 Hello, my name is Ruth Gerger and I am the LBJ Library's Associate Curator of Digital Interpretation. You may not know this, but the LBJ Library is home to over 55,000 objects in our museum collection storage, but only about 1% of those objects are available for people to see in our permanent exhibits. So we created two small cases in our Great Hall to feature the breadth and depth of our collection. We routinely change out these cases with new exhibits so we can really highlight our diverse collections. This quarter's featured exhibit is Votes for Women. In 2020, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote, celebrates its 100th anniversary. Suffragists began their organized fight for women's equality in 1848 when they demanded the right to vote during the First Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. For the next 72 years, women lobbied, marched, picketed, and protested for the right to cast a ballot. On May 21, 1919, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the 19th Amendment, also known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote. The U.S. Senate followed two weeks later. The 19th Amendment then required ratification by at least three-fourths of the states to be added to the U.S. Constitution. Tennessee became the last state needed to ratify the amendment on August 18, 1920. A proclamation was then issued declaring the 19th Amendment ratified and part of the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920, forever protecting American women's right to vote. While we could not feature all the brave women who protested for suffrage, and there were so many, here are three. Susan B. Anthony founded the National Women's Suffrage Association in 1869 with fellow activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and traveled the country giving speeches, gathering signatures on petitions, and lobbying Congress for the right to vote. She drafted the first version of the 19th Amendment in 1878. Ida B. Wells, who was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2020, used her skills as a journalist to fight racial and gender injustice and is considered one of the founding members of the NAACP. She formed the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913, which encouraged women of color to be more involved in politics. Her successes in Chicago spurred her to travel nationally and internationally to promote women's suffrage. She marched in the first suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., alongside her white co-suffragists, despite objections from party leaders because of her race. Even after the passage of the 19th Amendment, not all women received the same protection. Several race-based laws prohibited many non-white women from voting. One example of this is the Jim Crow laws enacted in the Southern United States that prevented African Americans from voting. Another 45 years would pass before the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 accomplished what the 19th Amendment had not. So in effect, white women received the right to vote nearly half a century before many other women. Alice Paul broke with Susan B. Anthony's National Women's Suffrage Association over what she deemed timid practices and formed the National Women's Party in 1916. She and her followers protested outside of the White House and endured arrests, imprisonments, hunger strikes, and forced feedings. Ultimately, her tactics forced the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. She was also the first to propose an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in 1923, which was later passed by Congress in 1978, but lacked ratification by three-fourths of the states to become law. I hope you enjoyed this brief tour into the LBJ Museum collections.