Nellie Griswold Francis

Nellie F. Griswold Francis (November 7, 1874 – December 13, 1969) was an African-American suffragist, civic leader, and civil rights activist. Francis founded and led the Everywoman Suffrage Club, an African-American suffragist group that helped win women the right to vote in Minnesota. She initiated, drafted, and lobbied for the adoption of a state anti-lynching bill that was signed into law in 1921. He died there from yellow fever in 1929. Francis is one of 25 women honored for their roles in achieving the women's right to vote in the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Memorial on the grounds of the State Capitol. Her parents were Maggie Seay and Thomas Garrison Griswold, and she had a sister, Lula Griswold Chapman, who died in 1925. Her grandmother was Nellie Seay (1814–1931), a house slave to Colonel Robert Allen, a Tennessee congressman. Her aunt on her mother's side, Juno Frankie Pierce, was also a prominent suffragist and civil rights activist. She was the only African American among 84 students graduating from her high school in Saint Paul in 1891. She gave a passionate talk at the high school's commencement titled "The Race Problem", winning second place for oratory.

Francis was offered scholarships for a college and a drama school, but took a stenography course. As well as performing, she also wrote and produced, including a play called "Magic Mirrors".

Suffragist and anti-lynching activism In 1914, Francis resigned from her job to devote herself full-time to community work and civil rights activism, particularly women's suffrage and racial discrimination and violence. Across her life, she was involved in national civil rights networks, attending a dinner in honor of W.E.B. du Bois, and visiting with Booker T. Washington's wife. the board of the local NAACP chapter, and was active in the Republican Party. She held shorthand classes in her home when African-Americans were unable to enter business schools. In 1918, Francis led a resolution of her church, the Pilgrim Baptist Church, against lynching and burning of people that was delivered to the President of the United States.

That year, white suffragists in Minnesota rejected an amendment that would have secured women's suffrage, in exchange for excluding black women from the vote: "keen would have been my disappointment if they had failed to make this sacrifice", Francis said. Although it would not come into force till 1920, the battle for women's vote in Minnesota was won in 1919. Francis' group turned its attention to social progress on race, particularly for black women.

In June 1920, Minnesota became a national focus of attention because of the Duluth lynching. Three young African-Americans who worked in a visiting circus, 19-year-old Elias Clayton, 22-year-old Elmer Jackson, and 20-year-old Isaac McGhie, were among a group accused of gang-raping a white woman, although there was no direct evidence a rape occurred. A mob of white people, estimated to be from 1,000 to 10,000 people – a considerable proportion of Duluth's residents, stormed the police station and lynched the young men in the middle of town.

Francis responded by initiating a campaign for legislation, drafting an anti-lynching bill, and using her considerable community and political influence to build support for the law. The bill's provisions were reported by the NAACP in The Crisis.

The Appeal (also known as National Afro-American newspaper), reported a celebration to honor Francis in detail. The anti-lynching law was repealed in Minnesota without comment in 1984.

The Francis' would themselves become the targets of escalating racist abuse and Ku Klux Klan attacks a few years later when they bought a home in a white neighborhood in St. Paul. The couple bought a two-storey house (with a title held in Juno Frankie Pierce's name) in Sargent Avenue, Groveland Park, experiencing an increasingly vicious Ku Klux Klan campaign to stop them moving in. W.T. Francis' report was able to show that the country's president, Charles D.B. King, had profited from the selling of young Liberians into forced labor for Spanish plantations on Bioko Island.

Personal and later life Francis met her husband, William T. Francis, when they both worked for a railway company, and they married on August 14, 1893. Nellie's sister, Lula, and brother-in-law lived with them in Saint Paul. Francis is one of 25 women honored for leading the fight for votes for women, each named on a steel trellis in the garden.