Narrator: Imagine the scene: March 1913, Washington D.C. Thousands of women are preparing for a massive suffrage parade, a bold procession down Pennsylvania Avenue designed to demand the right to vote. But behind the scenes, the organizer, Alice Paul, faces a crisis. Southern white suffragists are threatening to boycott if Black women are allowed to march alongside them. The solution she proposes is a segregated section at the back of the parade. For Black women who have been fighting for political power for nearly a century, this is not just an insult; it’s a betrayal. This single moment reveals a deep and painful truth about the fight for women’s rights in America—that it was never one single movement.

In her groundbreaking book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, historian Martha S. Jones dismantles the simplified history of suffrage. She reveals a parallel, and often more expansive, struggle for power led by African American women who understood that the ballot was just one tool in a much larger fight for dignity, safety, and equality for everyone.

Narrator: Long before the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, which is often cited as the start of the women's rights movement, Black women were already building a unique political tradition. Theirs was a vision born from the dual burdens of racism and sexism, a philosophy that we now call intersectionality. They knew that their freedom was tied to the freedom of their entire community, and they pursued power through any means available.

This early activism often began in the church. Consider the story of Jarena Lee in the early 1800s. A devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Lee felt a powerful calling from God to preach. When she approached the church leader, Richard Allen, he refused, citing the church’s prohibition against female preachers. For years, Lee wrestled with this divine call and the man-made barrier. Then, one day, a guest minister faltered in the middle of his sermon. Seizing the moment, Jarena Lee stood up and delivered an impromptu, electrifying sermon. Witnessing her power, Bishop Allen relented, declaring her call to be genuine. Lee became a trailblazing itinerant preacher, traveling thousands of miles and challenging the notion that a woman’s place was in silent submission. She, and others like her, were fighting for a voice, for a platform, and for the right to lead.

Narrator: As the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements gained momentum in the mid-19th century, Black women found themselves in a precarious position. They were essential to the fight against slavery, yet they often faced racism from their white female allies. The burning of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838 stands as a stark example. When Black and white women met there for an anti-slavery convention, a violent mob, enraged by the sight of racial mixing, burned the building to the ground. It was a brutal lesson in the dangers they faced.

This tension culminated in the decades leading up to the 19th Amendment. While white-led organizations like the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) increasingly courted Southern support by downplaying race, Black women were pushed to the margins. The 1913 suffrage parade in Washington D.C. perfectly illustrates this "dirty compromise." When organizers tried to segregate Black marchers, journalist and activist Ida B. Wells refused. She waited on the sidelines until the Illinois delegation, her home state, marched past. She then emerged from the crowd and defiantly took her place among the white delegates, refusing to be erased from the narrative. This act of defiance showed that Black women would not be pawns in a fight that ignored their full humanity.

Narrator: Facing exclusion from white-led movements and sexism within Black organizations, African American women turned inward, building their own powerful institutions. The church, which had been a training ground for leaders like Jarena Lee, became a political battleground. In the late 19th century, women like Eliza Ann Gardner of the AME Zion Church led campaigns to remove sexist language from church law, secure the right for women to be ordained, and gain control over missionary work, which was a major source of funding and influence.

This spirit of self-reliance led to the creation of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896. Galvanized by a journalist's public, racist attack on Ida B. Wells and all Black women, leaders from across the country united under the motto, "Lifting as we climb." Led by figures like its first president, Mary Church Terrell, the NACW created a national network to fight for civil rights, challenge lynching, and advocate for the vote. It was a movement built on the understanding that, as Terrell put it, their "peculiar status in this country" demanded that they stand for themselves. They were not just fighting for the ballot; they were fighting for their reputation, their safety, and their collective dignity.

Narrator: The ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 was a victory, but for most Black women, especially in the South, it was not a guarantee. They were immediately confronted by the same racist tactics used to disenfranchise Black men: poll taxes, literacy tests, and violent intimidation. The mainstream suffrage organizations, like Alice Paul's National Woman's Party, declared their work finished and offered little help.

So Black women continued the fight on their own. In Richmond, Virginia, entrepreneur and community leader Maggie Lena Walker led hundreds of Black women to the registrar's office, protesting the segregated and demeaning conditions they faced. But the most intense battles were yet to come. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, women were the backbone of voter registration drives. Activist Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper from Mississippi, endured a savage beating in a jailhouse that left her with lifelong injuries, all for trying to register to vote. In 1964, she delivered harrowing testimony at the Democratic National Convention, telling a national audience, "All of this is for what? For America to be America." Her courage, and that of countless women like her, exposed the brutality of Jim Crow and paved the way for the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Narrator: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally broke down the legal barriers to the ballot box, unleashing the political power Black women had been building for over a century. A new generation of leaders emerged, ready to run for office and govern. In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress, running on the defiant slogan, "Unbought and Unbossed." Four years later, she became the first Black woman to run for president, declaring, "I am not the candidate of Black America... I am not the candidate of the women’s movement... I am the candidate of the people."

Her career, along with that of Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan, who mesmerized the nation with her powerful defense of the Constitution during the Watergate hearings, marked a new era. These women, and the ones who followed, like Stacey Abrams, saw themselves as inheritors of a long legacy. They drew strength from the stories of their grandmothers who couldn't vote, from the history of activists like Fannie Lou Hamer, and from a political tradition that always understood power as a means to uplift everyone. They are the modern vanguard, continuing a struggle that has always been about more than just one person or one vote.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Vanguard is that the story of women's suffrage is incomplete and misleading without the central role of African American women. Theirs was never a single-issue fight for the ballot. From the very beginning, they pursued a broader vision of power rooted in dignity, community, and human rights for all. They fought on multiple fronts simultaneously—against racism in the women's movement, against sexism in the civil rights movement, and against a legal system that denied their very humanity.

Martha S. Jones's work challenges us to rethink what a political movement looks like. It’s not always a straight line to a single legislative victory. Sometimes, it’s a woman demanding the right to preach in her church. Sometimes, it’s an activist refusing to be segregated in a parade. And sometimes, it’s a sharecropper telling her story to a nation that desperately needs to hear it. The vanguard has always been here, and their work reminds us that the fight for a more perfect union is a climb, and the only way forward is to lift others as we go.