Elsie Walker (Johns)

Biographical Database of Black Women Suffragists

Biographical Sketch of Elsie Walker (Johns), 1889-1975

By Thomas Dublin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Binghamton University, and Anne M. Boylan, Emerita, University of Delaware

Elsie Walker was born in Delaware in 1889, the daughter of Nelson and Clara (Shockley) Walker; she was the second of their four surviving children. Elsie and her siblings grew up in the Ninth Ward on Wilmington's Northeast side, attending the nearby Clara Mendenhall primary school (School No. 26) through grade eight. Elsie spent at least one year (1903-1904) at Howard High School, the only four-year high school for Black students in the entire state, and in 1929 graduated from the Howard night school's dressmaking course. Like her mother and sister Eva (or Evva), Elsie contributed to the family economy by doing housework in private families. Her father was successively a brick-maker, a laborer, and a school janitor who eventually acquired a settled position as a fireman for the Wilmington Board of Education. A 1931 obituary recorded that he had worked at the George Gray School for thirty-five years. Nelson Walker was also active in Wilmington's Republican Party politics. By 1920, the family had acquired property, especially a house at 1506 North Heald Street that remained their home for decades.

In June 1925, at Ezion Methodist Episcopal Church in Wilmington, Elsie Walker married Ira Washington Johns, a Delaware native whom the census recorded as a janitor (1930) and then a porter (1940) at an automobile dealership. The couple resided with Elsie's family on Heald Street. Although they had no children and Elsie was recorded without an occupation in either 1930 or 1940, she was undoubtedly involved in helping to raise two young relatives – Granville Boyer (1921-1992) and Marjorie Boyer (1925-1960) – who had joined the household by 1930.

In February 1921, Elsie was one of six Delaware voting rights supporters, led by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who travelled to Washington, D.C. in order to join a delegation of 60 Black suffragists protesting violations of the recently ratified 19^th Amendment. Southern states were systematically denying Black women's voting rights. The delegation, headed by the NAACP field secretary, Addie W. Hunton, met with Alice Paul, President of the National Woman's Party (NWP) on the eve of the party's national convention. Their purpose was to press the NWP to pass a resolution calling on Congress to investigate the failures of Southern states to enforce the 19^th Amendment for Black women. Paul made no such commitment and the convention as a whole refused to endorse the call.