Elizabeth Piper Ensley

Elizabeth Piper Ensley (1848-1919), was an American suffragist. She was born in the Caribbean, and moved to Boston in the 1870s, where she became a teacher in a public school. She then taught at Howard University with her husband. In the 1890s they moved to Denver, Colorado. There Ensley joined Denver's relief efforts for the poor and the homeless. She also joined the campaign to put a women's suffrage amendment on the November 1893 ballot in Colorado. She was the treasurer of the Colorado Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association, and beginning with a fund of twenty-five dollars, helped gain the money necessary for the campaign. The suffrage amendment was approved in 1893.

She organized the Colorado Colored Women's Republican Club to teach black women why and how to vote. She also helped found the Women's League in 1894, and she founded the Colorado Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACW) in 1904. The NACW led community and educational programs, including the George Washington Carver Day Nursery. Ensley was the only black member of the board of the NACW.

Ensley wrote about Colorado's first election in which women voted (which occurred in 1894) in the Woman's Era, which was the national publication of the NACW.

She is buried in the Riverside Cemetery in Denver, Colorado.