User:Ngriffeth/Elizabeth Piper Ensley

Elizabeth Piper Ensley (1847-1919) was an African-American suffragist instrumental in the fight for equal suffrage in Colorado. She was a founding member of the Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association of Colorado in 1893. As treasurer of the association, she maintained its finances through the campaign for suffrage.

Before moving to Colorado, she lived in Boston, where she established a circulating library and became a public schoolteacher. In 1882 she married Horwell N. Ensley and they moved to Washington DC to join the faculty at Howard University. Later they moved to Mississippi, where she was on the faculty at Acorn University. In the early 1890's, the Ensleys moved to Denver.

She founded the Colored Women's Republican Club and was one of the founding members of the Women's League of Denver in 1894. In the same year, with the help of new African-American women voters, Joseph Henry Stuart was elected one of Colorado's first African-American legislators and helped to pass an important civil rights bill, and in December 1894 she wrote about the work of colored women in the election in an article entitled "Election Day" in The Woman's Era (the official publication of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.

In 1904, she founded the Colorado Association of Colored Women's Clubs, an organization formed from the African American women's clubs of the state.

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