Martha S. Jones on Black Women and the Suffrage Movement

The John W. Kluge Center will host historian Martha S. Jones for a conversation centered around her recent book: Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.  Vanguard tells the history of Black women activists that is too-frequently left out of accounts of the struggles for racial and gender equality in the US. Jones writes about trailblazing activists like Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and the political battles they fought against unjust systems. Kluge Center Director John Haskell will interview Jones on the book and its lessons for today’s political world.

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy. In addition to Vanguard, Jones is the author of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), which won the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award, the American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize, the American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid book award, and the Baltimore City Historical Society Scholars honor for 2020. Jones is also author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015).

For transcript and more information, visit https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-9698