national constitution center and to tonight's convening of america's town hall. i am jeffrey rose of the president of this wonderful institution and let's begin as always by inspiring ourselves with the national constitution centers mission statement. the national constitution center is the only institution in america charted by congress to increase awareness and understanding of the constitution among the american people on a non-partisan basis, and i want to give a special thanks to the and welsh mcnulty institute for women's leadership at villanova university for their great collaboration on a series of discussions, including this one, which is part of the constitution center's women and the constitution initiative and i want to also thank mcnulty foundation for their generous generous support which makes these program is possible. they spread so much light and we're so grateful for our collaboration and now i will introduce the panelists and then tonight's moderator. nadia brown is professor of government chair of women's and gender studies and affiliate in the african-american studies program at georgetown university. she's also an idle family fellow at the mcnulty institute at villanova. she is the author of the award-winning sisters in the state house black women and legislative decision making and distinct identities minority women and us politics. she's also in editor for the washington post's political science blog the monkey cage. betty collier thomas as professor of history at temple university she is also the inaugural director of temples center for african-american history and culture. she's written several books including african-american women and the vote 1837 to 1965 and she's currently writing about african american women and politics and martha jones is the society of black alumni presidential professor professor of history and a professor at the snf agora institute at the johns hopkins university. she is the author of the pathbreaking vanguard. how black women broke barriers won the vote and insisted on equality for all as well as birthright citizens a history of race rights in antebellum america. it's such an honor to welcome this superb panel of scholars, and i'm also thrilled that the moderator for tonight's program is my wonderful colleague lana ulrich senior director of content at the center. she does so much to make all of our programming possible and over to you llama. great. thank you so much jeff for that wonderful introduction. thank you to everyone here attending this wonderful seminar, and i'm so looking forward to this conversation with these wonderful scholars we have tonight. so professor collier thomas, i'd like to start with you and i'd like to ask you about your landmark volume african american women and the vote which begins in 1837 with the first anti-slavery convention of american women, which was an interracial gathering of women held in new york to define their roles independent of men in the crucial struggles of that era to end slavery in southern states and racial discrimination in northern states. and as your co-author ann gordon writes in the introduction 1837 replaces 1848, which was the year of seneca falls in order to emphasize the preeminency of anti-slavery agitation, and the local history of african-americans including women and the volume also ends with 1965 which is the passage of the voting rights act. so i wanted to ask if you could just say a little bit more about that crucial date of 1837. would you say that that is the starting point of the story of black women suffrage and representation in america and why or why not i wouldn't say that's the starting point for african-american women, but african-american women were certainly interested in it. but lana first, i want to say that we didn't and i did not author that book. it is an edited work. i was at the slash in july and and asked me a note and said could she meet and talk with me? and i said yes, and she said what do you think is the most important subject that has not been dealt with in terms of black women history and history period now you have to understand that that was in the 1980s midnight 1980s when she asked that question. and i said well politics. i said nothing has been written about politics and black women. she said well, how can we do i would like to to university of massachusetts has given me some money and i have been given the money to do a national conference and then we want to put together a book. and she said i don't know anybody that area i said, well, i know lots of people so i mentioned roslyn turberg pen and and a number of persons in in the field who i knew were working on different topics. and so that's how that came to be and we did that national conference, but the paper sat for until when was that book published that book was published in the in and around 2000. i think late. um, yeah, so it was published decades have to we had the conference and we had edited the papers. so that's of that book began. so, you know a lot of that is not original to me my piece in that book is on francis ellen watkins harper. and that too was written to be published in 19th century. um, it wasn't -- americans by august maya and that was earlier and i was invited to write a paper there and i wrote some paper on harper and august maya any of you familiar with august maya. well, august maya called me on a sunday morning and said doctor can you thomas? you cannot have 30 some pages on francis out ellen watkins harper frederick douglass. only received 25. so i called john hope franklin and he said yes, that's why nobody knows who she is. and that's why she deserves those pages. and so i said well it doesn't have to be there. i was famous for just pulling things. and so i i pulled it and and that sat there then until we did that conference. so it was written much earlier. um, so in terms of 1837, we thought that we should find people and we should trace it through this history through from 1837 right on up into the more recent period of that time and that's what we did. we had no idea that this was going to turn into a major book. but 19 18 37 was a beginning point, but as lisa tetrault has explained and others now who have published so many books. we know far more now than we knew then but what we wrote the scholars wrote. about black women these two were seminal works for all of those people. some of them were working on dissertations and all kinds of things. so that's how we came to that point. now martha has has written in her wonderful book. a lot about the transitional period and both martha and i wrote about that in our books on women and the church. okay mind jesus jobs and justice and and hers. senior moment martha. what is the title? all bound up together all bound up together. i should remember that from you. and and so that's how these came to be. and and i think we were martha and i were amongst the first who began to trace, um the whole question of suffrage and an african-americans women struggled with that to the church, which is where it emanated. but not only that did it emanate from there, but as i argued in jesus jobs and justice the women who become so involved in the suffrage movement the national suffrage movement. they are these church women. and it's a very involved process. so the ascent of black women was very different from that of white women. but no ye this one of the quotes that i sent john was from 1859 from laura. and i was stunned. when i saw that particular, um, peace and quote, i don't know who that woman was and you know, she was not mentioned, but obviously the people in that period knew so in 1859, and obviously she a free black woman. he makes that statement that said we are as interested call it women are as interested in. politics as the colored men that says it all. you tell it women black women african-american women, whatever you want to call them then. they were there from the beginning. and before the civil war concerned about politics and you see it pulled all the way through. you see that it bates and great detail on suffrage and i have to stop because i do talk a lot. and i don't want to go one as my husband would say preaching. i don't want to go on but you you get the picture so, you know, we can go on with that. i'm discussion, but there is a lot there and we can't put it in these books. no, definitely pieces. absolutely, and thank you so much for clarifying that and for telling the story about that conference. it's just really interesting to hear how that came together and amazing that it took that long to get that to get that work out there and you mentioned your your research into francis ellen watkins harper. i know you were telling us the story as well about how you discovered her while you were researching black newspapers, so i might want to ask you a little bit later on just more about that research and any other figures that you came across during during that so professor jones professor collier thomas mentioned, you know your work in this area as well. so, you know, feel free to respond to anything that she said and maybe say a little bit more about some of the earlier movements, you know, the importance of the church the anti-slavery societies color conventions anything else that might help shed additional light in this area. well, thanks to you lana for hosting us along with jeff rosen in the national constitution center. it's a tremendous honor to be here with dr. brown and dr. collier thomas who has really been far too modest about her own work and the role of the volume that she co-edited on african american women in the vote one of the important things that i say about my own evolution as a historian is that i benefited from that volume from the work of dr. roslyn turbog pen because i read this work before i read the major works on say susan anthony and elizabeth cady stanton right my introduction to the history of women in the vote came from this. path-breaking work on black women and voting rights and i consider myself fortunate because in a sense i didn't have to unlearn right the other histories that were so predominant for far too long on and and i thank dr. collier thomas for including me anywhere in her orbit on this, but it is correct that i think one of the things we share is this strong conviction that you cannot understand the history of black women's politics if you don't understand black women's politics in their churches in their faith communities and one of the things about that readers of vanguard or sometimes surprised to discover, is that the book begins in church and it begins in the african methodist episcopal church. a figure an extraordinary black woman preacher named gerina lee now. we are in the 1820s not the 1830s and i begin with purina lee because it turns out in order for black women to fully enter to fully level a claim on american politics. they have to begin with ideas right before you get to the activism before you get to the organizing before you get to the interventions. they need a critique, right? they need a view right that challenges a political order that countenances racism and sexism in the intersection of the two and hence black women's exclusion from politics. so we go back to women like gerina lee in the church because that is the crucible, right? that is a critical crucible where black women are working out a vision for american politics one that they will champion for a very long time alone, but very importantly in these early years a critique right that begins to make room for them in american politics and as you allude to lana, we will see that manifest. yes in black churches particularly black methodist churches in these early years. we will see it manifest in anti-slavery societies. we will see that critique manifest in the political movement that we refer to as the colored conventions again, and again black women coming to the podium picking up their pens and the anti-slavery and black press leveling that critique that says no racism and no sexism in politics, but the church we can't tell that story without telling the story of black women in church. thank you for that professor brown, you know, please feel free to comment on anything that dr. collier thomas and and professor jones have said and you know your work focuses a lot on contemporary issues relating to suffrage representation and intersectionality which dr. doon just mentioned and you also write about black women voters, but also candidates and representatives for instance in your articles and in your books sisters in the state house, but before we get to talking a little bit about the current state of representation from your research, just wanted to know if there were any if there was anything about the history that's been discussed so far or any of the figures from the past that speak to you as well. i know in your book you site for example, dr. anna julia cooper. is there anybody else that you wanted to mention or put on the table too being central to understanding this? 3 and so i'm very thankful to be able to share space today with colleagues professor betty collier thomas and professor jones because their work is so canonical for people like me and political science to do this research on black women's politics because there wasn't a there there are four mother dual prestage is one of the first black women to receive a phd in political science and started studying black women and before that right there really were not in depth studies on black women. period right mac women and politics and as many of the audience will know political science and history used to be the same field and then after world war two political science splits off and becomes its own. you know this own thing so much of our origins as political scientists. we owe to historians, but the discipline the the ways that history was enabled to really dig deep and understand the presence of black americans in the united states at the founding of our democracies something that we haven't been able to do quite fully in political science yet. so political scientists stand on the work of people like professor collier thomas and professor jones in order to get us to the stage where we are now, so there would not be scholars like myself or wendy smooth evelyn simeon nicole floyd alexander if we weren't for historians, right because they're just they're just wasn't much of understanding that black women had different political behavior that black women had different political views and prep policy preferences had different political tactics. so so i share this to say that this is a new field black women studies and politics is new. i wrote the first book on black women state legislators in 2014, right? so very very recently just goes to show that so bringing in figures like anna julia cooper. france it's out. i'm ellen watkins. harper are people that we know throughout history have been doing black women's politics. we just haven't talked about them in our discipline of political science. and so i start my classes with this historical look and i've had just fortune opportunity to teach both professor collier thomas a professor jones' work in the beginning of the semester right because they need my students really need to deeply understand that what we do in political science now right since the voting rights act since black women have more access to political representation doesn't mean that black women just woke up one morning right in the 1960s and said now we're going to engage in politics but instead right black women have been dwelling for political rights and act as activists as grass street leaders before the ballot and that if i think it's incorrect to think that black women's politics in my own field, you know, some feel the political science. starts only when we're seeing black women as elected officials are black women. forecasting balance, right but as professors collier thomas and jones have mentioned right? this is a long lineage that starts in 1820 and even before so in my own work, i oftentimes start with mariah stewart and as someone who is leading a charge as a race woman, right and she's talking to audiences about black women's political concerns very early on and this is a figure that i honestly would not have known about if it weren't for the work of historians and i think it's so important that we're having this under disciplinary conversation today because there has to be a much more expansive view of what black women are doing politically. so while we're championing kamala harris the first black woman vp, we have to understand the soldiers on which she stands i am so pleased that you mentioned julia prestige. you because i stumble across her at least almost 40 years ago. and i was looking for trying to find out what had been written by political scientists. and i discovered nothing. and i checked again. um 30 years ago when i arrived at temple i said, well, maybe it's more now nothing. until finally i stumble across wendy smooth and i said what political scientists? writing about black women and vote. well prestige makes the point. she was concerned that that in political science departments. nothing was taught about black people in politics period and it's black women were totally exclusive. so she was i put that the front in terms of a pioneer and people don't know her name today. so thank you very very much for that. and yes. i have all the copies of your work about those states that are going in politics to stay in my next book. so i have you two. okay, so we want to thank you for that work. yes, definitely. thank you professor brown too for for your groundbreaking work in this area. so professor collier thomas speaking about you know, this this new history and you know as as dr. jones and and dr. brown mentioned your work in this area and your original research, just going back to you know, the stories that you told us about looking through these newspapers discovering francis ellen watkins harper, you know, you mentioned that these were conventions that were being held across the country that were made up of all all black men and just she was the only woman she was the only woman there that was speaking and writing and and so, you know, i think maybe if you could just say a little bit more about her how significant it was that you discovered this information about her and i guess more about you know, your original research in this area and how you you've you know contributed to help building up this foundation of work around these questions. well, first of all, my dissertation was on the baltimore black community 1865 to 1910. um, it was recommended to me. by i can't think of his last name. he was major major scarlet university of chicago richard who did slavery in the cities. you know, it's me. no, i was looking at martha thinking that she went to his name. but anyway wait and we can drop this way. yes. i took a course a research course under him at emory university. and his thing was that all of us had to do this original research on urban centers, and he wanted atlanta. he was a visiting professor. so therefore he was looking for us to do the research for him. and so he decided that i should he wanted me to go through the minutes of the the minutes of the the city minutes of atlanta and track from 1860 up to the turn of the century the patterns of race. and what they were doing? well, he had to go get permission from the city for me to do that and they put a table out in the lobby. now. this is in the days of segregation. let's make this very clear when i was doing my masters. we were still in segregation. okay? that was in the 1960s 1965. and so they put this table in the lobby. and they brought up these big old books and some of you who have worked in those books. they they're like felt those old books and a