Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

by Martha S. Jones

Overview

The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power — and how it transformed America.

In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own.

In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women—Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more—who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541618619
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	09/08/2020
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	23,616
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. She is president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the oldest and largest association of women historians in the United States, and she sits on the executive board of the Organization of American Historians. Author of Birthright Citizens and All Bound up Together, she has written for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, and more.She lives in Baltimore, MD.

Table of Contents

Introduction Our Mothers' Gardens 1

Chapter 1 Daughters of Africa, Awake! 15

Chapter 2 The Cause of the Slave, as Well as of Women 43

Chapter 3 To Be Black and Female 69

Chapter 4 One Great Bundle of Humanity 95

Chapter 5|yMake Us a Power 121

Chapter 6 Lifting as We Climb 149

Chapter 7 Amendment 175

Chapter 8 Her Weapon of Moral Defense 203

Chapter 9 A Way to Express Themselves … and Make Change 227

Conclusion Candidates of the People 267

Acknowledgments 277

Notes 281

Index 325

Editorial Reviews

Jones has written an elegant and expansive history of Black women who sought to build political power where they could…[In] a sense Vanguard is a rebuke to our fixation on firsts. Jones is just as interested in everything these women made possible—not just the trails they blazed, but the journeys they took, and what came after…Jones is an assiduous scholar and an absorbing writer…For the most part she allows the history to unfurl with all of its twists and complexity.

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

"Jones has written an elegant and expansive history of Black women who sought to build political power where they could.... Jones is an assiduous scholar and an absorbing writer, turning to the archives to unearth the stories of Black women who worked alongside white suffragists only to be marginalized."—New York Times


"In her important new book, Jones shows how African American women waged their own fight for the vote, and why their achievements speak mightily to our present moment as voters, regardless of gender or race."—Washington Post


“If you read no other book on suffrage this centennial of the 19th Amendment, read this one. Let the incomparable historian Martha S. Jones take you to school.”—Ms.


“Jones’ book is a welcome addition to the spate of books on woman suffrage that have been published this year in honor of the Centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. Through her rigorous scholarship and out-of-the-box perspective, she sheds new and important light on the crucial role of Black women in winning and ensuring the right to vote…Jones’ scholarship addresses a gaping hole in suffrage literature.”—New York Journal of Books


“Thanks to Martha Jones’s Vanguard, Black women’s rightful place in this history has been restored."—Foreign Affairs


“In her forceful and compelling history, Johns Hopkins professor Jones corrects and enriches the conventional narrative of the noble suffrage crusade led overwhelmingly by white women with the determined and strategic efforts by Black women to build their own movement to win the rights that had been denied them.”—National Book Review


“A necessary, insightful book that shines light on Black women underexplored in history. Jones writes narrative  nonfiction at its best.”—Library Journal


"Highly charged, absorbing reading and most timely in the era of renewed advocacy for civil rights."—Kirkus

"Martha Jones is the political historian of African American women. And this book is the commanding history of the remarkable struggle of African American women for political power. The more power they accumulated, the more equality they wrought. All Americans would be better off learning this history and grasping just how much we owe equality's vanguard."—Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

"In her inspiring new book, Vanguard, renowned historian Martha S. Jones gives us a sweeping narrative for our times, grounded in the multi-generational struggle of black women for a freedom and equality that would not only fulfill their rights but galvanize a broader, redemptive movement for human rights everywhere. Through the carefully interwoven stories of famous and forgotten African American women, together representing two hundred years of history, Jones shows how this core of our society — so key to winning elections today — also gave us 'the nation's original feminists and antiracists.' From organizers and institution builders to preachers and writers, journalists and activists, black women found ways to rise up through the twin cracks of race and sex discrimination to elevate democracy as a whole. At a moment when that very democracy is under assault, Vanguard reminds us to look for hope in those most denied it."—Henry Louis Gates Jr.

"Bold, ambitious, and beautifully crafted, Vanguard represents more than two hundred years of Black women's political history. From Jarena Lee to Stacey Abrams, Martha S. Jones reminds her readers that Black women stand as America's original feminists — women who continue to remind America that it must make good on its promises."—Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of Never Caught and She Came to Slay

"You cannot tell the history of modern democracy without the history of Black women, and vibrating through Martha Jones's prose, argument, and evidence is analysis that takes Black women seriously. Vanguard brilliantly lays bare how a full accounting of black women as powerful political actors is both past and prologue. Martha Jones has given us a gift we do not deserve. In that way she is as bold and necessary to our understanding of ourselves as the women in this important work."—Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Thick: And Other Essays

From the Publisher

★ 10/01/2020

Beginning with her own history as a descendant of enslaved people, Jones (history, Johns Hopkins Univ.; Birthright Citizens) shares stories of women in her family who created paths to political power as freedom did not lead to liberty or dignity. This standout social history shows how the 19th Amendment did not guarantee Black women the right to vote—state laws, including literary tests, poll taxes, and restrictions on descendants of enslaved people, were implemented to suppress turnout. Jones masterfully outlines how Black women used the pen, pulpit, and podium to share information in the 19th and 20th centuries, and how teaching each other how to read and write was the greatest form of resistance. Moving chapters follow journalist Mary Ann Shadd Cary, poet and orator Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, educators Charlotte Forten Grimké and Mary Church Terrell, and writers Harriet Jacobs and Anna Julia Cooper, among others, as they sought to link voting rights to civil rights. Notably, Jones recounts how these women, and others, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, faced danger for their visibility while often being ignored by white suffragists. VERDICT A necessary, insightful book that shines light on Black women underexplored in history. Jones writes narrative nonfiction at its best.—Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

Library Journal

2020-07-08
Johns Hopkins history professor Jones turns in a searching portrait of African American women who agitated for voting rights over generations.

Born into slavery in 1840 in Kentucky, Susan Davis—the author’s great-great-grandmother—learned a valuable truth: “without the vote, Black Americans had to build other routes to political power.” During the Reconstruction Era, in Davis’ case, this involved building women’s clubs to consolidate political power. She lived to see passage of the 19th Amendment, but that constitutional guarantee did not stop white Kentuckians from attempting to suppress the Black vote. Other activists adopted various tactics to press their cases, from Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of a bus to the sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South. As Jones writes, the truth of Davis’ conviction endured: “The women of my family, like so many Black women, constructed their political power with one eye on the polls and the other on organizing, lobbying, and institution building.” Naturally, they met opposition from Whites—and often from Black men, who, notes the author, were glad to accept women as helpmeets in political situations but expected them to hold subsidiary roles. In many instances, Black women neatly sidestepped racism; in the case of her great-grandmother, Jones writes, “she would link arms with white women when they shared her sense that American women, even after the Nineteenth Amendment, had a distance to go before they realized their full influence upon politics and policy.” In the end, though, many of the voting rights and civil rights activists realized that they had to build their own movement, cultivating a strong emergent leadership that included lawyers, politicians, and the first Black woman to serve as a priest in the Episcopal Church. The work continues today: Jones’ sharp chronicle closes with Stacey Abrams, the Georgia politician who wages a constant campaign against voter suppression meant to keep Black voters away from the ballot box.

Highly charged, absorbing reading and most timely in the era of renewed advocacy for civil rights.

Kirkus Reviews

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