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

Description

The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Johns Hopkins is hosting a presentation via Zoom by Johns Hopkins history professor Martha S. Jones. She will be discussing her book Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), which was selected as one of Time's 100 must-read books for 2020.

In Vanguard, Jones shares an 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 did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. Jones recounts how black women defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons.

Jones studies the legal and cultural history of the U.S., with a particular focus on how Black Americans have shaped the history of American democracy. She has published books on the voting rights of African American women, the debates about women's rights among Black Americans in the early U.S., and the development of birthright citizenship in the U.S. as promoted by African Americans in Baltimore before the Civil War. She is also the leader of the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project.