Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All Cover
Podcast Mentions

Vanguard How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

Martha S. Jones

The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power -- and how it transformed America. 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 di...

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The Ezra Klein Show

Podcast

The Ezra Klein Show

Ezra Klein described Vanguard as Jones' most recent book that examines the 19th Amendment and the long struggle of Black women for true suffrage.

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Jones' most recent book, Vanguard, does something similar for the 19th Amendment.

— Episode: What Keeping American Democracy Alive Lo...

Episode: What Keeping American Democracy Alive Looks Like

Ezra Klein described Vanguard as Jones' most recent book that examines the 19th Amendment and the long struggle of Black women for true suffrage.

"

Jones' most recent book, Vanguard, does something similar for the 19th Amendment.

Episode: Sarah Schulman’s Radical Approach to Conflict, Com...

The book revises the narrative of women's suffrage, showing that white women won the vote in 1920 while Black women continued fighting for voting rights, thereby correcting a persistent myth.

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My second favorite book this year was Vanguard by Martha S. Jones. It is a book that absolutely changed the way I look at things.

Stay Tuned with Preet

Podcast

Stay Tuned with Preet

It highlighted the stories of Black women who were involved in the suffrage movement, but whose contributions were often overlooked due to racism within the movement.

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The suffrage movement gets right the fundamental idea that sex should have no relationship to political rights or political power in the United States.

— Episode: No Voter Left Behind (with Maria Teresa...

Episode: No Voter Left Behind (with Maria Teresa Kumar & Ma...

It highlighted the stories of Black women who were involved in the suffrage movement, but whose contributions were often overlooked due to racism within the movement.

"

The suffrage movement gets right the fundamental idea that sex should have no relationship to political rights or political power in the United States.

The suffrage movement also suffers from an important shortcoming and that shortcoming is its relationship to racism, anti-black racism.

African-American women will be kept from the polls just like their fathers and their husbands have been kept from the polls by state laws that are used to keep black Americans away from Election Day.

Poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, and nothing in the 19th Amendment, by design, nothing in the 19th Amendment interferes with the ability of Southern states to continue to use those laws to now keep black women from exercising the vote.

African-American women are organized all throughout the movement for women's rights and women's suffrage going back to the early decades of the 19th century.

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