Greer traces a line of Black women's political leadership running from Fannie Lou Hamer through Barbara Jordan to Stacey Abrams. Hamer's organizing work in Mississippi and across the South forms one starting point; Jordan's rise is the other: she reached the House as only the second Black woman to win a seat there, and the first ever sent to Congress from the US South.

What those two built, in Greer's account, made room for Abrams, who ran for governor of Georgia in 2018 and again in 2022 and assembled the electoral operation credited with helping deliver the 2020 presidential win and a Senate majority to the Democrats.

The argument Greer adds to existing scholarship is that Black women have been central to bringing new voters into the Democratic Party, to the workings of American democracy, and to the political development of Black communities in the South.