Back More
Salem Press

Table of Contents

From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues

Graves, Dixie Bibb (1882-1965)

Democrat Dixie Graves of Alabama served in the U.S. Senate from August 20, 1937 to January 10, 1938. When incumbent U.S. Senator Hugo Black was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Alabama Governor Bibb Graves appointed his wife, Dixie Graves, to fill the vacancy until an election could be held. During her brief tenure, Senator Graves made a speech to the Senate tearfully pleading with her colleagues to defeat the anti-lynching bill before them. She argued that the South’s law enforcement system could decrease lynching without federal involvement. The extent of her influence on the Senate is unknown, but the speech made her so popular in Alabama that a write-in campaign to make her a candidate for the balance of the term began. She declined, however, and did not run.

Born on a plantation near Montgomery, Alabama, Graves’s formal education was limited. As a member of the State Literacy Commission and as chair of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs’ Commission on Literacy, she worked to end illiteracy. Active in the Alabama Equal Suffrage Association, she served on the state’s ratification committee, but Alabama failed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. She was president of the Alabama Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy from 1915 to 1917 and vice president of the Alabama Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1929.

See also: Anti-lynching Movement; Congress, Women in; General Federation of Women’s Clubs; Nineteenth Amendment; Suffrage

References: Boxer, Strangers in the Senate: Politics and the New Revolution of Women in America (1994); Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, Women in Congress, 1917-1990 (1991); Yelverton, They Also Served: Twenty-Five Remarkable Alabama Women (1993).

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
"Graves, Dixie Bibb (1882-1965)." From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, edited by Suzanne O’Dea, Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0401.
APA 7th
Graves, Dixie Bibb (1882-1965). From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, In S. O’Dea (Ed.), Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0401.
CMOS 17th
"Graves, Dixie Bibb (1882-1965)." From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, Edited by Suzanne O’Dea. Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0401.