Alpha Suffrage Club  The Alpha Suffrage Club was the first and most important black female suffrage club in Chicago and one of the most important in Illinois. It was founded on January 30, 1913 by Ida B. Wells with the help of her white colleagues Belle Squire and Virginia Brooks. The Club aimed to give a voice to African American women who had been excluded from national suffrage organizations such as the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Its stated purpose was to inform black women of their civic responsibility and to organize them to help elect candidates who would best serve the interests of African Americans in Chicago. The club was formed after women in Chicago were granted the right to vote in the year 1910. It fought against the white Chicago women who were trying to ban African Americans from voting altogether. They also wanted to promote the election of African Americans to public office. As Wells stated in her autobiography, "we (women) could use our vote for the advantage of ourselves and our race." Quoted in the "Chicago Defender", a local black newspaper, she was more specific, stating that the object of the Alpha Suffrage Club was to make women "strong enough to help elect some conscientious race man as alderman." Besides focusing on women's newly gained civil duty to vote, Wells also encouraged these women to ensure that their husbands were taking seriously their responsibility to vote as well, recognizing the "sacredness" of the vote to both sexes. At the first anniversary of the club's founding, Kentucky-born poet Bettiola Heloise Fortson, vice-president of the Club, read her poem "Brothers" which told the story of two men who had been lynched by a mob for their attempt to save their sister from her imprisonment by a farmer in Alabama as a slave.  1913, the year in which the club was founded, was a time still rife with Jim Crow laws and casual discrimination. Black women were subservient to men and other White women and denied education and social mobility. They were also confined to social expectations such as taking on domestic responsibilities and working on the farms if necessary. They were also unprotected by laws even when they were abused and rape by men. Lynching was also common and they denied African American women any chance to prove their innocence from false claims. This fueled the movement founded by Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Wells declared that an inherent problem to black women was the fact that they were overall less invested in gaining the vote because the men and churches of their communities had not supported it.