Digital committee during these unprecedented times. Every week will host event on personal account. Our Event Schedule appears on a website harvard. Com events. You can sign up for email newsletter. We will conclude with a time for your questions. After you have a question, if you a question at anytime during this talk click on the q a button at the bottom of the screen and will get to as many as time allows. I will be posting a link to vanguard and restaurant for your purchase of a financial contributions make events like tonight as possible and help ensure the future of a landmark independent bookstore. Thank you for showing up and tuning in in support of our offers an incredible staff of booksellers at Harvard Bookstore. Bookstore. We appreciate your support now and always. Finally as you move experience compact and glaciers may arise. If they do will do our best to resolve them quickly and we thank you again for your patience and understanding. So now i am so pleased introduced tonight speaker. Afsa martha jones is president ial professor professor at Johns Hopkins university and the copresident of the Virtual Conference of women historians. Her work has been registering American Council of learned societies and organization of american historians, American Society for legal history and National Unity center and shes held fellowships including with the Columbia University center for her critical analysis of social deference and the university of pennsylvania law school. Her writing has appeared in reframing the color line and connected conducted with the library museum. The Smithsonian National portrait gallery and the Charles Wright museum of African American history as well as inwards by pbs and netflix and shes been published in the washington post, atlantic among many others. She is the coeditor of four the author of all bound up together. Cannot professor jones will be joined by Nikole Hannah jones domestic course but for the New York Times magazine 2021 of the Pulitzer Prize in cometary for essay 1619 project. It would discuss vanguard how black women broke barriers, won the vote, and insisted on equality for all. The New York Times called professor jones and expanse efficient of black women who sought to build political power where they could and National Book awardwinning author said martha jones is the political the story of africanamerican women and this book is the commanding history of the remarkable struggle of africanamerican women for political power. All americans would be better off learning this history. We are so happy to have them both your tonight so without further ado this digital podium issuers, martha and nikole. Thank you so much for the introduction, and just honored to be your tonight with dr. Jones whom i admire so much both as a scholar and as a black woman and someone who has been so supportive black work over the last year. This book is very much a dogeared right now, and and i o glad to get into this talk. Thank you for inviting me and happy publication date. Thank you, knuckle. Happy to be here with you. 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 chain process because i knew the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment was coming, and a story about a proposed monument in central park, one that would celebrate Elizabeth Cady stanton and susan b. Anthony was circulating. This said to me that we were in danger perhaps of entering into this anniversary year and overlooking black women quite literally. It was time i thought to try and hold together three generations of black womens historians work and offer of volume, one volume that would really permit all of us to fully appreciate the role of black women have played in political culture. Vanguard started as the notion that this is a book that would be filled with black women first, black women breaking barriers, shattering seedlings thats true but as a begin to reflect on what i was finding, i realized first it was a core principle that black women had really arrived at 200 years ago at the beginning of the 19th century and had carried forward really and tell her own time. This is the idea that american politics should have no place for racism and sexism. And what i recognize how long black women had been championing that view, when i realized how long did been alone in carrying that forward and setting that ideal in front of us, i realized they were indeed an intellectual and political vanguard showing this country its very best ideals. Thank you. I shouldve said this when i first started, 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 our talk today. So dr. Jones, he opened the book with a story about your ancestor, a woman who was born into slavery in 1808 in danville kentucky. For obvious reasons i am interest in the power of using personal memoirs to tell these National Stories and the stories of people. Can you tell us a bit about your great, great, great grandmother and her descendents and how started this book with his personal story about these womens fight for equality . Yes. I also want to say thanks to Harvard Bookstore for hosting us. I work in office. Im sitting at home in my office now, and on the wall, you all cant see it, are or portraitsy four mothers including my great, great, great grandmother, nancy. When i work i am very aware that i am accountable to them in everything i do. I became selfconscious in fact, that i was writing this book about women suffrage and i really didnt know where they sit. For all my interest in them and only thinking about them i have never had a chance to ask them about where they were in 1920. Of course nancy belle graves is no longer living in butter daughter, granddaughter and great granddaughter of a life in 1920 black women to places like kentucky and North Carolina and missouri and i didnt know what they were doing. But i realize before i was done with the book i was going to have to dig for those stories and let those stories help guide me to tell what i think is a uniquely black womens perspective on Political Rights and Voting Rights. So are you saying that you didnt know their involvement in this work prior to beginning the research of this book . I didnt. That mustve been an amazing discovery. It was amazing except it was also tough because there were things i wanted to know that i couldnt learn. I was particularly trying to find my own grandmother in the 1920s and are tried in missouri where she lived in 1920, later in greensboro and North Carolina where she lived later in the 20s. The records just were not there and i really thought i have struck out frankly. For a historian is a devastating thing. The one thing you think and how to do is keep the archives and answer your questions. But no one had valued those records that we might use to recover black womens first votes in the 1920s. Then i got lucky and i stumbled onto an interview that she gave in 1978 she and my grandfather had for many years run a place at vantage college, black women school and North Carolina, and so come and greensboro where the event, you know, fable in civil rights history. The interview was about that but in the course of the interview she talked about Voting Rights. She doesnt talk about 1920 at all. She talked about the 1950s and 1960s, but for her the story, a brilliant story come is about young women who began to knock on doors, register voters, do that arduous and dangerous work at getting black americans on the voter rolls in the 50s and 60s. That was the story that she would have me tell. This book comes all the way to 1965, which is where i think it aptly should our private because it is with the Voting Rights act in that year that black southerners like my grandmother unequivocally get to vote. We will come back to that, but the fact she wanted to talk about 1965 and 60s as opposed to 1920 speaks to the reason this book exists in many ways but we will come back. When did you know youre going to include this memoir, his personal story at the beginning of your book . And why do you think as a historian this was a good tool to use . A long time ago i went to law school and i was trained by people in the field of Critical Race Theory. One of the interventions that Critical Race Theory made into legal scholarship was surface the word i into give us the latitude to come when we didnt find her our own narratives ine casebooks, to introduce stuff to our own storytelling. So in some ways my training from a long time ago had already given me a sense of what and how it can be important that we use our own stories. Of course you have done this so beautifully in your essays with the 1619 project, introducing us to your father giving us a a he advantage point in history of this country and the stakes in the history. But it was definite departure for me because my very first paper in graduate school has been about my family, a wonderful advisor, my beloved advisor eric taught me the word. Maybe i didnt quite have the distance to write about my family. Its taken me a lot of nerve to come back around and to have a voice and admiring and loving and compassionate as i am to the women who come before me but also knows how to teach bigger lessons about them. Its not family for family sake as much as it is using them as a way into my approach to a book. So readers will tell me if im successful or not, but it definitely was a departure for me but it was an important one. I would agree and as a trained journalist who practice journalism for almost two decades most of my career, i also should write about myself or my family because journalists should be telling the stories of others and it transition somewhat as i moved on in my career. It speaks to the fact that when youre a black woman writing about this history, these are our stories. There isnt the same type of distance sometimes that of the people can have writing about American History. I want to move on to the politics of writing black womens history in particular and, we know the unearthing of black womens roles in movements come in resistance and organizing is critical because our work has been im White Society but also by myth of her own race who were, we were fighting alongside. I think this is what of the many cases where history is so constructed because black women were being accused of derailing the fight for black male suffrage as those being accused of derailing the fight white male rights and suffrage. You catalog how they were sidelined and collar, people of convention were marginalized for trying to take leadership roles in churches and Antislavery Movement and then you have this illuminating passage about a reporter on a womens suffrage and Rights Convention or she blamed black women for introducing the color question. You quarter as writing the convention was not called to discuss the rights of color. We think altogether irrelevant and unwise to introduce this question. She basically said black women should not be seeking to aspire more than two base come to the level of the own class, which is to stay in the black womens place. In fact, you write about how white women at the time, to use in a metaphorical way while literally black women were entering actual slavery. People push back against that and she said i am womens rights. Whats fascinating about this weekly recidivate black women are still finding themselves fighting off both racism and sexism and still finding herself pinned into those same quarters. You talk about the suffragist monument thats being proposed for new york city with black women were literally written out of that. Can you talk about those lessons from history and that original intersectional fight that black women had to engage in and down that is instructed in how black women have to do with political power today . Yeah. One of the things that the quote reminds us of is the way in which the presence, a bodily presence of black women in a political gathering, in a conference, in the Public Square somehow seems to deprive folks that they can hear the words are read their words clearly. So theres this Sojourner Truth is speaking narrowly and specifically and consistently about racism when, in fact, when we read her own words we recognize shes deeply invested in the question of who is woman, what does it mean to be a woman for her, how does a woman like her fit into a movement that is framed around womens rights . Part of my reflection is the way in which the very presence of a black woman some outputs cotton in the ears of listeners who dont hear what i hear in the women throughout vanguard who say yes, we are here to claim our political power. We are here to exercise our Political Rights. But we have come to do that in the interest of this work i didnt expect, we come to do that and interest of all humanity. We see that again and again and it becomes clear that its not that black women dont have extraordinary ambitions and political vision like it encompasses all americans, so international moments come the whole globe but also can hear black women have come to speak about themselves in some parochial inward looking way. That is trouble for black women that runs through vanguard and a think we can point to examples in 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 his it is like reading some of internal arguments or discussions that are still going on today. 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 we will be one or the other, i think with the silent white in front of the word women and we know that it was kind of an inability to have two intersectionality that derailed kind of the womens march, that they were unable to resolve those tensions of women of color say we have to do with more than just discrimination based on our gender or sex. I talked about this when we did the event for the 19th but i just always, what encapsulates it best in my mind is the science a lot of white Women Holding in the womens march, if hilary were elected well would be a brunch right now which erased the struggle of black women and other marginalized groups of women that somehow this one women and not donald trump were in the office the wouldbe and need to do other marching and protesting for peoples rights. Can you talk about how black women have generationally been expected to return off critical part of our identity and oppression, that weve had to focus on a race focus on our gender when clearly we are compelled to focus on both. For me the moment that always come to mind when we talk about this is the primary concept between barack obama and Hillary Clinton which if it was a contest between white women in black men as if there were no black women in the body politic and it was this very naive reading that i think black women stepped to the podium, stepped to the blogosphere, stepped to the microphone and more but it has to be [inaudible] i will take us back to the 1860s to an iconic moment in history of womens suffrage. Its the years after the civil war and the Old Coalition of womens rights activists and abolitionists are coming back together to chart out their future politically in response to slavery abolition, citizenship and the 14th amendment and the prospect of black mens Voting Rights in the 15th amendment. That story has been told i continue to be told as if it were a faceoff between white women as embodied in the thick of Elizabeth Cady stanton who calls are educated suffrage which is basically white womens suffrage, on the one hand, and on the other hand, Frederick Douglass who says the vote is a matter of life and death for black men. What about the black women who were in those meetings and on the record . We have their voices. We have their thoughts. I invoke always harper, shes one of my most beloved figures from this book and not only speaks, she has a different political philosophy to put on the table. Shes a poet, where all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity its a way of saying im not going Elizabeth Cady stanton interview about how to go forward or like Frederick Douglass. In fact, i think it is a black one because i live in a crossroads that racism and sexism, i should be at the center women like me should be at the center because this coalition manages to lift me up we will all be lifted up politically. Well all be empowered politically. But my point is that store is often told. I do to vilify women were vilified black men but in both instances it is the story told that there is a kind of violence to black women as if they were not there, as if in fact, Francis Watkins harper faceoff against both Douglass Douglas f you will because she wants to speak about pilots can speak about sexual violence. She wants to speak about those specific plight of africanamerican women in the country and in the face of freedom and in the struggle around citizenship. She doesnt get the hearings that she might in that meeting, but her ideas leave a legacy that black women will pick up and work on in work through one could say even until today. You also quote Francis Harper as a white women speak of rights for black women speak of francs which i felt was a kind of perfect encapsulation. I really appreciate you bringing up the primary when barack obama was facing off with Hillary Clinton. Because i went interviewed a lot of black women during the next president ial primaries 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 thought felt was maka choice between, because they believed both of them are qualified and would make an excellent president , but having to choose their race over the gender. Clearly black women chose the race and it felt like they had to vindicate though that split by then supporting Hillary Clinton. I heard that again and again that this is a chance to redeem the fact had to split ourselves. It seems like that struggle, how can the struggle be resolved in this country built on the foundations upon which it was built . Well, 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 in 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 with the convention. She name checked mary macleod the thin, shirley chisholm, and more, as a way of helping democrats understand how she came to be there and how she was situated in a very complex in American History that knows too little about black womens politics. There is that burden i think that black women still carry which is to help them read black womens bodies intelligently rather than when at the podium. At the same time and now folks have branded me, perhaps too optimistic but im going to tell you what i think, which is im ready to dispense with the black womens first analysis, if we can call it that, which is to say i dont think most interesting thing about Kamala Harris is the fact shes a first black woman to be nominate anna major party ticket, et cetera, et cetera. I think was more interesting is the black women have emerged as a force. Its more interesting she was one of six on bidens shortlist because black women were more than prepared to step right into that moment, right, when it ws election cycle, when it was a candidate, when there was a party. Turned out the were at least six that i can name, many others who couldve been on that shortlist. There are more than 120 black women running for congress. It is a record shattering number in 2020, and so my term is force. What we are seeing now is the force of black women in politics. People asked me how should we go vote . One of the recent jeff to go vote is finally we have to tune in and understand and appreciate the study of black woman and a black women have made politics of way out of no way very long time but today turning out in disproportionate numbers, really being voters of consequence in tight races and appear to sit in washington, not to mention state and local legislatures and do the business of this country. So i hope this is the year where folks find that necessary, tuning into that necessary can understand that necessary. I have tried to write the book to at least appreciate the history of how we got here, the real consequence the course is what were going to do with it. I will go so far as to say while i have the investment in the outcome of this, i think all americans do, black women will not go home in november even if things go the wrong way. That the history reminds black women have shown up even in the darkest, right, even in the most dire moments of this history, at the height of jim crow lynching and more, black women show up for this country if we are doing that now in 2020 and it dont have any reason to think that we will hold back, whatever the outcome of the election is in november. I think black women are a force and are here to stay in american politics. Am i too optimistic do you think . Im not an optimistic person but i dont think, i think what you are doing so is, it is actually a fact. I love come youre not saying what the outcome ultimately will be but you are talking about what lack women through our organizing have accomplished. Thats why do think that frenemy you just talked about, not talking about first but but a e is so important because black women pretty much made it impossible for joe biden not to pick up black women 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. We have come out at the highest rate and actually when you think about what the democratic principles are, democratic, that black women are the ones who promote him to leave and vote for the common good at the highest rate of all those things at the Democratic Party says it stands for, and yet have all been used to win election and then forgotten about. I think it is that a basin to see black women come into the power and say not this time. You will pick up black woman if you expect us to keep showing up for you. I think that is a great framing, and we should think about more that way because the first didnt come out of nowhere. Kind of warn of the Antislavery Movement. I wonder if you could talk briefly about that. Sure on the one hand. I think theres a predominant story that situates the political awakening, particularly the political awakening about their own, you know, equalities for White American women in their engagements with antislavery organizing and indeed, by the 1830s why is that . What was it about that that its partly a deliberate strategy on the part of this movement. Remember, the Abolitionist Movement demands the immediate unequivocal ending of slavery. In the earliest iterations it works through, the idea is that you win people over by hearts and minds. Its not a political question, its a moral question. And women are considered, if you will, vulnerable, susceptible, the vectors of morality in American Culture and familys way to the transformation of men is through womens thinking. So women are very much the white middle class women the target of abolitionists rhetoric and organizing. And say, a, youve got women who have met history in their own families or lives or public or political lives for the first time being called, you know, controversially, but importantly, you know, to the podium. They pick up the pen. Theyre writing in William Lloyd garrisons deliberater and the thinking is that white women begin to see themselves and their own plight, own omission is mirrored in the circumstance of enslaved people. Some will term it the slavery effects. Now, its important to say, as a historian of black women, it is very unusual to find a black woman in this same period in these same scenes who picks up slavery as a metaphor. Slavery is too much a part of lived experience, or the legacy that black women, even in the north, even free women, are living with and through, i think, for them to borrow slavery as a metaphor to talk about the scourge of sex in their own life. So thats one piece. But i also wanted to say that in vanguard, i think for black women, the story begins much earlier and it begins before antislavery. It begins in black churches. It begins with the black womens literary associations. It begins in black womens interventions into civil rights work in the free states in the north. Even before we get a radical Antislavery Movement. Black women are developing the intellectual, the critical intellectual foundation as preachers, as women who speak at the podium. As people who right in garrisons liberator. As they get they have a critique in hand and thats a critique that says no racism, no sexism in american politics, right, but that is sort of where the bar sits. 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 is uneasily with white womens ideas about what a political future might look like. Women like elizabeth good morning, my name is tom wright, im the director of the center for the United States and europe at Brookings Institute and International Order and strategy. I am delighted today to be chairing this important
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