Untitled , 2022
[12]

As they protested through the streets of New York brandishing a long banner that read "President Wilson Says: 'This is the time to support Woman Suffrage," advocates for the movement famously used the President's words to energize themselves and attempt to sway naysayers into offering their support. Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe fought for women's suffrage as well, despite often facing discrimination in the white-dominated spaces. According to a October 23, 1915, Afro-American article, Dean Slowe "asserted that women need the right to vote as they are taxpayers, homemakers and deeply interested in all movements for civic betterment" in her address to the Sharp Street Memorial M.E. Church. Following the ratification of the 15th amendment in 1870 that gave Black men the right to vote and the 19th amendment in 1920 that gave all women the right to vote, many Black women and men still faced many obstacles in actually casting their ballots, as we still do today. In 1934, she commented on voting's vital purpose stating, "women, as well as men, must realize that in a democracy, the ballot is their only safeguard."

In this original art, Henderson transforms the historic photograph and slogan to consider how Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe may have intervened as a supporter of Stacey Abrams's gubernatorial campaigns through the lens of a speech Slowe actually gave in support of training more women deans to women of Columbia University in 1925. Abrams, the now-nationally known candidate, led the campaign to get thousands of Georgians registered to voting and to help restore the rights of voters illegally suppressed by her opponent, Brian Kemp, and other Georgian officials. Slowe never shied away from a fight and always acted with the upmost integrity; thus, Henderson uses her paintbrush to imagine Dean Slowe using her fiery voice to support Stacey Abrams.

Other works by Raya Henderson

Generational Champions , 2022
Dr. Amy Yeboah Quarkume and Jade Flint

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Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe and Mary P. Burrill sit in their backyard , c. 1930s
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Slowe and Burrill's Backyard , c. 1930s
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Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe , c. 1930s
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Letter from Alvin Slowe to Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe, September 25, 1937, Lucy Diggs Slowe Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center
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Letter from Evelio Grillo to Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe, June 16, 1956, Lucy Diggs Slowe Papers, Lucy Diggs Slowe Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center
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