LEH to host Martha S. Jones in Conversation with Leslie Harris
On Wednesday, April 21, at 6 p.m., join the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and Leslie Harris for a conversation with Martha Jones on her groundbreaking book Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.
Register for this free event here.
In Vanguard, 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, as well as how they wielded what political power they obtained 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 who formed the vanguard of women’s rights activism and called on America to realize its best ideals.
About Martha S. Jones
Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. She is president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the oldest and largest association of women historians in the United States, and she sits on the executive board of the Organization of American Historians. In addition to Vanguard, Jones is the author of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America and All Bound up Together: The Women Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900. She has also written for the Washington Post, Atlantic, USA Today, and more.
About Leslie Harris
Leslie M. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the author or editor of three award-winning books, including In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863; Slavery in New York (co-edited with Ira Berlin); and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (co-edited with Daina Ramey Berry). As the 2020–2021 Beatrice Shepherd Blane fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Harris is completing a book on late-20th century New Orleans, entitled Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History.
This event is part of Who Gets to Vote? Conversations on Voting Rights in America, a program of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities intended to build public understanding of the complicated history of voting rights in the United States. Who Gets to Vote? is part of the “Why It Matters: Civic and Electoral Participation” initiative administered by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
