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