Book Review/Heather Seggel

Keeping History Honest

Let’s judge a book by its cover, or at least let us begin there. “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All” (Seal Press) features cover art by artist Charly Palmer, a painting depicting nine Black people waiting in line to vote (a sign above them clearly reads “voting booth” and a ballot box is also labeled). There are two young girls, three women, four men, varied in age and dress. The bright yellow background gives the feel of a hot day, and impatient waiting tempered with commitment. It could be an imagined scene, or one painted from a photograph; there’s a timeless quality that speaks to events as recent as today, when voting rights are once again imperiled, and most often denied people of color. Historian Martha S. Jones’s history of Black women in politics doesn’t focus solely on the vote, but it is a powerful through-line in a book that begins in 1827 and ends discussing the career of Stacey Abrams.

Being cut off from the vote and left out of many political forums, these women found a voice in social clubs and also church, where moral appeals could be tied to a higher authority. Women who wanted to preach had to fight for the opportunity, but it allowed them to develop skills they could pass along to others, and translated to public speaking in other forums; Jones describes women as moving easily between the podium and the pulpit. Maria Stewart was a writer, teacher, and preacher, who ultimately faced uncomfortable crowds when she began to call for women’s equality with men. When she retired from public speaking, though, she returned to teaching with an invigorated curriculum in hand, schooling young women in elocution, posture, and other tools of persuasion, enabling her work to continue onward.

Profiles of Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm and others fill in gaps in our knowledge. The suffrage movement I learned about as a child was a story of ladies in bustles with sashes who ... did something (I was not a good student) and secured the vote. A closer look at many of those feminist icons revealed that they solicited help from Black women but denied them the spoils of their collective efforts, and many of them profited from slave ownership and were unwilling to give up that privilege. Jones brings much-needed nuance to that history, pointing out times when African American women allied themselves with this flawed version of suffrage, plainly calling it out as inadequate but pragmatically using that leverage to help advance their own causes. Advancement came in increments, building footholds to gain ground with the end goal of fully inclusive equality (which we still have not achieved).

While reading, it’s hard to stifle one’s anger on behalf of the women profiled, whose work made life better not just for themselves but for all of us, despite being met with resistance and even violence. Even harder is the feeling of only just beginning to learn about these women and their work after a lifetime of learning histories that pointedly excluded them. Jones writes about all this with clear, direct language, but an introduction describes how she was led to the project by first collecting stories of the women in her own family. That personal connection gives readers a sense of how recent all this history was (and is). It’s striking to set the book down and realize how being politically active was a much bigger part of daily life for these women than anything I’ve seen in my own life, but that my freedom to do other things if I choose comes in part from their efforts.

Back to that cover, though. The women and girls wear dresses while one man wears a suit and the rest are dressed more casually. One woman holds her ballot up near her face, as if she might use it as a fan. It’s an intimate scene, and one showing people forced to change the system so it might make room for them. And the moment is peaceful, but one that could only happen after amending the Constitution; people lost their lives in the effort, and the country failed to tell the story of how it all came to pass. “Vanguard” begins to right that wrong, and in so doing introduces us to heroes whose names we should have known all along.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2021

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