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

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

Popular accounts of the suffrage crusade often begin in Seneca Falls in 1848 and end 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. To secure their rights, Black women needed a movement of their own.

In Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, prizewinning 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 who were the vanguard of women’s rights: the pioneering lecturer Maria Stewart, abolitionist and suffrage advocate Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, community organizer Fannie Lou Hamer, and many more. She shows how these women again and again called on America to realize its best ideals as they set the pace in the quest for justice and collective liberation.

In the twenty-first century, Black women’s power at the polls and in our politics is undeniable. Vanguard reveals that this power is not at all new. It is the culmination of two centuries of dramatic struggle that transformed America for the better.

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.

"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

"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

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 is editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women. She lives in Baltimore, MD. For more information on the author visit marthasjones.com

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
by Martha S. Jones  |  2020  |  ISBN 978-1-5416-1861-9  |  339 pages
Basic Books  |  Hachette Book Group
www.basicbooks.com

The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy - REVIEW

 “The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people… American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto.”

These words, written by Albert Murray at the height of the Black Power movement, cut against the grain of their moment, announcing the arrival of a new kind of “militant integrationist.”  Against narratives of marginalization and racial pathology, Murray argued that black art and culture, particularly jazz and blues, stand at the very headwaters of the American mainstream – that “American culture” and “black American culture” were one and the same.  As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., makes clear in his foreword, Murray’s poetic voice, impassioned argumentation, and pluralistic vision have only become more urgently needed today.

Albert Murray (1916-2013) was the author of Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, The Seven League Boots, The Magic Keys, and Stomping the Blues, among many other works.  His collected writings are published in two volumes by Library of America.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African American Research at Harvard University and an award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, culture critic, and institution builder.

Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope - REVIEW

Reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition can help us connect with a rich faith history and address the urgent issues of our times. Demonstrating an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley shares a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation.

Growing up in the American South, Esau McCaulley knew firsthand the ongoing struggle between despair and hope that marks the lives of some in the African American context. A key element in the fight for hope was the practice of Bible interpretation coming from his traditional Black church. This ecclesial tradition is often disregarded by much of the wider church and academy, but it has something to say.

Reading While Black is a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation. At a time in which some within the African American community are questioning the place of the Christian faith in the struggle for justice, New Testament scholar McCaulley argues that reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition is invaluable for connecting with a rich faith history and addressing the urgent issues of our times. He advocates for a model of interpretation that involves an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, in which the particular questions coming out of Black communities are given pride of place and the Bible is given space to respond by affirming, challenging, and, at times, reshaping Black concerns. McCaulley demonstrates this model with studies on how Scripture speaks to topics often overlooked by white interpreters, such as ethnicity, political protest, policing, and slavery.

Ultimately McCaulley calls the church to a dynamic theological engagement with Scripture, in which Christians of diverse backgrounds dialogue with their own social location as well as the cultures of others. Reading While Black moves the conversation forward.

Esau McCaulley (PhD, St. Andrews) is assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. He is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America where he serves as a Canon Theologian in his diocese C4SO (Churches for the Sake of Others). Esau also serves the Province of the ACNA (Anglican Church in North America) as director of the Next Generation Leadership Initiative, a province-wide effort to raise the next generation of Anglican lay and ordains leaders. Esau is a contributing writer for the New York Times and has written for numerous outlets such as Christianity Today, The Witness, and the Washington Post. His publications include Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance and The New Testament in Color (forthcoming). He is a highly sought-after speaker, hosts The Disrupters podcast, and speaks at many conferences.  Throughout his career in ministry and academia, Esau has served in a variety of contexts, including as a pastor at All Souls Episcopal/Anglican Church in Okinawa, Japan, assistant to the pastor at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Portsmouth, Virginia, and assisting priest at All Saints Episcopal Church in St. Andrews, Scotland. He is a military spouse and is married to his beautiful wife, Mandy, a pediatrician. Together, they have four wonderful children

Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope 

by Esau McCaulley

September 1, 2020 \ $20 \ 200 pages \ paperback \ ISBN: 978-0-8308-5486-8 

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