There’s A Long History Behind Stacey Abrams

Martha Jones’s new book, “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All,” explains the crucial role of Black women, such as Stacey Abrams, in the American fight for equality over the past two centuries. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University (and — full disclosure — a colleague of mine at Hopkins’s SNF Agora Institute). I interviewed her about her book (the interview has been edited for length)

Henry Farrell: Your book ends by talking about Stacey Abrams. How did the tradition of Black women suffragists shape Abrams and the work she has done in Georgia?

Martha Jones: Leader Abrams herself has explained the political traditions from which her work emerged. This includes the influence of her parents and a beloved grandmother whose own reluctance about casting a ballot, as a Black woman in the U.S. South, lends a distinct poignancy to Leader Abrams’s commitment to voting rights. She credits the legacies of formerly enslaved women such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, both of whom worked against slavery and for women’s suffrage.

Among heroes of the modern civil rights movement, Leader Abrams has singled out the sharecropper turned SNCC organizer and Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party leader, Fannie Lou Hamer. Mrs. Hamer organized at the grass roots, understood how to use news cameras to take her demand for voting rights into American homes, and publicly challenged Democrats for seating an all-White delegation from Mississippi at their 1964 convention without the input of Black Democrats.

Abrams’s versatility in mixing office holding with organizing grows out of a tradition in which Black women have long pivoted against violence, disfranchisement and discrimination. Stacey Abrams knows how, in politics, to make a way out of no way.

HF: You explain how Black women saw women’s suffrage, equal religious participation and Black civil rights as intimately bound together. How did their various lived experiences provide them with this broader crosscutting perspective?

MJ: Black women’s early political ideas developed from their vexed relationship to the body politic into what we might call today an intersectional approach to politics. At the start of the 19th century, they pioneered the view that neither race nor sex should affect access to political rights or the exercise of political power. These women — preachers, abolitionists and writers — were the nation’s original anti-racist feminists. They built a political culture — in antislavery societies, literary associations, women’s clubs, sororities, and civil rights organizations — promoting a vision for American democracy that honors Black women’s equality and dignity.