Tackling a Century-Old Mystery: Did My Grandmother Vote?

by Martha S. Jones

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (Basic 2020) @marthasjones.

I was looking for my grandmother. That meant spending a warm fall day in a reading room among reference books, microfilm reels and acid-free folders.

I had stolen the day from a meeting in Charleston, S.C., to stop over in Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital and home to its archives. I felt anxious. It wasn’t the time crunch, though the doors would close at 5:30 sharp. I rushed through the Guilford County voting records, driven by a need to discover my grandmother’s story of the 19th Amendment. Halfway through the afternoon I knew I had struck out.

As a historian, I break silences. I was writing a history of Black women and the vote, and spent most days in old records recovering their words, their actions and an entire social movement. Usually I work as part of a community of historians who tell stories about Black women’s struggles for power. Together, we make a good bit of noise every time we open a dusty box, unfold a long-ago creased letter or turn the page of a diary.

But this search was mine alone. Where had my grandmother been on Election Day in 1920? When did she finally vote? These questions gnawed at me. They led me to hours of looking for clues in the faces of the old family photos that hang on my office wall.

I also scoured census returns, letters, newspapers and interviews knowing that I could not finish my book without first understanding her story and the lessons my grandmother’s political life could teach. They were not in the history books, and it was up to me to find them.

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