ABSTRACT
The complete history of African American women's participation in American politics must recognize not only their involvement in traditional political acts such as registering, voting, and holding office but also those nontraditional activities in which they engaged long before gaining the ballot. Because African American women are simultaneously members of the two groups that have suffered the nation's most blatant exclusion from the normal channels of access to civic life, African Americans and women, their political behavior has been largely overlooked by political scientists, who have tended to focus primarily on those actions that conform to the more restrictive definitions of politics. 1 Because African American women have only recently been granted access to the political arena as voters and officeholders in significant numbers, there is a paucity of information about them in these roles and even less about their nontraditional actions that predated these roles. 2
