Martha S. Jones

Uses stories of Baltimore’s free Blacks to explore the complicated ways in which they used citizenship claims and rights claims to reinforce each other, before and even sometimes after Chief Justice Taney declared in the Dred Scott case that Blacks could not be citizens. For example, they pointed out that white women were citizens even though white women couldn’t vote or hold property (in many places) by themselves. Black people filed petitions; they litigated; they made claims in the papers and in the streets. Those tactics didn’t always succeed, and there wasn’t always agreement about the best course of action (including leaving Maryland for the North, or Canada, or even Liberia), but they did claim the status of rights-bearing people.… (mehr)

The structure of this book relies on a series of biographies to build a picture of the role of Black women in politics. I learned a ton about these women--some were previously unfamiliar to me, others I'd only known in a very specific role (like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper as a poet) whose accomplishments went so much further. That said, it often felt more like a collective biography rather than an overarching history, and I wish I had more meat that comes with a wider lens. It felt a little like jumping from A to B to C to B to D to A to C, etc. This book did broaden my scope of history as it's not taught to us in school, and I hope to read more dedicated biographies and memoirs of these (and other) trailblazing women.… (mehr)