American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
Join us as Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. Jones will recount how African American women defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons.
Martha S. Jones is a historian, writer, and commentator who focuses on how black Americans have shaped the history of American Democracy. She is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. She is an immediate past co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and today serves on the boards and committees of the Society of American Historians, the Library of Congress, the National Women's History Museum, the US Capitol Historical Society, the Johns Hopkins University Press, the CUNY Law School Foundation, the Journal of African American History and Slavery & Abolition. Jones was elected to AAS membership in 2018. Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), was the winner of the 2021 L.A. Times Book Prize for History, the finalist for the 2021 Mark Lynton History Prize, a 2021 MAAH Stone Book Award short list selection, a 2021 Cundill History Prize short list selection, and named a best book for 2020 by Ms., Time, Foreign Affairs, Black Perspectives, the Undefeated, and Smithsonian.