Nellie Francis, ca. 1924. In Foster, Mary Dillon, Who’s Who Among Minnesota Women (1924), 111. Minnesota Historical Society.
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The only Black graduate of St. Paul High School (now Central High School) in 1891, Nellie Griswold became a leader in both the women’s suffrage and Black civil rights movements. After she and aspiring lawyer William Francis were married in 1893, they quickly became leading members in the majority-Black Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul, where Nellie founded a Black women’s choir and served in leadership roles at Pilgrim Baptist Church. In 1914, she founded the Everywoman Suffrage Club (later called the Everywoman Progressive Council), the only Black women’s suffrage organization in Minnesota, which continued to fight for Black women’s voting rights after the 19th Amendment was ratified. After the lynching of three Black men in Duluth in 1920, she became the first African American woman to lobby the Minnesota Legislature, writing the bill that became Minnesota’s first anti-lynching law. She was a leader in the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, the NAACP, and the Urban League and worked with major national figures including Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells. After her husband died in 1929 in Liberia while working as the United States’ first Black diplomat, Nellie Griswold Francis moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where she cared for her aging mother and led local community organizing efforts before her death in 1969.
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