(bright music) - [Narrator] Adella Hunt Logan was an activist, educator, and suffragist of African American, European, and Cherokee ancestry.

She was born in 1863 in Sparta, Georgia to a free black woman and a white plantation owner.

The young Adella attended Bass Academy in her hometown where she earned a scholarship to Atlanta University.

In 1883, she accepted an invitation to teach at Tuskegee Institute where she taught English, social studies, and other subjects in the humanities.

She also married Warren Logan, another member of the faculty.

The Institute's first librarian, Hunt opened a lending library to serve Alabama's African Americans who were barred from using white-only public libraries.

Logan's work on behalf of human rights found a home in the suffragist and civil rights movements of her time.

After attending the 1895 National American Woman Suffrage Association Convention in Atlanta, she joined the organization as its first woman of color, Alabama's only member of any color, a membership she would continue for the rest of her life.

In this organization and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Adella Hunt Logan would be a voice, writing and contributing to the organization's newspapers and magazines.

Hunt saw universal suffrage as the path to universal education and social equity.

Organizing and writing on behalf of the right to vote for all, "The colored American believes in equal justice "to all, regardless of race, color, creed, or sex "and longs for the day when the United States "shall indeed have the government of the people, "for the people, and by the people, "even including the colored people."

In 1920, five years after her death, the United States, Congress ratified the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote.

In 1965, 50 years after her death and work on behalf of universal suffrage, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting discrimination by race and guaranteeing the right to vote to all.

Today, Adella Hunt Logan's legacy continues to speak to human rights, as well as social justice.

"The main components of personal sovereignty "are wisdom and power, "and the greatest power any people in a democracy have "is that which they exercise at the polls."