Jones, Martha S.
Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
Basic Books (New York)
2020
OUR SYNOPSIS: Martha S. Jones presents the stories of Black women who earned the right to vote in the United States, then fought to exercise this right. She tells a 200-year history of African American women’s political involvement through a compelling cast of changemakers. From antislavery organizing through to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond, Jones locates Black women at the forefront of American activism.
BIG QUESTIONS:
Who inspires you to participate in politics and/or democracy?
How did the Civil War change the freedom struggle for Black women?
How did Reconstruction change the freedom struggle for Black women?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“Terming Black women the ‘Vanguard’ has a double meaning. Despite the burdens of racism, they blazed trails across the whole of two centuries. In public speaking, journalism, banking, and education, Black women led American women, showing the way forward. Some ‘first’ Black women leapt out front because nothing less would get them where they aimed to go. Black women emerged from brutal encounters with enslavement, sexual violence, economic exploitation, and cultural denigration as visionaries prepared to remedy their circumstances and, by doing so, cure the world. As the vanguard, Black women also point the nation toward its best ideals.” (11)
“Black women would never sever their political power from the movements and organizations that sat at the heart of their communities. At times, their drive to power led them to convene as women. But all roads brought them back to the needs of the African American public culture in which they had been formed.” (68)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
