Indiana Little

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Indiana Tuggle Little (born January 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, a World War I veteran, in 1918. The couple had two daughters before moving to Birmingham in 1923. Terrell took a job at a foundry as a riveter. Indiana has been identified as a teacher in news accounts, but listed only her work as a maid on census forms.

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" African Americans had been seeking to register.

In another interview, 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 arrested Little for, "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, five years after her husband's death. She remained active as a community leader and as a Sunday School and Training Union teacher at 23rd Street Baptist Church. She died in 1970 and was survived by her daughter Lessie Tellis. She was buried at Shadow Lawn Memorial Gardens under a marker reading "Not my will but thine be done," a quote from Christ's prayer at the Mount of Olives in the Gospel of Luke.

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