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Saturday, November 5, 2022

Adella-Hunt-Logan" (February 12 1863- December 12 1915)

Educator,suffragist, and clubwoman,was born in Sparta,Georgia, the fourth of eight children Henry Hunt,a white planter and tanner, and Mariah Hunt, a mixed-race and Cherokee Native American woman of whom little else is known.Adelle grew up in a prosperous neighborhood and attended Bass Academy in Sparta.At the age of sixteen,she attended the Upper Normal College (a school for teacher education) at Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia.She graduated two years later in 1881, and then taught for two years at an American Missionary School in Albany, Georgia, where she also worked as a city missionary.

She was offered a position teaching at Atlanta University in 1883, Adelle responded to the call of  Booker T.Washington to teach at at Tuskegee University,Booker's renowned industrial school and college in Tusegee, Alabama,teaching at the well established urban Atlanta University might have seemed a natural choice for her broad intellectural interests, she chose tinstead to join Washington's mission to educate young African Americans from more impoverished backgrounds for careers in education and the trades.

In 1888 Adelle married Warren Logan,Booker close friend, who had arrived at Tuskegee a year before her.During Warren career at Tuskegee,he served as the school's president and treasurer.Following her marriage Adelle had little time or opportunity to teach.She was occupied attending to the many duties of the wife of a top administrator and to the raising of her family. In 1890 she gave birth to the first of the couple's nine children. Their last child was born in 1909.

She soon declared that education was her primary interest. Despite her household duties and frequent pregnancies,she managed to continue leading a number of educational missions at Tuskegee's including the formation of a model 
school to prepare student teachers for careers in education, and the guidance and administration of Tuskegee's teacher education curriculum and facilities.

In 1895 She became a charater member of the Tuskegee Woman's Cluyb.The club, which became an affiliate of the of the National Association of Colored Women 

(NACW) IN 1896, consisted of educators and staff at Tuskegee Institute.The Tuskegee chapter's mission focused on the social uplift of African Americans in the communities surrounding the school. As a member, Adelle directed and participated in programs to improve the lives and health of African American families,including programs in nutrition, hygiene,civics, an effort to improve  the preand post-natal health of mothers and babies. She also advocated prison reform and,always mindful of the need to educate, organized and ran a lending library.As a Tuskgee educator and as a clubwoman, she found ways to integrate civics instruction into everything she taught.Her civics interests led directly to her passion to prepare her students and African Americans in the local community for universal sufrage.Although she was personally discouraged by local and state government attempts to disenfranchise African American men,Adelle persisted in educating young men and women for the day when universal suffrage would be achieved. 

She became captivated by the women's suffrage movement sometime in the early 1890s.In 1895 the (NAWSA) held its annual convention in Atlanta  the hopes of educating white southern men and women about the importance of the ballot for women.At this time,NAWSA was seeking this support became a women's suffrage amendment to the Constitution could not be ratified without the approval of many southern states.NAWSA leaders barred African American women and men from attending all of its southern conventions, a move they later claimed was merely in deference to southern whites. African Americans, were allowed to hold membership in the organization.

Adelle traveled to Atlanta during the convention week to hear the NAWSA leader and prominent suffragist Susan B.Anthony lecture at Atlanta University.
After hearing Susan, speak, Adelle was inspired to dedicate herself  further to 
women's suffrage. Despite NAWSA's explict racism,Adelle revered Susan throughout the white suffrage leader's life.

While Adelle disapproved of  NAWSA's  accommodation of white southern's racism, it did not deter her from participating in the organization.She became a life member of NAWSA shortly after 1895. By 1897 she was using the forum of the Tuskegee Women's Club to educate and inform her fellow clubwomen about suffrage and the activities of the movement. Public support for women's sufrage  was nearly nonexistent in Alabama, as would be the case for the next two decades.

She gained knowledge and inspiration from NAWSA conventions, she commented that African American women's suffrage leaders could have run them better; as she wrote to Emily Howland,a white suffragist who sponsored her membership in NAWSA, "You know a number of colored women would have done it [managed the conventions]  more intelligently..."  She also contributed financially to NAWSA and wrote articles for The Woman's Journal, (NAWSA'S primary newspaper),and attended a 1901 NAWSA meeting in Atlanta. Because Adelle was light-skinned, as a result of her predominantly white ancestry,her granddaughter Adelle Logan Alexander has suggested that Adelle consciously attempted to "pass" for white when she attended NAWSA conventions,which was something she might have justified because of African-American suffrage.

It is not evident from Adella"s personal correspondence or letters what her thoughts and feelings were about her attendance at suffrage gatherings of African American clubwomen in the South.She lectured at the Alabama Federal of Colored Women's Club conventions,the  Southern Federal of Colored Womens
Clubs, and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). She was also 
the leader of the NACW's suffrage section.

In addition to her writings for suffrage journals, she contributed article about 
women's suffrage to The Crisis,the NAACP's journal edited by W.E.B. Du Bois,
and the Colored American magazine. A major reason for giving African American women the vote, Adelle emphasized,was to give them a voice in education legislation to ensure that African American children would receive their share of public school funds.She argued that African American women 
gaining the right to vote would improve life for all African Americans.

In 1915 Adelle experienced a series of misfortunes.She suffered a crippling emotional breakdown,which may have been clinical depression.The death of her good friend and colleague Booker T. Washington in the fall of that year contributed to her despair. On the day of his memorial service,she jumped from the top floor of a Tuskegee University building to her death,she died at the age of 52, five years before the Twentieth Amendment became law,thereby guaranteeing women the right to vote.














































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