Education activist Mary-Cooke Branch Munford and the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia
Mary-Cooke Branch Munford (September 15, 1865 — July 3, 1938) was a Virginia activist for women’s rights, civil rights, women’s suffrage, and education. Her father drowned accidentally three years after her birth. She grew up in a rich family, but from a young age she became interested in social welfare issues.
Educational Reform
Munford had been educated in both Richmond and New York but regretted the fact that she had not been permitted to attend college despite her deep desire. Consequently, she worked to improve access to higher education for women.
She was a member and held leadership positions in the Cooperative Education Association of Virginia. She also helped establish and served as president of the Richmond Education Association, which became operational in 1901, and promoted public education — at the time woefully underfunded in almost all areas of the state. Affiliated with a national organization, the Richmond group was mainly concerned with boosting education in rural areas.
She saw great success in convincing the College of William and Mary to open its doors to women in 1918, and in March 1920 she became the first woman to serve on the Richmond School Board school’s Body of Directors. Munford also worked to improve opportunities for teacher training in the Commonwealth. In 1931 she managed to persuade Richmond’s school board to reverse its policy discriminating against married women serving as teachers in the city’s schools.
Equal Suffrage League of Virginia
With the founding of the Equal Suffrage League (ESL) of Virginia in 1909, women in the commonwealth began lobbying for the right to vote. Lila Meade Valentine, as the first president of the league, traveled throughout the state to raise public awareness and build support for women’s suffrage. Other prominent participants included authors Ellen Glasgow and Mary Johnston, education activist Mary Munford, and artists Nora Houston and Adèle Clark.
The ESL members worked tirelessly for a decade, but they failed in their efforts to convince state representatives that women should have the vote. Other southern states, including Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, also fought to keep women away from the polls.
One foil to passage was the issue of race — some members supported suffrage for all women, while others favored suffrage for only white women. Another stumbling block for woman’s suffrage was its close tie to the labor movement and the call for legislation to protect women and children from the exploitation of sweatshops. All of ESL’s efforts were complicated by Virginia’s one-party rule, which made exploiting differences between political parties impossible. After years of defeat at the state level, the ESL switched tactics and focused on winning Congressional passage of the amendment.
Women in Virginia gained the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It passed without Virginia’s support, and in 1952 the General Assembly officially adopted the amendment.
Civil Rights
Her activism was motivated, in part, by the unusual circumstances of her father’s death. After the Civil War, Colonel Branch, a Confederate veteran, joined the so-called “True Republicans,” white conservatives who allied with moderate Republicans to defeat the Radical Republicans. The moderates even sought support from newly enfranchised black voters. As part of their campaign, Branch attended a picnic sponsored by the Colored Walker Club of Richmond on July 2, 1869, designed especially to attract black voters in support of the moderate Republican gubernatorial candidate, Gilbert C. Walker.
Hundreds of white and African American men gathered under a banner of “United we stand; divided we fall.” The makeshift pedestrian bridges out to the island in the James River where the event was held collapsed under the weight of the crowd, and several people died; Munford’s father was one of the victims. The dramatic story of her father’s demise — a literal “sacrifice” to the cause of African American uplift, as she saw it — led Munford to become one of Virginia’s most vocal white advocates of interracial cooperation.
Although Munford never directly acknowledged the injustice of segregation, she nevertheless recognized the growing needs of African Americans. Communities such as Jackson Ward, for example, a primarily African American district in Richmond, received inferior sanitation, modernization, and maintenance compared with white neighborhoods. Munford deplored the area’s inadequate, overcrowded housing, and attended City Council meetings to petition for improved services for black neighborhoods and business districts.
She worked with the Community House for Negro People and served on the board of trustees of Janie Porter Barrett’s reformatory, the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls. Munford also served on the board of the National Urban League, was a founding member of the Virginia Inter-Racial League and became a trustee at Fisk University.
Munford died in Richmond on July 3, 1938 and was buried at Hollywood Cemetery. The Mary Munford Elementary School in Richmond was named in her honor.
