Michael: Alright Kevin, pop quiz. When did American women get the right to vote? Kevin: Easy. 1920. The 19th Amendment. I paid attention in history class! Michael: That's what we all learned. But for millions of Black women, that date is a myth. Their real fight for the vote wouldn't be won for another 45 years. Kevin: Whoa, okay. My entire understanding of suffrage is officially broken. Where is this coming from? Michael: It's from a book that's been sweeping up awards and completely reframing this history. We're diving into Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones. Kevin: Vanguard. I like that title. It feels active, like they're on the front lines. Michael: It's perfect. And Jones is the ideal person to write it. She's a renowned historian at Johns Hopkins, but what's fascinating is her own family history is woven into this story—her grandfather was the president of Bennett College, a key institution for Black women's education and activism that we'll talk about. This book is both deeply researched and deeply personal. Kevin: Okay, so this isn't just academic. This is lived history. It makes you wonder what other foundational stories we've been told are incomplete. Michael: That's the central question of the book. And to understand this 45-year gap, we have to go way back, even before the Civil War, to a time when Black women were building political power without any hope of voting.

Kevin: That’s the part that’s hard to wrap my head around. If you can’t vote, and you have no legal standing, how do you even begin to build political power? It seems impossible. Michael: You find alternative routes. And for many Black women in the early 19th century, the first political arena wasn't a statehouse; it was the church. Take the story of Jarena Lee. She was born in 1783 and felt a powerful, divine calling to preach in the African Methodist Episcopal, or AME, Church. Kevin: I’m guessing that didn't go over well with the all-male leadership. Michael: Not at all. The head of the AME Church, Bishop Richard Allen, flatly rejected her. He told her the church had no rules allowing for women preachers. But Jarena Lee was persistent. She didn't give up. Years later, she was attending a service in Philadelphia when the guest minister faltered, at a loss for words. Kevin: Oh, I can see where this is going. Her moment arrived. Michael: It did. Lee stepped up, uninvited, and delivered this incredibly powerful, impromptu sermon that captivated everyone. The experience was so profound that Bishop Allen himself stood up and declared her call to preach was as authentic as any man's. He essentially said, "The spirit of God is upon her." From that point on, she became a traveling evangelist, speaking to thousands. Kevin: Wow. So she literally had to seize the pulpit to get her voice heard. The church became her training ground for public speaking, for leadership, for persuading an audience. Michael: Exactly. It was a place to practice politics in a world that offered them no other stage. But it wasn't just the pulpit. As we move later into the 19th century, we see women building power through institutions. A perfect example is Fannie Williams, the daughter of a woman who had been enslaved, Susan Davis. Kevin: What was her story? Michael: Fannie was highly educated, a college graduate from Berea College in 1888. But she lived in St. Louis, Missouri, where as a Black woman, she was barred from voting. Her husband could technically vote after the 15th Amendment, but poll taxes and intimidation made it impossible. So, what did Fannie do? She organized. She fundraised. She built things. Kevin: What kind of things? Michael: Her crowning achievement was spearheading the construction of the first-ever YWCA for African Americans in St. Louis, the Phillis Wheatley YWCA. This wasn't just a building. It was a power center. It was a safe space, a place for education, for community organizing. She also ran workshops to prepare other Black women for the discriminatory literacy tests they’d face if they tried to register to vote. Kevin: That is pure strategy. It’s like she was saying, "If you won't let us into your system, we'll build a better one right next to it." It’s not just about protest; it's about creating a parallel infrastructure of power. Michael: That’s the core of it. Power wasn't just the ballot. Power was having a community hub. Power was education. Power was having a network of women who could support each other. These women were politicians in everything but name, long before they could cast a vote. They were the invisible architects of Black political life. Kevin: It’s incredible. They were playing a completely different game, and frankly, a much harder one. But this strategy of building their own power base must have gotten really complicated when they had to interact with other groups, right? Like the white women fighting for suffrage. Michael: Incredibly complicated. And that brings us to one of the most painful and central themes of the book: the 'double bind' these women faced.

Kevin: The double bind. I think I can guess what this means. They're fighting racism and sexism at the same time, often from the same people. Michael: Exactly. They were caught between white-led feminist movements that were often deeply racist, and Black-led freedom movements that were often deeply sexist. They were constantly being asked to choose which part of their identity was more important: being Black or being a woman. Kevin: An impossible choice. Can you give me an example of how this played out? Michael: A truly harrowing one is the 1838 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in Philadelphia. This was a radical moment. For the first time, Black and white women abolitionists were meeting, organizing, and walking arm-in-arm in public, a direct challenge to the social order. Women like Susan Paul and Sarah Mapps Douglass were there, representing Black women's societies. Kevin: That sounds like a powerful moment of solidarity. Michael: It was, but the backlash was immediate and brutal. Mobs formed, screaming insults, throwing rocks. The mayor of Philadelphia told the women the only way to calm the mob was to segregate their meeting—to have the Black women sit separately. Kevin: What did they do? Michael: They refused. They held their ground on the principle of equality. But that night, after the women had left, the mob returned and burned the convention hall, Pennsylvania Hall, to the ground. It was a magnificent new building, dedicated to free speech, and they reduced it to rubble in hours. Kevin: They burned the hall to the ground just because Black and white women were meeting together? That's terrifying. What happened after that? Did the white women stand by them? Did that shared trauma forge a stronger bond? Michael: That’s the heartbreaking part of the story. While some individuals did, the broader movement did not. This event was a preview of what would happen for the next century. Time and time again, when faced with a choice between racial solidarity and political expediency, the mainstream white suffrage movement chose expediency. Kevin: How so? Michael: They made what the book calls a "dirty compromise." To win the support of white women in the South, leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton began to distance themselves from the cause of Black rights. They argued for "educated suffrage," a coded way of saying that white women should get the vote to outweigh the votes of Black and immigrant men. They essentially threw Black women under the bus to get ahead. Kevin: That is the ultimate betrayal. You're fighting for freedom, but only for a specific kind of freedom. It’s what the activist and lawyer Pauli Murray would later call 'Jane Crow.' Michael: A perfect term for it. It's a discrimination so unique, a blend of racism and sexism, that it needed its own name. And this betrayal is precisely why the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 was, for Black women, not a victory celebration. It was the starting gun for another, even harder, fight. Kevin: So this kicks off what you called a 'second suffrage movement.' Michael: Precisely. The fight to make the promise of the vote a reality.

Kevin: Okay, so 1920 happens. The 19th Amendment is ratified. On paper, all American women can vote. But in practice, in the Jim Crow South, what did a Black woman face if she tried to register? Michael: She faced a wall of violent resistance. She'd be forced to pay a poll tax she couldn't afford. She'd have to pass an impossible literacy test, where she might be asked to recite the entire state constitution. She'd face economic retaliation—getting fired from her job, or her family being evicted from their farm. And if all that failed, she faced threats, beatings, and even death at the hands of the KKK. Kevin: So the amendment was basically a dead letter for them. It meant nothing. Michael: For millions, yes. And this is where the story of the modern civil rights movement becomes the story of Black women's fight for the vote. We have to fast forward to the 1960s, to Mississippi, one of the most brutal states. And we have to talk about Fannie Lou Hamer. Kevin: I know her name. Her story is just unbelievable. Michael: She was a sharecropper who, in 1962, decided she wanted to register to vote. For that simple act, she was fired, evicted, and later, arrested and savagely beaten in a jailhouse, leaving her with permanent injuries. But that violence didn't silence her. It ignited her. Kevin: It turned her into one of the most powerful voices of the movement. Michael: Absolutely. She became a leader in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or MFDP, which was created to challenge the state's all-white, segregationist Democratic party. In 1964, they went to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City and demanded to be seated as the legitimate delegation from Mississippi. Kevin: And that’s when she gave her famous testimony, right? Michael: Yes. On national television, in front of the credentials committee, she told her story. She described the beating in raw, unflinching detail. She spoke of the constant fear and humiliation. And she ended with that powerful question: "Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?" Kevin: Her testimony is one of the most powerful things I've ever heard. It’s so raw. She's not just asking for a right; she's demanding recognition of her humanity. And President Johnson was so scared of her testimony that he called a last-minute press conference just to get her off the air. Michael: He did. But it was too late. The networks played her full speech later that night, and the nation was horrified. Fannie Lou Hamer’s courage, her truth, put a human face on the sheer brutality of voter suppression. It created a moral crisis for the country and built immense pressure that led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Kevin: And that act is what finally, truly, opened the door. It put federal examiners on the ground to register voters and outlawed the literacy tests and other tricks. Michael: It was the real key that unlocked the ballot box. And this is the legacy that animates figures like Stacey Abrams today. When she founded Fair Fight after her 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia, she was drawing from the same playbook as Fannie Lou Hamer and the NACW. It's about exposing the mechanics of voter suppression, organizing communities, and using every tool—legal, political, and moral—to fight for access to the ballot. The struggle continues.

Kevin: It’s just an incredible, sweeping history. When we look back at this whole two-hundred-year struggle, from Jarena Lee in the pulpit to Fannie Lou Hamer at the DNC, what's the one thing we should take away from Vanguard? Michael: I think it's that for Black women, the vote was never just about casting a ballot. It was never a single-issue fight. It was, as another incredible activist Nannie Helen Burroughs called it, a "weapon of moral defense." Kevin: A weapon of moral defense. I like that. What does it mean? Michael: It means the vote was a tool in a much larger, ongoing battle for the dignity, safety, and humanity of their entire community. They weren't just trying to join the existing political system; they were trying to redeem the soul of American democracy itself. They believed, as the book quotes, that "when society lifted them up as equals, everyone would rise." Kevin: That’s a fundamentally different vision of politics. It’s not about individual gain or party loyalty. It’s about collective uplift. It makes you rethink what political power even means. Michael: It absolutely does. It's not just about winning elections. It's about building community, protecting the vulnerable, and as the title says, insisting on equality for all. They were the vanguard, showing the country the path to its own best ideals, even when the country refused to see it. Kevin: And they did it while being attacked from all sides. It's a story of unbelievable resilience. Michael: It is. And it makes us wonder, what are the 'invisible' power structures being built today? Who are the vanguards we might be overlooking right now? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our social channels and share what this history brings up for you. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.