Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/349

 baum) of Meridian and passed almost unanimously. In 1919 at the annual meeting held in Clarksdale, during the presidency of Mrs. Saunders, a resolution endorsing the ratification of the Federal Suffrage Amendment was carried with but one dissenting vote, that of Mrs. Lizzie George Henderson of Greenwood, daughter of the late U. S. Senator J. Z. George. When the League of Women Voters was formed the next year Mrs. Henderson was among the first to join it.

In 1919, the State Teachers' Association passed unanimously a resolution endorsing woman suffrage introduced by Professor Frederick Davis Mellen of the State Agricultural and Mechanical College, the son of the late Reverend Thomas L. Mellen, one of Mississippi's earliest suffragists. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union here as elsewhere was a great school for women, teaching them the need of the ballot, and the majority of its members were suffragists but all through the years the minority, who did not want the question brought into the Union, overruled their wishes. Mrs. Harriet B. Kells, the president for many years and a lifelong suffragist, was not able to overcome this situation and it never endorsed woman suffrage.

There never has been any organized opposition among Mississippi women. During the session of the Legislature in 1920 there was an open attempt to organize opposition to ratification of the Federal Amendment but it failed.

. After the suffrage association in 1913 decided to ask for the submission of an amendment to the State constitution to enfranchise women the preliminary work of interviewing legislators and distributing appropriate literature was conducted by the chairman of the Legislative Committee, Mrs. Nellie Nugent Somerville, the president, Mrs. Annie Kinkead Dent, and other members. The president at her own expense sent the Woman's Journal and other literature to all legislators for three months. The concurrent resolution asking for the submission was introduced in the House Jan. 9, 1914, by N. A. Mott of Yazoo county. Senator Hall Sanders of Tallahatchie county offered it in the Senate three days later. The House Committee on Constitution, to which the bill was referred, granted a hearing, at which speeches were made by Mrs. Monroe