Bettiola Heloise Fortson

Though born in Kentucky, she spent her formative years in Evansville, where she graduated from Clark Street High Schoolin in 1910. Following graduation she moved to Chicago and was active in the Alpha Suffrage Club, the city's most important African American suffrage association founded by Ida B. Wells. The Alpha Suffrage Club canvassed neighborhoodsn to register and educate voters, as well as worked to elect African American women to office after Illinois women earned the right to vote in state and local elections in 1910. They also were countervailing force to those suffrage organizations that tried to deny black women's rights to vote even as they fought for white women's suffrage. Miss Fortson also served as the Alpha Suffrage Club's second vice-president and co-founded the University Society of Chicago. She died of tuberculosis in 1917 at the age of 26.

Indiana Women's Suffrage