Biographical Database of Black Women Suffragists

Biographical Sketch of Eva Conner, 1894- ?

By Thomas Dublin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Binghamton University

 

The First Colored Women in Ettrick to Vote. Eva Conner is the first woman on the left in the back row, partially hidden by another teacher. Special Collections and University Archives, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University.

Eva Conner was born about 1894 in South Carolina and by 1919 she was a teacher at Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute. With eight fellow VNII teachers, Eva had her photo taken as the women recorded themselves among the first voters in Ettrick, VA after the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Eva Conner was listed in the 1920 census as a teacher at VNII, but in 1930 she was living in Richmond, a single lodger working as a maid in a hospital. We've not found a marriage or death record for Conner.

Sources:

Liette Gidlow, "Resistance after Ratification: The Nineteenth Amendment, African American Women, and the Problem of Female Disfranchisement after 1920," in Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (2017).

Addie W. Hunton, "'Phoebus' and ‘Hampton,'" NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, reprinted online in Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.

Federal Manuscript Censuses, Virginia., 1920 and 1930, accessed online with Ancestry Library Edition.

Untitled, Richmond Planet, 19 July 1919, p. 13.

 

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