Basic Books, 2020. — 799 p. — ISBN 9781541618619
I started writing Vanguard by collecting stories of the women in my own family. These begin, as far back as I can trace, with Nancy Belle Graves, who was born enslaved in 1808 in Danville, Kentucky. I wondered what it had been like for Nancy’s daughters and granddaughters when, in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment opened a door to women’s votes. That year, three generations of women in my family—from my grandmother to her mother to her mother’s mother—faced the same question: Could they vote and, if so, what would they do with their ballots? And though I knew lots of family tales, I’d never heard any about how we fit into the story of American women’s rise to power. I knew that Black women had won the vote unevenly in a struggle that took more than a century. They’d fought for their rights, hoping to change the lives of all Black Americans. They confronted an ugly mix of racism and sexism that stunted their aspirations. Still, I knew that I came from women who had always found a way to gather their strength and thenpromote the well-being of their community, the nation, and the world.
My great-great-grandmother, Susan Davis, was Nancy’s oldest daughter, and when she said that she wanted to vote, it was a radical idea. Born enslaved in 1840, twenty years before the Civil War, Susan was a young woman when slavery was abolished in 1865. Her husband, Sam, had fought for the Union and against slavery as a private with the 114th US Colored Infantry. Sam’s valor gave him a claim to political rights. Susan celebrated when, with adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, he won the ballot in 1870. But disappointment soon followed when local laws such as poll taxes along with intimidation and violence kept her Sam from the ballot box.