For Generations Black Women Have Envisioned a Better, Fairer American Politics

The traditional narrative of American voting rights and of American women’s history, taught in schools for generations, emphasizes the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 as the pinnacle of achievement for suffragists. A look at the headlines from last month’s centennial commemorations largely confirms women’s suffrage as a critical step in the continuing expansion of rights.

But black women, explains historian Martha S. Jones, have been mostly excluded from both of those arcs. In her new book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted On Equality For All, Jones reveals more than 200 years of black women’s thinking, organizing, and writing about their vision for an inclusive American politics, including connecting the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 to our contemporary politics and the vice presidential nomination of Senator Kamala Harris, herself African American, in 2020.

Jones writes, too, about the women in her own family across two centuries. She brings these generations of black women out of history’s shadows, from her great-great-great grandmother, Nancy Belle Graves, born enslaved in 1808, to her grandmother, Susie Williams Jones, an activist and educator of the civil rights era. Jones, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, shows us black women who were active in their churches, in schools and colleges, and in associations, advancing a vision of American politics that would be open to all, regardless of gender or race.

What is the Vanguard that you use as the title of the book?

The title came to me very early. The first meaning of vanguard is in the book’s many, many women who were dubbed firsts. Patricia Roberts Harris, the first black woman to be appointed a diplomat during the Johnson administration, explained during her swearing-in ceremony that being first is double-edged. It sounds like a distinction. You broke new ground. But it also means that no black woman came before you. I really took that to heart; it was really a check on the way in which I celebrate the distinction of firsts.

Being in the vanguard also means being out front: leading and showing the way. The women in this book developed a political vision for American politics very early in our history, one that dispensed with racism and sexism. They spent a very long time alone in insisting on that vision. When I explain this about black women’s politics, my students think it's a 21st century idea. But the women I write about were showing that way forward for two centuries. Black women as cutting-edge political leaders is the most important meaning of vanguard.