Martha S. Jones - Vanguard: How BLACK WOMEN Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for ALL

Martha S. 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 equalitys vanguard.

Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Awardwinning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

Bold, ambitious, and beautifully crafted, Vanguard represents more than two hundred years of Black womens political history. From Jarena Lee to Stacey Abrams, Martha S. Jones reminds her readers that Black women stand as Americas original feministswomen 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 S. Joness 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. 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

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 societyso key to winning elections todayalso gave us the nations 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., author of Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, and executive producer of the PBS series Reconstruction: America After the Civil War

Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America

All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 18301900

Copyright 2020 by Martha S. Jones

Cover design by Francine Kass

Cover image 2019 Charly Palmer

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First Edition: September 2020

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jones, Martha S., author.

Title: Vanguard : how black women broke barriers, won the vote, and insisted on equality for all / Martha S. Jones.

Description: First edition. | New York : Basic Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020006087 | ISBN 9781541618619 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541618602 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: African AmericansSuffrageHistory. | WomenSuffrageUnited StatesHistory. | African American women suffragistsHistory. | African American women social reformersHistory.

Classification: LCC JK1924.J66 2020 | DDC 323.3/4092396073dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006087

ISBNs: 978-1-5416-1861-9 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-1860-2 (ebook)

E3-20200730-JV-NF-ORI

For Nancy Belle Graves, and all of us who are her daughters.

I started writing Vanguard by collecting stories of the women in my own family. These begin, as far back as I can trace, with Nancy Belle Graves, who was born enslaved in 1808 in Danville, Kentucky. I wondered what it had been like for Nancys daughters and granddaughters when, in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment opened a door to womens votes. That year, three generations of women in my familyfrom my grandmother to her mother to her mothers motherfaced the same question: Could they vote and, if so, what would they do with their ballots? And though I knew lots of family tales, Id never heard any about how we fit into the story of American womens rise to power. I knew that Black women had won the vote unevenly in a struggle that took more than a century. Theyd fought for their rights, hoping to change the lives of all Black Americans. They confronted an ugly mix of racism and sexism that stunted their aspirations. Still, I knew that I came from women who had always found a way to gather their strength and then promote the well-being of their community, the nation, and the world.

My great-great-grandmother, Susan Davis, was Nancys oldest daughter, and when she said that she wanted to vote, it was a radical idea. Born enslaved in 1840, twenty years before the Civil War, Susan was a young woman when slavery was abolished in 1865. Her husband, Sam, had fought for the Union and against slavery as a private with the 114th US Colored Infantry. Sams valor gave him a claim to political rights. Susan celebrated when, with adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, he won the ballot in 1870. But disappointment soon followed when local laws such as poll taxes along with intimidation and violence kept her Sam from the ballot box.

Nancy Belle Graves (18081889)

MARTHA S. JONES

Susan learned a critical lesson in those years: without the vote, Black Americans had to build other routes to political power. Racism kept Black Kentuckians to the sidelines on Election Day, but Susan got busy. She banded together with friends and neighbors to form a Black womens club that linked them to thousands of women across the country, in a movement that would use political power to ensure the dignity of all humanity. When the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted in 1920, Susan knew it was a new chance for her and women like her. I cant say precisely what she did in that moment, though I like to think that she steered her buggy from her home on the edge of Danville to the voting precinct office. White commentators in Kentucky certainly worried that she would do just that. Black women, they feared, might outnumber white women at the polls and tip the balance in favor of the Republican Party. Likely Susan didnt worry about that one bit. The potential for an upset would have been just what she had in mind.