Kathleen Lavey

Lansing State Journal

Amy Elliott Bragg isn't running for office, but she's been hustling around the state during the runup to Election Day anyhow.

Her campaign: Visit the graves of Michigan women who fought for voting rights.

Of course that's happening during a historic year, with Democrat Hillary Clinton taking on Republican Donald Trump as the first major-party female nominee in history. And it's happening during a campaign in which misogyny has been a key issue. Trump has drawn sharp criticism for calling Clinton a "nasty woman" during a debate and for his behavior toward other women.

"Though so much progress has been made, we still have a long way to go," Bragg said.

The 32-year-old lives in Ferndale and works for Detroit-based Issue Media and blogs about Detroit history.

She said she was inspired to start the grave project by a tradition of people leaving "I Voted" stickers at Susan B. Anthony's grave in Rochester, New York. Anthony was among national leaders working to pass the 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote in 1920.

"I guess it's a tradition that has been longstanding, but I noticed it during the primary," she said. "I thought, '"I'd really like to be able to do that somewhere in my own town."

"I started looking for a good candidate to bring my sticker to and got going down this little research rabbit hole."

What she found: Michigan has many worthy candidates, from the nationally famous -- Rosa Parks and Sojourner Truth -- to women who worked statewide, locally and behind the scenes. She got some recommendations from the Women's Hall of Fame and Historical Center in Lansing.

Truth, who lived the last years of her life in Battle Creek, was born a slave in New York in 1797 and escaped to freedom in 1826. She fought for both abolition and women's rights for the remainder of her life. Parks, known for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in 1955, sparked the historic Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. She moved to Detroit in 1967 and died in 2005. Parks was present when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, prohibiting discrimination in voting.

Bragg has been posting the sites of graves she has found or visited on a Google map: http://bit.ly/2fyjA2L. She also is asking others to post photos of their visits to suffragists' graves on social media using the hashtag #visitasuffragist.

"I've really visited a range of well-known suffragists," she said. "They are all so interesting."

Among them is Martha Strickland Clark, buried in DeWitt. She was the first woman to practice law in Detroit and the first woman to argue a case in front of the Michigan Supreme She died in 1935.

There's also Lucinda Hinsdale Stone, who died in 1900 and is buried in Kalamazoo. She spent 15 years fighting for female students to be admitted to the University of Michigan; she won that battle in 1870.

And Lucinda Voorhees Grimes, active in the national suffrage movement, who told women in Detroit during a 1974 speech about the Equal Rights Amendment not to "rest on their oars." That amendment has only been ratified by 35 of the 38 required states.

Bragg said she likely will continue the #visitasuffragist effort even after election day passes.

"I'd like to build up the map so that it's a little more comprehensive," she said. "There are still some suffragists whose graves I have not been able to find, and I'd like to do a little more research about them."

Although it would involve a lot of work, she said she'd consider the possibility of building the Michigan map into a national one.

"The 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment is just a couple of years away," she said.

You can find Bragg on Twitter at https://twitter.com/thenighttrain/; you can find her blog at http://nighttraintodetroit.com/

Contact Kathleen Lavey at (517) 377-1251 or klavey@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @kathleenlavey.