Recently, someone asked me to name my “favorite” Black suffragist. Now, choosing favorites is not exactly a historian’s endeavor, so I dodged the question. But I can admit here that I did know the answer. For me, no figure looms larger than Ida B. Wells. For two decades I have taught her epic life story, with its beginnings in the burdens borne by an orphaned oldest sibling and then as a young teacher in a clash with a railroad conductor. The lawsuit that followed foretold how Wells would go on to insist upon recognition of her humanity and the dignity of all Black Americans. Her lessons often grew out of brutality. Wells became a fierce opponent of lynching after confronting the murder of friends in Memphis, Tennessee. Her journalist’s pen was ignited in that moment, and even today Wells’s fiery condemnation of lynching’s brutal reign of terror are words to live by.
Vanguard is deeply indebted to Wells. She lived the theory of intersectionality long before we came to explain Black women’s lives by that term. All she knew emerged from her simultaneous encounters with racism and sexism. Her 1883 battle over a seat in the whites-only car on the Chesapeake, Ohio, Southwestern Railroad seared that dilemma into her consciousness, and ours. When the conductor directed her to move, Wells shot back that “if he wished to treat me like a lady, he would leave me alone.” In the struggle that followed, Wells recounted: “My dress was torn… one sleeve was almost torn off.” Wells mixed respectability with bold resistance on that rail car headed to Memphis and then she sued. She is a model of how Black women came to political personhood and then used it.1
When it came to injustice and her commitment to undoing it, Wells never confined concerns to her own circumstances. She worked broadly against lynching and school segregation, and for worker’s rights and civil rights. Wells was also a staunch suffragist, and her founding of Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club not only impelled Black women to the polls but also shaped outcomes, such as the election of Oscar DePriest to Congress in 1928 as the first Black man to be seated in Washington since Reconstruction. Still, Wells always defied boundaries between political movements. This was the style that so many Black women have adopted. Winning the vote was one facet of a vision that aimed to win dignity for all humanity.2
Wells exemplified the spirit that runs through all the women in Vanguard. It is a spirit that also runs through the community of Black women historians of which I am a part. The members of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH)—their work and their life examples—have inspired and emboldened my thinking. Vanguard is especially indebted to the work of the late Dr. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, an ABWH founder and author of the field-defining book African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920. Our mission as historians includes excavating the past to promote well-being in our own time. Vanguard joins the collective work of ABWH historians, one part of a mighty whole.
I woke up on an August morning sure that I needed to write Vanguard. The nation was awakening to the upcoming anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, but it was at risk for forgetting Black women’s side of that story. I am grateful to Roz Foster, who took my call and then worked with me to transform a late-summer urge into a book worthy of the women whose lives it chronicles. At Basic Books, Brian Distelberg has been a frank, demanding, and committed editor whose team has made Vanguard the best book it could be. Johns Hopkins University has supported my commitment to these stories by providing time and research support. Special thanks go to the Hopkins students in my courses on the history of women and the vote. Vanguard has benefited from their careful criticism of early drafts.3
It is my great fortune to be surrounded by people who believe in my work and guide my ambitions. I must single out two of them here. First is my friend, historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar. When I first whispered to her my desire to tell the story of two hundred years of Black women’s politics, Erica told me I could and that I must. In the months since, she has shown me how to do just that, even while juggling the demands of her own important work. My advice to students: pay attention to that interesting classmate seated next to you in the lecture hall, because she might just be the lifelong friend who shares your values and commitments. Second is my agent, Tanya McKinnon. Our partnership emerged out of one part happenstance—a shared taxi ride—and another part of deep connection that feels timeless. Tanya and her team generously came on board to support Vanguard and help me project its stories out into a world that badly needs them.
My families, Jones and Hébrard, are my foundation. Thank you to my brother, Paul, and his wife, Heidi, for their unflagging support for my work and for permitting me to tell a bit of our own family story here. Much of this book was written in La Grande-Motte, France, in the seaside home of my mother-in-law, Blanche “Mimi” Hébrard, who has mostly forgiven me for the hours stolen from family time to write. My husband, historian Jean Hébrard, has been Vanguard’s biggest champion. He has carved time out of his own work to support the book, from the afternoon I interrupted our summer vacation to hatch an idea, through the days and nights spent turning that idea into prose. Jean’s steady love for me and for the women from whom I come lifts us all up.
This book is dedicated to my great-great-great-grandmother Nancy Belle Graves. She was born enslaved in 1808, lived to see emancipation, and then remade her family in partnership with her husband, Edmund Graves, after the Civil War and in freedom. Understanding Nancy’s life story and how a women’s movement grew up out of her experiences and her concerns has forever changed my perception of what voting rights can and should mean. Vanguard is also dedicated to Nancy’s daughters, and I count myself among them. But when I speak of Nancy’s daughters, I am referring to women far beyond those in my particular family. I have written Vanguard for all the daughters of Black women like Nancy Graves, who persisted in the face of some of the most brutal, degrading, and undignified circumstances this nation has ever known. Out of their lives—a mix of grief, despair, joy, and hope—we produce our own beautiful truths.