Belle Kearney

Kearney was born on her family's plantation in Flora, Mississippi. Her father, Walter Guston Kearney, was a successful slave-owning planter who suffered significant financial losses after the Civil War.[2]

Belle Kearney attended Canton Young Ladies' Academy, but was forced to leave due to the cost of tuition. She educated herself, and opened a private school in a spare bedroom of the plantation house. She later began teaching in the public school system.[2]

Kearney was a Methodist, and a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. She was also active in the American suffrage movement, and was hired as a speaker and lobbyist by the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In this role, she traveled throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, and was a respected orator.[1]

Kearney was a white supremacist, and used her public speaking events to advocate her racial views. While delivering an address at the National American Woman Suffrage Association Convention in 1903,[3] she said that women's suffrage would bring about "immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained".[2]

Kearney authored two novels: A Slaveholder's Daughter (1900), and Conqueror or Conquered: Or, the Sex Challenge Answered (1921). She also edited Mama Flower (1918).[4]

In 1922, Kearney ran unsuccessfully for the office of U.S. Senator from Mississippi.

In 1924, she was elected to the Mississippi State Senate as a Democrat representing Madison County, the first woman in Mississippi to hold that office.[1]

Kearney never married and had no children. She spent her last years on the family plantation in Flora, and died of cancer in 1939 at the home of a friend in Jackson. She was buried in Kearney Cemetery near the family plantation.[4]

• Nellie Nugent Somerville, first woman elected to the Mississippi Legislature, elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1924.