Exhibit highlights NC's discomfort with 19th Amendment

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina has a less-than-friendly history with the 19th Amendment, as a small exhibit traveling the state to mark the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage makes clear.

The exhibit includes the jacket of the first suffrage bill filed in 1897, indicating it was sent to a legislative panel called the Committee on Insane Asylums, and a telegram North Carolina legislators sent to their colleagues in Tennessee asking them not to approve the amendment, which needed one more state to become law.

Instead, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, giving women the right to vote.

“I would characterize North Carolina’s consideration of it as: We dithered,” State Archivist Sarah Koonts said.

The exhibit, which opened in September in Raleigh, is part of a larger program from the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources called “She Changed the World: North Carolina Women Breaking Barriers.” It will be displayed for one day a month at various locations through October 2020. It was in Mars Hill in November and will be the Southern Pines Library on Jan. 29.

Koonts said that when the first women’s suffrage bill went to the Committee on Insane Asylums, which was chaired by the legislator who filed the bill, Rep. J.L. Hyatt of Yanceyville, “he knew that was a signal that they didn’t want it to pass.”

North Carolina’s copy of the 19th Amendment was pulled from its vault in the State Archives for the exhibit. Although the state would have gotten the copy not long after the amendment was ratified in 1920, North Carolina didn’t sign off on it until more than 50 years later.

In 1971, a lobbyist for the League of Women Voters called the oversight to the attention of Willis Whichard, a retired state Supreme Court justice...