If Exploited is about what was done to the bodies of Black women, Disenfranchised is about what was denied to their voices. The $10 bill documents a particular kind of erasure: how Black women were written out of two movements at once, left out of Black rights, which centered men, and women's rights, which centered white women. Caught in the gap between, they were disenfranchised twice over.
Here is what the note encodes.
A note for the unrepresented
This is a Federal Reparations Note that will pay to the unrepresented on demand. The bill is explicit about the double bind in its own fine print: it declares itself legal tender related to assumed Black rights, meaning male, and women's rights, meaning white. In that single line, the bill captures exactly how Black women fell through the floor of both causes. The portrait at the center is marked Disenfranchised, the female-focused theme of the note.
The banner names The United Slaves of America, the population created in the Americas under enslavement, the thread carried across every bill in the series.
The methods of denial
The bill catalogs the machinery built to keep Black Americans, and Black women in particular, from the ballot.
A seal reads Property Tax, Long Lines, Grandfather Clause, Literacy Test, the everyday apparatus of voter suppression, the obstacles stacked between a citizen and the vote.
Series of 1964 marks the 24th Amendment against poll taxes, ending one of the many discriminatory methods that required voters to pay a fee simply to enter the polling place.
Series of 1965 marks the Voting Rights Act, the landmark federal legislation prohibiting racial discrimination in voting, the law that finally put federal weight behind the ballot.
The organizations that excluded them
The bill names the suffrage establishment that shut Black women out:
NAWSA, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, whose state and local organizations excluded Black women even as they fought for the vote.
Seneca Falls, NY marks the first women's rights convention, the Seneca Falls Convention, which was largely devoid of Black women and other minorities. The founding moment of American feminism did not make room for them.
The women who organized anyway
Against that exclusion, Black women built their own. The "Lifting As We Climb" pin honors the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, whose motto became a statement of collective uplift, the principle that none rise alone. It is the bill's answer to NAWSA: shut out of white women's organizations, Black women made their own infrastructure.
The numbers
Two figures anchor the bill in hard data.
1.92 marks the percent of imprisoned, disenfranchised Black women in 2000, the modern echo of the historical pattern, where incarceration becomes another mechanism of removing the vote.
1964V58, 1966R60 encodes a moment of hard-won progress: in 1964, a record 58 percent of Black people voted in elections, and by 1966, 60 percent were registered. The bill does not only document denial. It marks the breakthrough that organizing achieved.
The amendment and the signature
19 A marks the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, though in practice that right did not extend equally to Black women for decades after. John Conyers signs as Secretary of the Treasury, the author of H.R. 40, the bill to study reparations, installed again on a note he never got to issue.
The materials
Even the textures hold meaning. The design carries a Gambian kola nut and indigo dye pattern, the series tradition of grounding each note in the fabric and material culture of an exploited African nation.
Why it works
Disenfranchised is the bill that names the double erasure. By printing the bind in its own legal language, Black rights meaning male, women's rights meaning white, it makes visible the exact place where Black women were abandoned by both movements that should have claimed them. And by honoring the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs and marking the 58 percent who voted in 1964, it refuses to tell only a story of exclusion. It tells the story of people who organized their way into the franchise anyway.
And because every Black Stacks sale funds direct payments to community members, the piece moves resources toward the descendants of the unrepresented, paying, in some small literal way, the debt it documents.
Own the piece
The Disenfranchised $10 bill is available in the shop, alongside the full Black Stacks series, each one a decoded document with its own buried history.
[See the Disenfranchised bill in the shop]
Decoded is the journal of Andre Woolery's studio, where the hidden histories inside the work get read out loud.
