Virginia Brooks

Virginia Brooks (January 11, 1886 – June 15, 1929) was an American suffragist and political reformer who worked in the Chicago region and throughout Indiana in the early 1900s. She was born to parents who moved from Ohio to Chicago. Brooks penned two books, Little Lost Sister (1914) and My Battles with Vice (1915).

Early life

Brooks was born on January 11, 1886, in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, IL, to Oliver H. Brooks and Flora P. Brooks. Her parents owned boarding houses in the neighborhood. She married Charles Shephard Washburne on April 3, 1913. The couple had one child, a son named Walter Washburne.

Chicago, Illinois

Brooks spent time in Chicago throughout the 1910s working with different groups and political reformers. Brooks had a close relationship with Ida B. Wells, a suffragist, journalist, feminist, and prominent leader in Civil Rights Movement. Wells met Virginia Brooks in Chicago. In 1913 Brooks, with the help of Belle Squire, worked with Wells to create the Alpha Suffrage Club (ASC), a group that worked to get African-American women involved in the suffrage movement. The first goal of the ASC was to raise enough money to send Wells to Washington, D.C. to participate in a suffrage march on behalf of the club. The leader of the delegation from Illinois, Grace Trout, told Wells that she was not allowed to march with the white women of the state but could form a delegation of black women if she wanted. Brooks stood by her side by saying "...to exclude Ms. Wells on the basis of race of would be undemocratic." Brooks and Squire volunteered to walk with their friend Wells in the black section of the march but on the day of the march, she was nowhere to be found. Brooks and Squire returned to the Illinois women's section worried about Wells' whereabouts. As the march began, Wells came out of the crowd to stand beside Brooks and Squire with the suffragists of Illinois.