Susan celebrated when, with adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, he won the ballot in 1870. Sam’s valor gave him a claim to political rights. Her husband, Sam, had fought for the Union and against slavery as a private with the 114th US Colored Infantry. Born enslaved in 1840, twenty years before the Civil War, Susan was a young woman when slavery was abolished in 1865. My great-great-grandmother, Susan Davis, was Nancy’s oldest daughter, and when she said that she wanted to vote, it was a radical idea. Still, I knew that I came from women who had always found a way to gather their strength and then promote the well-being of their community, the nation, and the world. They confronted an ugly mix of racism and sexism that stunted their aspirations. They’d fought for their rights, hoping to change the lives of all Black Americans. I knew that Black women had won the vote unevenly in a struggle that took more than a century. That year, three generations of women in my family-from my grandmother to her mother to her mother’s mother-faced the same question: Could they vote and, if so, what would they do with their ballots? And though I knew lots of family tales, I’d never heard any about how we fit into the story of American women’s rise to power. I wondered what it had been like for Nancy’s daughters and granddaughters when, in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment opened a door to women’s votes. These begin, as far back as I can trace, with Nancy Belle Graves, who was born enslaved in 1808 in Danville, Kentucky. I started writing Vanguard by collecting stories of the women in my own family. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women-Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more-who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals. She recounts how they 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 offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power - and how it transformed America.
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