "Negress Facing Vagrancy Charge" (January 20, 1926), p. 22
• "Woman's Color Causes Assault: Mrs. Little Is Jailed When She Refuses to Leave Registrar's Office" (January 23, 1926) The Birmingham Reporter, p. 1
• "Joker in Alabama Constitution Lets Many Negroes Vote" (January 26, 1926) The Boston Evening Transcript
• "Ask Ballots in Alabama; Get Beating" (January 30, 1926) Chicago Defender
• "Birmingham Woman Held in Registration Dispute; Dept. of Justice on Hand" (January 30, 1926) Pittsburgh Courier
• Brittain, Joseph M. (April 1962) "Some Reflections on Negro Suffrage and Politics in Alabama Past and Present". Journal of Negro History, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 127–138
• Gidlow, Liette (2017) Resistance After Ratification: The Nineteenth Amendment, African American Women, and the Problem of Female Disenfranchisement After 1920. Alexander Street.
• Staples, Brent (February 2, 2019) "When the Suffrage Movement Sold Out to White Supremacy." The New York Times
• Royster, Briana Adline (2019) "Biography of Indiana T. Little, 1897–1970". Biographical Database of Black Women Suffragists. Alexander Street.

External links

• "I Will Not Move: The Story of Alabama Suffragist Indiana Little" (March 18, 2021) Presentation by Briana Royster for the Alabama Department of Archives and History.