With each discussion we will conclude with time for your questions and if you have a question for our speakers at any time, click on the q and a button at the bottom of the screen and we will get through as many as time allows. Ill send a link to donate in support of this series. Your purchases and financial contributions events like tonight possible and help ensure the landmark bookstore. Thank you for tuning in in support of our authors. We sincerely appreciate your support now and always. Finally as you may have experienced virtual gatherings technical issues may arise and if they do we will do our best to resolve them and we thank you for your understanding. Im so pleased to introduce tonights speakers, professor martha s jones, professor of history at Johns Hopkins university and copresident of the brookshire conference of historians. Her work has been recognized by the organization of american historians, American Society for history and the National Committee center and she holds scholarships including with the Columbia University center for critical analysis and university of pennsylvania law school. Her writing has appeared in Museum Exhibitions like reframing the color line and the Clemens Library in Smithsonians National portrait gallery and Charles Wright museum of National African history as well as netflix among others and shes also been published in the Washington Post andthe chronicle of Higher Education among others. Shes coeditor of an intellectual history of black women and author of all bound up together, and the awardwinning birthright citizen, a history of rates race in america and tonight she will be joined by nicole anna jones correspondent for New York Times magazine and 20 20 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in commentary for her essay on the 6019 project first discussing professor jones brandnewbook vanguard , how black women won the vote and equality for all. The New York Times calls professor joan and exhorting writer describing vanguard as an expensive history of black women who sought to build political power where they could and National Awardwinning author abram s kennedy says martha jones is the political historian of africanamerican women in this book is the commanding history of the remarkable struggle of black american women for political power in all black americans would be better off learning and how much we go vanguard. Without further ado the Digital Program is yours martha and nicole. Thank you so much for that introduction and honored to be here tonight with doctor jones who i admire so much both as a scholar and as a black woman and someone who has been so supportive of my work over the last year. This book is very much dog ear right now. And i will get right into this talk so thank you for inviting me and the publication date. Lets start with a Pretty Simple question, why did you decide to write this book and why did you title this book vanguard . The idea for this book came precisely because i knew the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment was coming. And a story about a proposed monument at central park, one that would celebrate Elizabeth Cady stanton and anthony was circulating. It just said to me we were in danger perhaps of entering into this anniversary year and overlooking black womens quite literally so at the time i thought to try and pull together this regeneration of black womens history and to offer up one volume that would really permit all of us to fully appreciate the role black women played in political culture. This started as a notion that this was a book that would be filled with black women first and black women breaking barriers, shattering theories and thats absolutely true. As i began to reflect on what i was finding i realized that first it was a core principle that black women had really arrived at 200 years ago in the beginning of the 19th century and had carried forward until our own time and this was the idea that american politics should have no place for racism and sexism and when i recognize how long black women had been championing that view, when i realized how long they had been alone in carrying forward and setting that ideal in front of us, i realized that they were indeed an intellectual and political vanguard, showing this country to its best, very best ideals. Thank you and i should have said this when i first put out the welcome to everyone who is joining us tonight and please feel free to put your questions in the q a box and we will get to them at the end of ourtalk today. So doctor jones, you open the book with a story about your ancestor nancy belgrade, a woman born into slavery in 1808 in daniels kentucky and for obvious reasons interested in the power of using personal memoir to tell the National Story and these stories of the people. Can you tell us about your great great grandmother and her descendents and how starting this book was this personal story about these women fighting for equality. I also want to say thanks to Harvard Bookstore for hosting us. I work in an office, im sitting at home in my office now and on the wall, you cant see it are portraits of my foremothers including my great great grandmother nancy belgrade and when i work i am very aware and accountable to them in everything i do and i became so conscious in fact that i was writing this book about the history of womens coverage and i didnt know where they fit. For all my interest in them and all my thinking about them i never had a chance to ask them about where they were in 1920. Nancy belgrade is no longer living with her daughter, her granddaughter and greatgranddaughter are all alive in 1920. Black women in places like kentucky and North Carolina and missouri and i didnt know what they were doing. But i realized that before i was done with the book i was going to have to dig for the stories and let those stories guide me to tell what i think is a uniquely black womens perspective on Political Rights and Voting Rights. Are you saying you didnt know their involvement in this work prior to beginning the research of the . No i didnt. That must have been an amazing discovery. It was amazing except it was also tough because there were things i wanted to know i couldnt learn. I was particularly trying to find my grandmother in the 20s i tried in missouri where she lived in 1920 in greensboro in North Carolina she lived later in the 20s and the records just work there. And i really thought i had structured frankly, it was a devastating thing is the one thing you think you know how to do is hit the archives and answer your questions but no one had value to these quotidian records that we might use to discover like womens first votes in the 1920s. Then i got lucky and i stumbled onto an interview she gave in 1978. She and my grandfather had for many years run a place called bennett college, a black womens school in North Carolina. So and murphreesboro where they lived was fabled for student citizens but in the course of the interview she talked about voter rightsbut she doesnt talk about 1920 at all. She talked about the 1950s and 60s because to her the story is such a brilliant story and its about young women who begin to knock on doors, registered voters, do that arduous and dangerous work of getting black americans on the voter rolls in the 50s and 60s. And that was the story. That was the story she would have me tell so this book comes all the way to 1965 which is where i think it actually should arrive at the coast it is the Voting Rights act in that year that black southerners like my grandfather unequivocally get the vote. Were going to come back to that but the fact that she wanted to talk about 1955 and the 60s as opposed to 1920s piece to the reason that this book exists in many ways but we will come back. When did you know you were going to include this memoir, this personal story at the beginning of your book and why do you think that as a historian this was a good tool to use . Along time ago i went to law school and i was trained by people including Patricia Williams in the field of Critical Race Theory. One of the interventions that it made into legal scholarship was to surface this word i and to give us the latitude to when we didnt find our own narratives in the casebook to introduce stuff through our own storytelling. So in some ways like training from a long time ago had already given me a sense of why and how it was important that we use our own stories and of course youve done this so beautifully in your essays of the 1619 project, giving us your fathers Vantage Point on the history of this country and the history but it was definitely a departure from me because this paper since graduate school has been about my family and my beloved advisor taught me the wordangiography. Maybe i didnt quite have the distance to write about my family. So its taken me a lot of years to come back around to have a voice that is as admiring and loving and compassionate as i am with the women who come before me also note how to teach bigger lessons about them. Its not family for families say as much as it is using them as a way into my approach to a book. So leaders will tell me if im successful or not but it was a departure for me and i think it was an important one. I would agree and as a trained journalist who practiced journalism for almost 2 decades, most of my career i also rescued writing about myself or my family because your lists should be telling the stories of others and have transitioned somewhat as ive moved on in my career and i think it speaks to the fact that when you are a black woman writing about this history, these are our stories. There isnt that same type of distance sometimes that other peoplecan have in their writing about american history. I want to on to the politics of writing black womens history in particular and how we know the underthings of black womens roles in organizing is critical because our work has been very verified by White Society but also by the men of our own race who we were fightingalongside. This is one of the many cases where history is instructed because black women were accused of devaluing the fight for suffrage as well as being accused of the fight for like womens rights in suffrage. You catalog a recital, and marginalized tristate leadership roles in churches and then you have this illuminating passage about james what town was reporting back on a womens suffrage and Rights Convention and you blame black women for introducing the color question and you quote her as lighting the convention was not called just the right color and it would seem to fall together. He basically said black women should not be seeking to aspire more than to the level of their own class. She says i am womans rights. Whats fascinating about that is we clearly see today black women are still finding themselves fighting off racism and sexism and still finding ourselves a hand into those same corners. He talked about the suffragist monument where black women were literally written out of that. Can you talk about those lessons from history and that original intersectional fight black women had to engage in and now this was instructed by not black women are having to deal with political power today. Yeah. You know, one of the things that a quote reminds us of is the way in which the presence, the bodily presence of black women in a political gathering, in a conference, in the public square. Somehow seems to deprive folks of the billy to actually hear the words are read their words clearly. Theres this juncture that Sojourner Truth is speaking narrowly and specifically and consistently about racism when, in fact, when we read the words we recognize shes deeply invested in the question of who is women, what does it mean to be a woman for her, how does a woman like her get into a movement that is frame around womens rights. Part of my reflections is the way in which the very presence of a black women some outputs cotton in the ears of listeners who dont hear what i hear in the women throughout vanguard to say yes, we are here to claim our political power. Were here to exercise our Political Rights but we come to do that in the interest, disorder didnt expect, we come to do that in the interest of all humanity. You see that again and again at it becomes clear that its not that black women dont have extraordinarily ambitious political vision, that encompasses all americans and some internationalist moments, the whole globe but also in here will become to speak about themselves in some parochial in an inward looking way. That is trouble for black women that runs through vanguard and i think we can point to examples and her own time of folks who cant really hear the words of black Women Political leaders and assume they know the message because they read the person. Yes. Reading some of this it is like reading some of an internal argument, the discussion still going on today and i think about how often even today the Women Movement really struggles to incorporate the fact that people can be black and a woman. The language is always women and black people, which seems to say will be one or the other and then puts the silent white in front of the word women. We note it was the inability to have true intersectionality that derail womens march, that they were unable to really resolve those tensions of women of color saying we have to deal with more than just discrimination based on our gender or sex. I talked about this when we did the events for the 19th but i just saw ways when it encapsulates its best in my mind besides a lot of white women were holding in womens march you said here that got elected, we would be a brunch retina. Which completely erased the struggles of black women and other marginalized groups of women that somehow this one women, and donald trump or any office that would be in protesting for peoples rights. Can you talk about how black women have generationally been expected to turn off the critical parts of identity and oppression, that wed have to focus on our race or focus on our gender when clearly we are compelled to focus on both. For me the moment that always comes to mind when we talk about this is the primary contest between barack obama and Hillary Clinton which if it was a contest between white women and black men as if there were no black women, no black women in the body politic, and it was this very naive reading that a think black women stepped to the podium, step to the blogosphere, stepped to the microphone and more but it has to be dispelled that recently. Ill take us back to the 1860s to an iconic moment in the history of women suffrage. Its the years after the civil war, an Old Coalition of womens rights activist abolitionists are coming back together to chart out their future politically in response to slavery abolition, citizenship and 14th amendment and the prospects of black mens voting right in the 15th amendment. That story has been told, continues to be told as if it were a faceoff between white women as embodied in the figure of Elizabeth Cady stanton who called for educated suffrage which is basically white womens suffrage, on the one hand. Another other hand Frederick Douglass who said its a matter of life and death for black men. What about the black women who were in those meetings and actually on the record . We have their voices. We have thoughts. I invoke one of my most beloved figures from this book and she never speaks, shows a different political philosophy to put on the table. She is a poet, so her eloquent all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity is her way of saying im not going to counter the view about how to go forward nor, going to counter douglas. In fact, i think as a black woman because i live at the crossroads of racism and sexism, i i should be at the center women like me should at the center because this coalition manages to lift me up here we will all be lifted up politically. Well all be empowered politically. But my point is that story is often told either to vilify white women were developed by black men but in both instances it is a story told that there is a kind violence to black women as if they were not there, as if it were she wants to speak about pilot script you want speak about Sexual Violence. She wants to speak about the specific right of africanamerican women in the country and in the base of freedom and in the struggle about citizenship. She doesnt get the hearing that she might in that meeting but her ideas legal legacy that black women will pick up and work on it and work through why could say even until today. You also quote Francis Harper sang white women speak of rights that black women speak of wrongs that was a kind of perfect encapsulation. I really appreciate you bringing up the primary when barack obama facing off with Hillary Clinton. Because i went and interviewed a lot of black women during the next president ial primary when Hillary Clinton was of course running to replace barack obama. They spoke about how painful it was having to make that choice. What they felt was making a choice between, because they believe both of them are qualified and would make an excellent president but having to choose their race over the gender. Clearly black women chose their race and they felt like they had to vindicate that split by then supporting Hillary Clinton. I heard that again and again that this is a chance to redeem, the fact with a split ourselves. It seems like that struggle, how can that struggle be resolved in this country built on the foundation on which it was built . I wish i knew, but ill tell you what i think. I think what becomes a regular part of black womens political analysis, political discourse in the wake of 2008 is taking that moment at the podium to articulate for the uninitiated, how you came to be here and what your own political trajectory has been. We watched senator harris do that a few weeks ago at the convention. She name checked mary mcleod bethune, shirley chisholm, and more as a way of helping democrats understand how she comes to be there and how she is situated in a very complex american political history that knows to about black womens politics. There is that burden that black women still carry which is to forget folks and to help them read black womens bodies intelligently when theyre at the podium. At the same time, and folks have branded me perhaps too optimistic but im going to tell you what i think, which is often really at the fence with a black womens first analysis, if we can call it that, which is to say i dont think most interesting thing about Kamala Harris is a fact that she a first black woman to be nominated on a major party, et cetera, et cetera. I think whats more interesting is that black women have emerged as a force that its more interesting that she is one of six on bidens short list because black women were more than prepared to step right into that moment, right, when it was in election cycle, when there was a candidate, when there was a party. Turned out they were at least six that we could name and many others who have been on the short list. There are more than 120 black women running for congress. It is a record shattering number in 2020, and so my term is forced. What were seeing now is the force of black women in politics, and people ask me how should we go forward . One of the way should go forward is finally to in and understand, appreciate the study of black women and a black women have made politics away out of no way for very long time, but today turning out in disproportionate numbers like really being voted in confidence in tight races and prepared to be in washington not to mention state and local legislatures into the business of this country. And so i hope this is a you were folks find that necessary, tue into that necessary can understand that necessary. I have tried to write a book that helps appreciate the history of how we got here but the real consequence of course is what we going to do with it. Ill go so far as to say investment in the outcome of this as a think all americans do, black women will not even if things go the wrong way. That the history minds that black women have shown up even in the darkest, even in the most dire moment of the century, at the height of jim crow lynching and more, black women show up for this country. Theyre doing that now in 2020 and i dont have any reason to think we will pull back whatever the outcome of the election is in november. I think black women are a force that is here to stay in american politics. And i too optimistic, do you think . Im not an optimistic person but i dont think that i think what you are doing though is, it is actually a fact. You are not saying what the outcome will ultimately be you are talking about what black women are organizing have accomplished. Thats why i do think that framing you just talked about not talking about first but bua force is so important because black women pretty much made it impossible for joe biden not to pick a black woman as vice president. I think about the amount of organizing that went behind this to say no, its not okay just to commit to a woman. It needs to be a black woman because black women have been the most loyal constituency for the Democratic Party and we actually, when you think about what the democratic principles are, democratic, that black women are the ones who promote and believe and vote for the common good at the highest rates, after all of those things Democratic Party stands for and get have all been used to win elections and forgotten about. It has been amazing to see black women come into the out and say not this time. You will pick a black woman if you expect us to keep showing up for you. So i think that is a great framing and we should think about it more that way because the first didnt come out of nowhere and the first game because of the organizing of millions of nameless faces of black women who make sure this could happen. I wonder if you could talk, one of the things i was not as aware of is a relationship between the Antislavery Movement and the Women Rights Movement and a womens Rights Movement is kind of board of the Antislavery Movement. I wouldnt you could talk briefly about that . Sure. On the one and i think there is a predominant story that situates the political awakening, particularly be awakening about their own inequalities White American women in the engagements with antislavery organizing. And indeed by the 1830s why is that . What is it about that . Its partly a deliberate strategy on the part of this movement. Remember the abolitionist movement, the end of slavery, early in its iterations it worked to the moral assuaging. The idea is you win people over by transforming hearts and minds. Its not a political question. Its a moral question and women are considered if you will vulnerable, susceptible of morality in american culture, and families, away to the transmission of means thinking is through womens thinking. Women are very much white middleclass women very much the target of abolitionist frederick, abolitionist organizing. So you have got women who have history in the own families, lives or political life for the first time being called controversially but importantly to the podium. They pick up the pen. They are writing as a deliberate or and the thinking evolves that white women begin to see themselves and their own plight if you will, their own oppression as mirrored in the circumstance of enslaved people. Some will term it as the slavery of sex. Its important to say come as a historian of black women it is a very unusual to find a black woman in the same period come in the same scenes pics slavery as a metaphor. Slavery is too much a part of the lived experience or the legacy that black women even in the north, even free women are living with, i think for them to borrow slavery as a metaphor to talk about the scourge of sexism in the own lives. Thats one piece but it also want to say in vanguard i think for black women the story begins much earlier and it begins before at the slavery. It really begins in black churches. It begins with a black womens literary associations. The begins in black womens interventions into recent civil rights work in the free states in the north, even before we get a radical at the slavery movement. Black women are developing the intellectual come the critical intellectual foundation as preachers, as with his stick at the podium, as women the right. They always have been handed by the time they get to antislavery organizing, they only have a critique in hand and that is the critique that says no racism, no sexism in american politics. But thats the sort of what the bar sits come that is the principle to which they will work. And it is not one that antislavery societies easily or readily embrace. It is one that fits easily with white womens ideas about what a political future might look like, women like Elizabeth Stanton are always working by way of a complex hierarchy that places white educated women in a different strata than black women, even those who are free and educated themselves. I dont think for black women the arguments really are in an essentially work at all. Its an important site of the work but i think they come to the work already with a critique in hand. So were going to open to questions in about seven minutes, so if you have any questions please feel free to enter them in the q a box. I want to talk about this year, the 19th amendment. Obviously this is the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment with extensively gave women the constitutional right to vote, but that amendment came with a huge asterisk coming to you at said you are not celebrating the 19th amendment this year, and i would love for you to talk to us about what the 19th amendment did and did not do for women with bars and why this is not a moment of celebration for you . The good news is i have a story. I dont have to look at celebrations. But i certainly have been a celebration agitation to this, lets put it that way, and i really declined. Why . My read is the 19th amendment is its history, take on the problem the ways in which antiblack racism runs through and is one of the underlying logix that permits the 19th amendment to be ratified. What do i mean . The campaign for the 19th amendment rests to an important degree on the exclusion of black women, the marginalization of black women within that movement. Why . Because the movement is leadership understandably is the only way to succeed is by winning the support of white southern women and ultimately their husbands were going to vote on ratification of a federal amendment. What does that mean . It means jettisoning black suffragists. But its not enough to point to the interdynamics of the Suffragist Movement when we can look at the record on the floor of congress or in state legislatures. We recognize the way in which antiblack racism, the fact that nothing in the 19th amendment is going to interfere with the capacity of the individual state to use jim crow laws, literacy test, poll taxes, and more, to keep black women from the polls. Thats the pillar of the 19th amendment. Went to see, the 36 state, to ratify this amendment does so, it is openly understood that tennessee will not be obliged to include black women at the polls. It will be able to use its own laws to now regard black women as it regards black men, and disenfranchise them. This is not a moment to celebrate. The 19th amendment is a landmark. It doesnt mean in the lives of black women over the long history of Voting Rights in the United States. There are black women even in some southern jurisdictions who do vote after 1920. So i dont want to leave the impression theres nothing remarkable about the moment. There certainly is. And at the same time, i think that sitting in 2021 in a historical moment when, as a country, we are grappling with a question. How on earth did we get here, such at racism and White Supremacy still contaminate so much, too much, of law, politics, culture and more . One answer, its not the only answer, but one answer lies in that dirty bargain in 1920, that didnt take on jim crow in the interest of womens votes, for womens votes here instead left it intact and left black women and men to create a new campaign for Voting Rights. It takes 45 years until 1965. That is not the raw material of a celebration for me, even ifi deeply admire that black women who waged a fight before 1920 and after 1920, its just not a moment that i can unequivocally celebrate. I think one of the things i say all the time is black people are just always so inconvenienced, especially narratives, that we want the simplistic uplifting narrative about advancement and forward progress, and in order to have that the law says we have to erase the stories of black americans, and we have to erase the way that White Americans have consistently been willing to compromise the right of black americans as to meet their own agenda. I just couldnt ask you one more question before go into the q a. I couldnt leave the conversation without talk talkg about the roles of black women journalists in the book which was some of my favorite parts of vanguard, was that you feature several prominent black women journalists, mary of course i did the wells. A lot of people talk about the role of black newspaper women in particular and the role that the plate in the struggle for womens rights, along with a particular outcome that they face. Sure. There is nothing easy or straightforward about being a black women journalists but in marianne ship carries casing and editor, writing a newspaper i know you know she is disguising her identity initial that she is convinced that readers just will not and you newspaper that is led by a woman. And that is an ongoing challenge for black women journalists, editors and more. And at the same time its hard to say too much about the way in which newspapers come in particular are the crossroads that makes black americans together across the extraordinary parts of space and time. I dont have to tell you, nikole, but sometimes remind my students there was no internet. But the newspaper is that. It is the new media and it is a crossroads and it is a incredibly dynamic emma and wod black women are at the helm we can then recover the ways in which they shape the coverage, they shape the debate. They are deciding whats in and whats out and how to save issues and Mary Ann Shadd cary is deeply interested in womens rights, womens suffrage. She will have her own political life as a journalist in the 1850s she is curating a forum that is thinking very hard about what it means to transform the relationship of women to black politics come to fs later politics and more. You know, i was i knew if i spent too much time on ida wells she would just take over this book, and you know why. Because she is a journalist but she is a social scientist she is an advocate, a lobbyist. I dont know what is sharper, her pen or her tong, but the combination is remarkable. We also know that wells wins admirers and she wins the tractors because her extraordinary brand of black womanhood is provocative and runs counter to still very present ideas about the relative subordination of black women, even within black institutions. The last thing i want to say on this is that the gift that these sorts of women, women with a pan, women with a printing press, is definitely a pin. They leave their own record us. It couldnt be history for me of my heavyhanded historians interpretation of the past. This really needed to be a history that insisted that, in fact, black women were there, that the understood, analyzed the thought through and organize more and they left us the record. So wells and Mary Ann Shadd cary are among those women who leave unequivocally a record of what they thought they were, what was happening around them and what the stakes were. So its an honor in fact, to come back to that material and to try to ferret out for readers and help distill that for readers and to dispel the rub the center we cant write like womens history. Thats what i was told 25 years years ago when i started writing, by some, not all, that there really wasnt enough there, and thats just a lie. But we have to you be willing o where black women were and to go to their materials in order to tell the past. I think about just the tremendous platform that selfpublishing provided black women were being shutout of other avenues of expressing themselves and of organizing if you think of ida b. Wells selfpublishing southern horrors and singlehandedly put lynching on the map as a global issue and the power of that and while we didnt have twitter and social media, newspapers were transferable. You would read and pass on some else and it would pass it on to someone else. I think there are so much power in that come particularly in a people for whom most of our history to that time had not allowed to be literate and we dont have much of a a written record because of that. Newspapers began, black owned newspapers and black women owned newspapers begin to create that, that record, record that we have had. I really appreciated that party your book, and hope we will lead people to further explore these women and rape the biographies of these women at that their interest will be peaked. Im going to go to the q a and then going to start with so many provocative questions, which i think is good because i didnt realize you were trained in Critical Race Theory so this is a question about that. First i i want to start with my own opening to that which is i hope, can you define Critical Race Theory for us . Obviously the right has just discovered this thing as if it is brandnew and just existed, came to existence a few months ago, clearly they have no idea what Critical Race Theory is of so for all the people on the gym tonight hope you could define it for us, and the question is what to think about recent comments by President Trump the diversity training and education is unamerican specific he was talking about Critical Race Theory . I just dispense with the latter part. I think thats a rhetorical question, so yeah. Knows nothing about american history. Critical race theory emerges out of a very particular moment among mostly scholars in the 1980s are looking to take stock of the civil rights era. Its success of the also are recognizing what civil rights did not accomplish. So these are folks who observe that despite the purging of race and racism from the face of american law, discrimination, inequality and more persistent in the United States for black americans in the the 1980s. So Critical Race Theory begins i cant answer the question, how is it that inequality persists, despite having worked toward a colorblind ideal and the United States. And the work is to understand better language, coded language, the dog whistle, the language of race and racism as it is been gussied up or sort of prettied up for lawyers and for judges in the United States. It looks to history to restore the legal thinking, the histories that had been, if you will, whitewashed and overlooked. It looks at the biographies piggy goes beyond the surface of legal writing, judges writing, legal treatises and learning text to ask about the biographies, the politics, the motivations of principal actors. And as a school of thought about what scholarship might be, it is this moment in which scholars of color, legal scholars of color begin to critique what happens in the law classroom, what happens in the case book, and open the door to the eye, the sort of the storytelling, the narrative, the autobiography. I studied in the 1980s with Patricia Williams whose work i think is well known by many people for her really artful and powerful combining of the stories of her own family, including the history of slavery and her family with an explication of how those ideas animate our thinking about property, for example, in the 20th century. So thats what Critical Race Theory begins. Its a companion to sociologists who, i feel like im giving a seminar as you push the button. Its a companion to sociological work that has begun to refrain race as a social construction come so critical race theorists become interested in the ways in which the law race and racism are being instructed affirmatively through a lot as well as of the realms of American Society. So theres no question that Critical Race Theory asks why does racism persist . Frankly, in the 21st century isnt that the question weve all been asking . I dont think thats a novel or provocative question at all. It seems be the question many people, even if we dont know the answer, we know thats the question. They are asking a question going back now almost 40 years. Some among us are branded more pessimistic than others. Some think that racism is permanent, intractable in the United States, and others think that by studying how did we get here perhaps we find to undoing that very problem. And where do you stand . Thats a good question. I think on many days, i think as far as my eye can see, racism, to keep racism they were required vigilance, extraordinary effort and commitment. That i dont yet see the formula, the analysis, the promise in any guys of the eradication of racism. But i do believe that we have the capacity to minimize it, to keep it at bay, to recognize it even if there will always perhaps the folks who are prepared to get up and use it and exploit it in American Life and politics. Certainly in my lifetime, im sorry to say, i think racism will have been a permanent feature, i hope, for your daughter in young people, we learn better how to keep it at bay. Okay. So i think we probably just have time for one more question. This one asks, says Frances Harper faced off with both stanton and douglas and you say it was her concern with violence against black women that informed her intervention. Does this come through in vanguard in terms of harpers concerns with Sexual Violence, extreme financial limitations which are kind of violence, or both . Its all of those things in harpers remarks at that meeting but the thread that runs through vanguard is one about Sexual Violence. Violence including Sexual Violence for black women. One of the things i had never expected to discover was how, from the 1850s forward, all the way until the modern civil rights era, black women activists come to narrate their fears, their encounters, their experiences with Sexual Violence. This is nowhere else more acute than in the realm of the transportation, and Frances Harper talks that what it is like to be a black woman lecturer, and antislavery lecturer, writing street callers alone. Nearly every woman i write about has a story about being accosted come about being denigrate come about being assaulted, and harper puts that on the table. Why . Because it really goes to the core of a black women understand their particular vulnerabilities and of racism and sexism work to keep them out of his cars. But she also brings it to the table because when she knows is that black women have and are the witnesses to this denigration in the lives of black women, and that they do nothing. In all of the stories that i collect and recount in vanguard, theres only one in which a black woman reports someone even speak up for her when shes being accosted on a streetcar. Otherwise, White Americans treat white women in the ladies car watch, it is a spectacle, it is theater, and they even cheer on conductors and brakemen and more. This is a core concern that when toronto burke and the 21st century equates to a movement that we refer to as me too, shes polling and old and vicious threads in his ship black women in politics, that question of where are the politics that will excuse of black women from the threat of Sexual Violence . Yeah, i mean, seeing as much as how whiteness is defined by blackness and distanced from blackness, that is doubly true for white women. Part of their anticipation in the denigration is the need to define themselves as opposite of black womanhood, which we could have a whole other talk about that. Those are my questions, and i think all the time with for questions from the audience. I dont know, dr. Jones, is anything else besides pick up this book, please buy the book, is anything else you would like to add before we close out tonight . No. I think i just want to say thank you to you very much for being here with me and for the conversation, for taking us through the history, helping as think hard about what that history means for our present and for our immediate future. Because it is on the horizon. The women i wrote about, i write about will tell you this is a season to engage the grand came in american politics into the work as arduous as it is going to be at november. I think that is for me the best way to honor them in this season, at a just want to say thanks to the Harvard Book Store for hosting us tonight. Thanks so much, nikole. Thank you, and again thank you for your work, and we will let them close it out. Thank you everyone for coming tonight. Yes, thank you both so much. This is a wonderful conversation, and so thank you professor jones and nikole hannahjones, thanks all of you out there who spent your eating for us, thank you a particular to all the questions we couldnt get to. We appreciate all your questions. You guys can open more about this important book and purchased trannine harvard. Com and on behalf of harbor bookstores have a good night. Keep reading and please everybody be well. Today at 6 p. M. Eastern on after words for him fbi Deputy Director of counterintelligence peter strzok on his book compromised, counterintelligence and the threat of donald j. Trump. Hes interviewed by new Times Justice Department reporter adam goldman. All these independent books that have been done, there been to the Inspector General investigation over three years with 15 or more attorneys and analysts looking at every last thing i did every tech company email, every call, every note, every communication, all of which have concluded that not only me but the entire team at the west evidence of any action taken on a improper motive. Watch today at 6 p. M. Eastern on booktv on cspan2. Did eating and welcome to pp life. Im bradley graham, coowner politics and prose along with my wife lissa muscatine. We have a Great Program for you this evening. For those of you not familiar with how this virtual format works, you will still be able to ask the question of the author if you would like. To do so click on the q a icon at the bottom of your screen. Bob woodward has been observing and reporting in washington for half a century. His decade with the Washington Post, is covered nine president s and shared in two covid surprises come first for the postcard of the watergate scandal and second