Rosalyn Terborg-Penn draws from original documents to take a comprehensive look at the African American women who fought for the right to vote. She analyzes the women's own stories, and examines why they joined and how they participated in the U.S. women's suffrage movement.

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn draws from original documents to take a comprehensive look at the African American women who fought for the right to vote. She analyzes the women's own stories, and examines why they joined and how they participated in the U.S. women's suffrage movement. Not all African American women suffragists were from elite circles. Terborg-Penn finds representation by working-class and professional women, from all parts of the nation, Some employed radical, others conservative, means to gain the right to vote. Black women, however, were unified in working to use the ballot to improve not only their own status, but the lives of black people in their communities. Following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, state governments in the South enacted policies which disfranchised African American women. Many white suffragists closed their eyes to these discriminatory acts. Terborg-Penn shows how every political and racial effort to keep African American women disfranchised met with their active resistance until black women finally achieved full citizenship.

The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power -- and how it transformed 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. In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She 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. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women -- Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more -- who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.

Provides 641 biographies and 163 topical essays discussing the important roles Black women have played in American history

"In this fine collection of rare documentary sources, many of them previously unpublished, African-American women in their rich diversity speak of themselves, their lives, their ambitions, their struggles. Theirs are stores of oppression and survival, of family and community self-help, of inspiring heroism and grass-roots organizational continuity in the face of racism, economic hardship, and, far too often, violence. In the spirit of the slave mother who counseled her daughter, "Fight, and if you can't fight, kick; if you can't kick, then bite," black women resisted sexual abuse and economic oppression, cared for black children and neighbors, and organized for survival and political power. Their vivid accounts, their strong and insistent voices, make for inspiring reading, enriching our understanding of the American past"--Book cover.

The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment because it granted the vote to black men but not to women. How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this? Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women's history and to 19th-century political history--a story of how idealists descended to racist betrayal and desperate failure.