Conclusion

CANDIDATES OF THE PEOPLE

Moving forward from the Voting Rights Act, Black women carried their history into a new present, looking back while they moved forward. Some explained their entry into politics through stories of the parents and grandparents who raised them to embrace leadership. Others emerged when they became “firsts,” breaking through new ceilings. Everyone told a story of the women who came before them: role models, cautionary tales, and lots of inspiration. It helped to consult the road maps that legendary woman left behind. There is Mary Church Terrell’s 1940 memoir, A Colored Woman in a White World, and Pauli Murray’s family history, Proud Shoes, published in 1956. The daughter of Ida B. Wells, Alfreda Duster, released her mother’s autobiography, Crusade for Justice, in 1970. That same year, Hallie Quinn Brown’s Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, long out of print, was republished for the very first time.¹

Collectives kept Black women’s politics innovative and ambitious. In 1973, the National Black Feminist Organization brought together veterans of civil rights, Black power, and women’s rights movements. The Combahee River Collective issued a guiding manifesto that called for a Black women’s politics that critiqued racism, sexism, class prejudice, and homophobia. Black women’s labor organizations—the National Domestic Workers Union, the Domestic Workers of America, and the Household Workers Organization—gave voice to the demands of working women. The National Welfare Rights Organization made public benefits a women’s issue, and Black women led there. In 1991, when the testimony of Professor Anita Hill charged US Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas with sexual harassment, more than sixteen hundred African American women organized to place a full-page advertisement in the New York Times titled “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves.”²

New histories recovered stories of Black women in politics that had been nearly lost or forgotten. Between 1968 and 1969, Arno Press reissued the narrative of Sojourner Truth, the Civil War–era memoirs of Susie King Taylor and Mary Peake, and the White House reminiscences of Elizabeth Keckley. A trio of anthologies published from 1970 to 1972 serve as near-bibles that explained Black women’s quest in their own words: Toni Cade’s The Black Woman, Gerda Lerner’s Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, and Dorothy Wesley Porter’s Early Negro Writing, 1760–1837. In 1978, Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn published an anthology of essays that ranged from labor and politics to biographies of Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs, titled The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images. Black women’s histories became squarely the subject of scholarly study. On Black women and the vote, it was in this volume that Terborg-Penn published some of her early and pathbreaking findings in the essay “Discrimination Against Afro-American Women in the Woman’s Movement, 1830–1920.” From there on out, when Black women made history they could count on historians to take notice and make note.³

THE STORY OF the Vanguard is still being written. Black women continue to innovate, challenge, and lead American politics to its best ideals in our own moment. Today’s political culture reflects the wave, the surge, the storm of Black women who claimed their places in American politics after enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Nothing short of an encyclopedia could account for the hundreds and then thousands of women who have kept burning the fires lit two centuries ago by women like Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and Sarah Mapps Douglass. Standing among such women in the late twentieth century and then in the twenty-first is to be part of a grand chorus of thinkers and doers. They are Black women who speak from an experience shaped by racism and sexism, and then call out injustice in the interest of all humanity. Even if America is still learning the history of Black women’s politics, the women of the Vanguard know where they come from and how they got to be who they are.

Shirley Chisholm explained that she came of age in Brooklyn College’s Harriet Tubman Society, where she heard “talk about white oppression, Black racial consciousness, and Black pride” and studied figures such as Tubman, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and George W. Carver. In 1965, Chisholm entered politics with the slogan “Unbought and Unbossed,” and by 1968, she was on her way to Washington, the first Black woman elected to Congress. There, she championed the Equal Rights Amendment, “one of the most clear-cut opportunities we are likely to have to declare our faith in the principles that shaped our Constitution, making the 5th and the 14th Amendments unequivocally applicable to ‘sex distinctions.’”⁴

Chisholm tested the Democratic Party in 1972 with a run for president. It was yet another “first.” Chisholm knew the significance of her candidacy and made plain her sweeping aims: “I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people and my presence before you symbolizes a new era in American political history.” Chisholm knew that thousands upon thousands of Black Americans possessed the right to vote for the first time, and she inspired them to use it.⁵

Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005) speaking in Detroit, Michigan, May 17, 1972

GETTY IMAGES

Listen to Barbara Jordan and you’ll learn that she was raised in Houston, Texas, the child of Baptist Church leaders, knowing that history mattered, even before she was poised to make it. Jordan graduated from Phillis Wheatley High School, then enrolled at Texas Southern University when the University of Texas refused to admit Black students. She went on to law school in Boston, but then returned to Texas and, in 1972, Houstonians elected her to Congress, making her the first woman from Texas, Black or white, to represent the state in her own right. Jordan opened the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon in a speech to the House Judiciary Committee. She recalled the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States and its opening words, “We, the people.” Times had changed, Jordan explained, “It’s a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that ‘We, the people.’… But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in ‘We, the people.’” Nixon would soon be out, but Jordan was in.⁶

Lottie Shackleford called Little Rock, Arkansas, home, a city destined to make civil rights history. Shackelford entered politics almost by accident, as a PTA mother who learned the ins and outs of the state house and city hall. Shackelford was elected her hometown’s mayor in 1987, even before Sharon Pratt Kelley became the first Black woman to lead a major city, Washington, DC, in 1991. Shackleford may not be the best-remembered politician to come out of Little Rock—that honor goes to the forty-second president, Bill Clinton. Still, the two are part of one story. Shackelford served as Clinton’s deputy campaign manager during his 1992 run for the White House. Shackelford stepped up as cochair of the Democratic National Convention. She’d always been a proponent of voting rights and in 2019 commented on the Nineteenth Amendment’s anniversary: “It’s great that we’re celebrating,” she began, and then her tone shifted: “I have some ambivalent feelings at this point.… I’m also a little depressed that we’re still fighting so many of the battles over and over again. So it’s a sort of mixed bag for me.” Yes, women are at the polls, she conceded, but “not in the numbers we need to be.”⁷

Lani Guinier was born into politics but took a different path from that of her activist mother, who raised her daughter in Queens, New York. Her direction was clear after, as a girl, Guinier saw NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Constance Baker Motley challenge the color line that kept James Meredith from enrolling at the University of Mississippi. Motley inspired Guinier to become a civil rights lawyer. She followed in Motley’s footsteps, working at the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department during the Carter administration and then joining the fabled NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where she headed the voting rights project. Though the nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in 1993, Guinier never saw the inside of the Senate chamber. After weeks of political wrangling, President Bill Clinton withdrew her nomination. Guinier’s views on voting rights, especially her departure from the principle one person, one vote, were too radical, and she was “vilified as a mad woman with strange hair… a strange name and strange ideas.” The opposition branded Guinier a “quota queen,” a caricature that denigrated her as a supporter of affirmative action, hence the quota reference. At the same time, she was said to be like the “welfare queen,” a parody that maligned Black women for choosing self-imposed poverty and then living high on public dollars.⁸

The civil rights movement was baked into the city streets of Greensboro, North Carolina, where Loretta Lynch grew up. Even after she was elevated to US Attorney General, Lynch regarded history as her foundation. Black women, like their white counterparts, were daughters of “the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848,” a gathering that “galvanized and empowered women to this day.” Black women in the twenty-first century were also the descendants of the students “who sat at a Greensboro lunch counter.” Lynch’s father had welcomed them to the basement of his church, where they planned their next moves. When she spoke to the young Black women graduates of Atlanta’s Spelman College, Lynch reminded them that “eleven women, some of them former slaves,” had 135 years earlier “sought an education in the dim basement of an Atlanta church.” Lynch urged them, as she did, to “draw strength from that inheritance, to lean on that example and never doubt the smallest step can create the most sweeping change.” By knowing their history, Black women were positioned to aid “our comrades in humanity on whose behalf we are called to work.”⁹

Lynch rooted her journey in lessons from African American history, then reached further: “We are a country that shares a bond of common humanity, all of us together.” The human family was, she believed, “stronger than anything that can divide us, it’s stronger than race, it’s stronger than ethnicity; stronger than nationality, gender and gender identity or sexual orientation.” Among her most demanding legal cases was the deadly shooting massacre at Pulse, the Orlando, Florida, nightclub, in 2016. As attorney general, Lynch was charged with investigating the atrocity as a crime. She went further and embraced the victims, their families, and their community as one part of the great bundle of humanity, as her Black foremothers had taught her.¹⁰

For those Americans who might think that Stacey Abrams came out of nowhere, she is usually the first to set them straight. Abrams knows the political tradition out of which she comes, and she stands on the shoulders of generations of Black women. Her run for the governorship of Georgia in 2018 brought Abrams unprecedented attention and she explained her bid to become the nation’s first Black woman governor as growing out of a long track record in politics. Her path began in Abrams’s college years, when, as a student at Spelman College, she earned her way onto Mayor Maynard Jackson’s staff after challenging the mayor in a public forum. Her graduate studies propelled her forward. After acquiring her master’s in public administration and then her law degree, Abrams returned to Georgia, where she was elected City Attorney for Atlanta and then a member of the Georgia State Assembly. Her professional bona fides were in order.¹¹

Stacey Abrams (b. 1973), election watch party, November 6, 2018

GETTY IMAGES

Abrams’s roots go deeper still. Her understanding of how to make a life in politics over the long haul derives from the Black women who came before her: “I know that Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, and Carolyn Abrams, my mother, that they have each faced difficult, heart-wrenching challenges, and that my obligation is to remain viable for the fight.” Her first lessons in voting rights grew out of her study of Fannie Lou Hamer, from whom she learned to stand her ground, use the podium and the press, and play the long game: “In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer defied President Lyndon B. Johnson and threatened his election, going on national television to excoriate the Democratic Party’s insensitivity to the plight of Blacks seeking a vote in the South.… The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party lost its bid to be seated in 1964, but the delegation gained full recognition in 1968, a delayed victory but a win nonetheless.”¹²

Abrams is of course a woman of her own time and she learned one of her first lessons about voting rights from an intimate family story. Her own grandmother had won access to the polls with passage of the Voting Rights Act. Still, Abrams explained how her grandmother “almost didn’t vote the first time she was allowed to in 1968.” Her grandmother was battle weary: “The other times she had tried to register and tried to vote they sicced dogs on her… they sprayed her with fire hoses.” Voter suppression persisted in the form of fear long after formal barriers had been lifted. “By the time the right to vote became real in Mississippi she was just terrified and so she had decided not to vote.” But recalling the price that others had paid for her changed the older woman’s mind. Abrams explains: “My grandfather took her to task and said your sons and daughters went to jail for this, your children have fought for this right they’re too young to enjoy. You owe this to them.”¹³

Abrams has moved between office holding and advocacy with equal parts skill and persistence. When her bid for Georgia’s governorship ended, a race that Abrams maintains was denied her through the suppression of Black votes, she shifted gears to put her energy into Fair Fight, a political action organization where she champions the voting rights of all Georgians. That same grandmother who soothed her own fears about voting supported Abrams in her bid for high office. Poetic justice runs through their intergenerational story: “She was so grateful that she had a granddaughter who had a chance to actually possibly become the first Black woman to be a governor in the history of the United States. Being from the South she understood how important governors are, that it was the governors of the southern states that created and implemented and maintained Jim Crow, it was the governors who authorized the treatment of Black people as less than human.”¹⁴

Today, the fate of Abrams’s political career is ahead of her. Wherever she may land, to hear her tell it, Abrams knows few limits: “I’m a Black woman who’s in a conversation about possibly being second in command to the leader of the free world and I will not diminish my ambition or the ambition of any other women of color by saying that’s not something I’d be willing to do.” If a question should arise about how Abrams grew to be so bold, so assured, and so certain about the future of Black women in American politics, listen in as she narrates the tradition out of which she has emerged.

Harriet Tubman imparted insight into how leaders must awaken the consciousness of their people. Abrams often quotes Tubman: “I freed a whole lot of slaves. I could have freed a whole lot more, if they’d only known that they were slaves.” Ida B. Wells mastered “the power of her words,” making “real the sin of lynching” and helping “to launch a civil rights movement with the founding of the NAACP.” Abrams claims white and Latinx women as among her foremothers: Bella Abzug “defied her party bosses to advocate for women, the poor, and the oppressed in New York, in Congress and beyond,” and Linda Alvarado “created one of the top ranked construction firms in the nation and then bought herself a baseball team.”¹⁵

The metaphor of standing on the shoulders of others is apt in Abrams’s case. Seeing Black women as mayors had at one time set her high bar: “My highest ambition when I was in college thinking about politics was to become mayor of Atlanta because that was the highest job I’d ever seen a Black woman have.” Studying the history of Black women in politics shifted her ambition: “I knew enough about Shirley Chisholm and about Barbara Jordan to know that you could go to Congress, maybe, but that was unlikely because there had never been a Black congresswoman.” The lesson? “Don’t be bound by what you’ve seen.” Whether calling for the full and unfettered voting rights of Black Americans in Georgia or contemplating who is likely to run the nation’s executive branch in 2020, Abrams is bold and emboldened by a past that, for all its ambition, could not have wholly seen her coming. When voter suppression meets Stacey Abrams, an old fight meets a new challenger, and Abrams, in the spirit of the two centuries of Black women before her, is in it for the long haul.