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BOOKS OF THE TIMES <https://www.nytimes.com/column/books-of-the-times>
‘Vanguard’ Spotlights the Black Women Who Fought for the Vote
ByJennifer Szalai <https://www.nytimes.com/by/jennifer-szalai>
* Sept. 2, 2020
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Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on
Equality for All
By Martha S. Jones
Illustrated. 339 pages.
Basic Books. $30.
Crisis and upheaval can often spur a growing interest in reconsidering
the myths of the past; triumphalist tales of a march toward national
greatness sound increasingly hollow next to the irrepressible weight of
reality.
As Americans mark the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which states
that a citizen’s suffrage can’t be denied “on account of sex,” the
long-held gloss that it guarantees women the right to vote has come
under pointed scrutiny. Scholars likeRosalyn Terborg-Penn
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/obituaries/rosalyn-terborg-penn-dead.html>and
Lisa Tetrault have already shown how this history is in fact more vexed
and exclusionary than the popular narrative allows. It’s a truth that
feels especially immediate now, when Americans face an election during a
pandemic with the Postal Service under attack andwithout the full
protections of the Voting Rights Act
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/books/review-one-person-no-vote-carol-anderson.html>.
In “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted
on Equality For All,” the historian Martha S. Jones writes about the
19th Amendment in a chapter she simply calls “Amendment.” The title is
appropriately minimalist and matter-of-fact. “For Black women,
ratification of the 19th Amendment was not a guarantee of the vote, but
it was a clarifying moment,” she says. Jim Crow made voting in the South
as fraught, dangerous and generally impossible for Black women as it had
long been for Black men. What happened in 1920 wasn’t a grand finale but
an inflection point; there was still too much work to do. “Black women,”
Jones writes, “were the new keepers of voting rights in the United States.”
Jones has written an elegant and expansive history of Black women who
sought to build political power where they could. Instead of beginning
with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 — where women gathered to draft
a fiery declaration of rights and the only Black person whose presence
was recorded was Frederick Douglass — Jones opens a couple of decades
earlier, with Jarena Lee, the first woman authorized to preach by the
African Methodist Episcopal Church.
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Women like Lee at the time could expect some digs at their reputation,
even from the more enlightened men in their community. As the editors of
the African-American weekly Freedom’s Journal put it: “A woman, in a
passion, is disgusting to her friends.” One minister compared women
preachers to male alcoholics: Both, he said, neglected their household
obligations. With the so-called colored convention movement that began
in the 1830s, women were welcomed to public life, but mainly as
helpmeets. “These men encouraged women’s work, but not their
leadership,” Jones writes.
Image
Martha S. Jones, whose new book is “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke
Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality For All.”
Martha S. Jones, whose new book is “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke
Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality For All.”Credit...Johns
Hopkins University
Jones recounts how Lee and others cultivated their own “power of
persuasion,” whether they chose the pulpit, podium or pen. She includes
some “firsts” like Lee, but in a sense “Vanguard” is a rebuke to our
fixation on firsts. Jones is just as interested in everything these
women made possible — not just the trails they blazed, but the journeys
they took, and what came after.
Suffrage may have been one goal, but there were more immediately
pressing concerns. An issue that keeps coming up for the women in
Jones’s book is transportation — or, as Jones says, “traveling while
Black.” When traversing the country to speak or preach, Black women
often faced impositions on their freedom to move.
The poet and abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper recalled the
insults thrown her way, the demands that she give up her seat on the
train or disembark entirely when trying to navigate the lecture circuit.
Speaking before the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, Harper
brought up what Jones calls “the terror of the ladies’ car.” “You white
women speak of rights,” Harper said. “I speak of wrongs.” Getting the
ballot could never be the panacea some suffragists made it out to be as
long as “there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon
the feeble and treads down the weak.”
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“Vanguard” includes a number of such iconic moments: Ida B. Wells
marching with her Illinois state delegation in the 1913 suffragist
parade, in defiance of white organizers who told Black women they would
have to march in an all-Black assembly at the back; Fannie Lou Hamer at
the 1964 Democratic National Convention, recalling how a vicious beating
in a Mississippi jail left her with permanent kidney damage and
blindness in one eye.
But Jones also introduces us to formidable women who haven’t been
enshrined in popular memory, like Maggie Hood-Banks, a bishop’s daughter
who combined forceful moral suasion with a sly wit. Hood-Banks would
take familiar lines and torque them to her argument’s advantage. In
1900, at a conference for A.M.E. Zion Church, she made a play on the
language of the notorious Dred Scott decision when she declared: “For
centuries woman was considered inferior to man, and in view of this fact
had no rights man was bound to respect.” She also warned that
churchwomen were “getting very tired of ‘taxation without representation.’”
Jones is an assiduous scholar and an absorbing writer, turning to the
archives to unearth the stories of Black women who worked alongside
white suffragists only to be marginalized, in what often amounted to a
“dirty compromise with white supremacy.” In a conversation with other
historians last year, when the subject of impending celebrations for the
19th Amendment came up, Jones warned against yielding to the “tug of
mythmaking and sanitization that these sort of rituals require.”
Occasionally “Vanguard” slips into the kind of sweeping register that
invited Jones’s skepticism, with refrains about Black women working to
“serve all humanity,” or reaching for “cures for what ailed all
humanity.” But for the most part she allows the history to unfurl with
all of its twists and complexity.
In the book’s introduction, she writes movingly about the women in her
own family, including her grandmother Susie, who arrived with her
husband and four children in Greensboro, N.C., in 1926. Susie, like her
mother and grandmother before her, was a woman “of learning, status and
enough savvy to navigate the maze that led to the ballot box.” But Jones
was never able to find the records that would tell her whether Susie
exercised her newly won right to vote. Still, as Jones recalled ina
recent essay for The Times
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/suffrage-segregation-voting-black-women-19th-amendment.html>:
“For my grandmother, the 19th Amendment was only a starting place.”
/Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter:@jenszalai
<https://twitter.com/jenszalai>./
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