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