In addition to the expected wealth of collateral scholarship and local and state civic archives, Jones turned to small-town and Black newspapers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, annual reports of organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society, church records, and other paper ephemera as primary sources. "A kitchen," Jones writes, "was a place to prepare meals and a place from which to plot the future." Showing how Black women educated, organized, and passed on their ideas is what makes Vanguard so vital. Jones notes that "so much of Black women's political activism had its origins in the educations they earned as domestic workers," and points out a thread of domestic work that runs from the formerly enslaved Sojourner Truth to Rosa Parks. Wright, the Johnson family cook, had long advised LBJ about the racism she endured. Malone was one of the first two Black students to integrate the University of Alabama in 1963, and she was the first to graduate, in 1965. Howard University law Professor Harris seconded LBJ's nomination at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Those three Black women in the LBJ photo aren't as instantly recognizable as King and Mitchell, but their efforts and intellectual labor shaped the era. Vanguard begins with the observation that the conventional narrative of women's suffrage in America excludes Black women, and Jones addresses that erasure from the 1820s up to Stacey Abrams.
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