Maude Evangeline Craig Sampson Williams

provided women the opportunity to vote, the county's Democratic executive chairman asked Belle C. Critchett, the recording secretary and former president of the El Paso Equal Franchise League, to suggest the names of a few women to serve as clerks in the county election. In addition to gathering a number of white women's names, Critchett asked Sampson for a few names of African American women with interest in serving as election clerks. According to Critchett, the county chairman "indignantly" turned down the black women's names. In a letter to TESA Corresponding Secretary Edith Hinkle League, Critchett recounted how she had to rescind her request of Sampson.

Sampson wrote to NAWSA executive Maude Wood Park in June 1918 to enroll her local league as an auxiliary branch to the national suffrage organization. Following Sampson's request, a series of letters flew back and forth between white NAWSA and TESA leaders, including national president Carrie Chapman Catt and Texas president Minnie Fisher Cunningham. NAWSA amended its constitution the year before, in 1917, to keep African American leagues from directly associating with the national organization because white suffrage leaders feared that it would upset southern campaigning and members. The only way local groups could affiliate with NAWSA by this point was directly through their state's association.

When Catt wrote to the TESA leaders, the NAWSA president was enormously blunt. She stated, "I presume that no colored women's leagues are members in southern states, although I do not know positively that this is true.... I think in some northern states, individual colored women are direct members. Of course, these women in the North are women with a good deal of white blood and are educated women, otherwise they would not be asking auxiliaryship."

Furthermore, Catt wrote, "The question has not been publicly fought out in our association, for the reason that the memberships come through the state and the states have not found it difficult to settle their own problems along this line. The constitution was amended last year, so that such a club as Mrs. Sampson's, could not come into the National Association directly."

Finally, Catt advised that, while it was a state decision, TESA leaders should inform Sampson that they "will be able to get the vote for women more easily if they do not embarrass you by asking for membership." When Cunningham responded to Sampson, she informed the El Paso civil rights leader that since the local group's application for membership was the first of its kind, it required delegate action, and the next convention would not be until the following spring. The TESA president went on to say that she hoped the federal amendment would be ratified by then, insinuating that TESA would not have to act. There is no record of Sampson's response, or if she gave one directly. She did not, though, shy away from future political involvement.

Two years later, as the Nineteenth Amendment moved along through the last few states, Texas primary election season came around again. Alongside white and black women, Sampson served as a precinct campaign organizer for the prohibition candidate in the Democratic primary, Robert E. Thomason. Thomason was the favorite among many suffragists across the state—including Cunningham and Critchett, the latter who also served as a precinct chair. Like African Americans across the state, Sampson's future primary participation was restricted further when the Texas legislature implemented a law in 1923 that defined voting access in primary elections as for whites only (see WHITE PRIMARY).