Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers and Won the Vote

CHS is pleased to welcome historian Dr. Martha S. Jones to deliver this year’s Charles Guilford Woodward Lecture.

Dr. Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Fought for Rights for All, a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. The book recounts how they 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. The book won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.

This virtual event will take place using Zoom. Registration is free, but please consider making a donation to help support public programming at the CMCH. Click here to register and learn more.

Questions? Contact Adult Programs Manager Natalie Belanger via email at natalie_belanger@chs.org, or call (860) 236-5621 x289.

About Our Speaker

Professor Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy.

Professor Jones is the author of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Professor Jones is also author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015, together with many important articles and essays.

Professor Jones is recognized as a public historian, frequently writing for broader audiences at outlets including the Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time, the curatorship of museum exhibitions including “Reframing the Color Line” and “Proclaiming Emancipation” in conjunction with the William L. Clements Library, and collaborations with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, the American Experience, the Southern Poverty Law Center, PBS, Netflix, and Arte (France.)

Professor Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law. Prior to the start of her academic career, she was a public interest litigator in New York City, recognized for her work a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University.