Vanguard: Black Women and the Right to Vote
U.S. Law and Race Initiative
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09/10/2024
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Please join us for a conversation on Black women and the right to vote with Professor Martha S. Jones (Johns Hopkins University), author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.
William Thomas will moderate the discussion and invite questions from the audience, including our students.
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- [00:00:03.760]Launched with support in fall of 2023,
- [00:00:06.590]the US Law and Race Initiative explores new approaches to research,
- [00:00:10.880]teaching, and public engagement with the history of law, race, and racialization in the US.
- [00:00:16.660]Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
- [00:00:19.310]the initiative brings together large university teaching programs,
- [00:00:22.963]immersive new forms of digital media content,
- [00:00:25.923]and community partnership storytelling
- [00:00:28.282]in order to connect Americans to their history in ways that repair the fractures of our
- [00:00:33.550]national understanding of race and racialization.
- [00:00:36.420]Dr. Will Thomas, Dr. Jeannette Eileen Jones, and Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky,
- [00:00:41.200]who are all on the Zoom today, are the faculty leads on the US Law and Race Initiative,
- [00:00:46.440]along with an array of expert partners in the College of Arts and Science and
- [00:00:51.640]the College of Law at UNL, we are hosting a series of webinars
- [00:00:56.060]deepening the national conversation on the legal history of race.
- [00:00:59.340]So today, we're excited for you to join our American Constitutional History class
- [00:01:04.643]for discussion for guest speaker Professor Martha Jones, author of
- [00:01:09.545]Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Votes and Insisted on Equality for All.
- [00:01:15.014]Professor Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and
- [00:01:20.020]Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.
- [00:01:22.580]She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines
- [00:01:26.430]how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy.
- [00:01:30.280]So in the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1948
- [00:01:36.546]and ended with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.
- [00:01:41.180]But this overwhelmingly white women's movement,
- [00:01:44.133]did not win the vote for most black women.
- [00:01:46.200]So securing their rights required a movement of their own.
- [00:01:48.914]And that's what Professor Jones's book, Vanguard, is about.
- [00:01:51.640]It's a new history of African American women's political lives in America,
- [00:01:55.710]where she recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot
- [00:02:01.190]and how they wielded political power to secure the equality
- [00:02:05.060]and dignity for all persons.
- [00:02:07.010]Vanguard received the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.
- [00:02:11.370]Finally, today's discussion will be moderated by Dr. Will Thomas, who is the
- [00:02:16.140]Angle Chair in the Humanities and Professor of History, as well as the Associate Dean for
- [00:02:21.140]Research and Graduate Education in the College of Arts and
- [00:02:24.090]Sciences at the University of Nebraska.
- [00:02:26.275]Today, at any time during the discussion, please feel free to submit your questions
- [00:02:31.200]using the chat feature. Live captioning will also be available to the audience member.
- [00:02:36.780]And we invite all of our participants to turn on their camera for the discussion.
- [00:02:41.940]Thank you, Professor Jones, for being here. Now I'll turn things over to
- [00:02:46.080]Dr. Thomas, and I'll see you all again at the end of our conversation.
- [00:02:48.980]Thank you, Elodie. And welcome, Professor Jones.
- [00:02:53.040]We're delighted you could be with us today
- [00:02:55.560]from Germany. And this is the beauty of Zoom.
- [00:03:00.540]And welcome to HIST 341, American Constitutional
- [00:03:05.640]History and the U.S. Law and Race Project at Nebraska.
- [00:03:10.350]Professor Jones, this is prize-winning,
- [00:03:16.020]wonderful, amazing book. And I want to just invite you to open really with an
- [00:03:22.385]overview for our group here about the questions you started out with.
- [00:03:28.580]Where did this book come from?
- [00:03:30.700]What questions were you trying to answer? And what you found?
- [00:03:38.600]Well, thanks very much, Dr. Thomas, Dr. Jones, Dr. Jagodinsky. I'm really,
- [00:03:45.820]honored to be here. Thank you to Elodie. Merci beaucoup for the introduction.
- [00:03:55.560]And thanks for the chance to talk about Vanguard. I think a way to introduce this book
- [00:04:06.340]that is maybe some version of the truest story is that I was some combination
- [00:04:16.300]of pissed off and worried. And what had really gotten me hot was anticipating the 2020
- [00:04:30.740]anniversary, the centennial of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
- [00:04:36.940]Already by 2017, there were all kinds of plans that were beginning to
- [00:04:45.840]take shape, anticipating a celebration, and one in particular caught my attention. A friend
- [00:04:57.020]sent me a news clipping because in New York City, which is my hometown,
- [00:05:02.580]there was planned to be
- [00:05:04.780]the installation of a new monument in Central Park. So you all know Central Park is sort of
- [00:05:11.960]the most valuable real estate in Manhattan.
- [00:05:16.362]And there had never been a monument to a living woman installed in
- [00:05:21.480]Central Park. And 2020 was going to be the occasion.
- [00:05:25.827]It was going to be the excuse. It was going to be the opening for just this.
- [00:05:29.393]And a committee had convened itself privately.
- [00:05:32.600]They had raised funds and they had commissioned a monument
- [00:05:36.103]to go into Central Park to be unveiled in August of 2020. And the design was
- [00:05:45.720]released and it included two figures, two historical figures very rightly associated
- [00:05:53.500]with the earliest decades of the women's movement in the United States.
- [00:05:58.485]Probably many of you could
- [00:06:01.420]recite the names, but I won't keep you in suspense.
- [00:06:04.110]They were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,
- [00:06:07.629]two venerable New Yorkers who certainly deserve tremendous credit for
- [00:06:15.660]the emergence and the promotion of the women's movement,
- [00:06:21.064]including the movement for women's
- [00:06:22.820]votes in the United States.
- [00:06:24.332]Well, why did this concern me? It's so monumental in so many ways.
- [00:06:30.260]It concerned me because I thought it was likely a sign
- [00:06:34.150]of what was on the horizon for 2020,
- [00:06:37.100]that we would tell the story of the advent of the women's movement
- [00:06:43.667]and the movement for women's votes
- [00:06:45.960]in the United States through the perspective, through the lives,
- [00:06:49.550]through the activism of women
- [00:06:51.080]like Stanton and Anthony,
- [00:06:53.100]while overlooking other American women who had been also part of that
- [00:07:00.900]important sea change in 1920. And so as these things do, the monument becomes
- [00:07:09.600]subject to public review and open comment. I'm among those
- [00:07:15.540]who write op-eds and things like this, trying to agitate about the monument.
- [00:07:21.938]But my point of view,
- [00:07:23.200]as a historian of African American women, it won't surprise you, is to promote the inclusion
- [00:07:30.240]of at least one more figure on this monument. And this is the figure of Sojourner Truth, the
- [00:07:36.040]one-time enslaved New Yorker, who is literally a peer to Stanton and Anthony in 19th
- [00:07:45.480]century New York in those early decades
- [00:07:48.473]of the women's movement, an abolitionist, a suffragist.
- [00:07:52.280]My question was why not Sojourner Truth if we were going to have Stanton and Anthony?
- [00:07:59.000]So long story short, the monument gets revised.
- [00:08:02.890]Sojourner Truth is there today. You could go see
- [00:08:08.200]it in Central Park along with Stanton and Anthony.
- [00:08:11.064]But this cued me in to what was likely ahead for
- [00:08:15.420]us in 2020, that the folks who were behind the creation of this monument
- [00:08:20.578]were not alone in
- [00:08:22.220]reaching for an old, important, but
- [00:08:27.910]narrow story about the movement for women's rights and women's suffrage
- [00:08:33.180]in the United States, that we were in danger, if I could put it that way, we were in danger of
- [00:08:39.140]repeating those stories and not telling the fuller stories.
- [00:08:42.823]I was promoting a book during this
- [00:08:45.360]time, so I spent a lot of time in 2018 with journalists. And I would, you know, and you're
- [00:08:51.840]sitting around in like a green room or something, and you need things to talk about,
- [00:08:55.970]so I'd say, so what about 2020?
- [00:08:58.030]What are you thinking? And when I would say, as I do in this book,
- [00:09:03.280]that in 1920, too many Black American women do not get the vote in the United States.
- [00:09:11.260]They are a little slack jawed.
- [00:09:15.300]Not unreceptive, just unknowing.
- [00:09:20.979]So, Vanguard becomes the book that I write very much drawing
- [00:09:27.420]on my teaching experience, very much drawing on some of my own research,
- [00:09:31.970]but drawing on really three generations of Black women's historians
- [00:09:38.270]to try and create one book that I can put in the
- [00:09:43.360]hands of a journalist and say,
- [00:09:45.240]"If you're going to cover the 19th Amendment in 2020, here's a place to look for, if you will,
- [00:09:54.360]some version of the rest of the story."
- [00:09:56.440]Now, I have hardly told all of the story, and there are many important
- [00:10:00.798]books that tell us about the extraordinary array
- [00:10:05.160]of American women who are concerned with, active around, and affected
- [00:10:09.720]by the 19th Amendment. We have studies that teach us the 19th Amendment.
- [00:10:15.180]As part of a transnational sea of change for women in many parts of the globe,
- [00:10:20.380]especially in the Americas, etc.
- [00:10:23.158]But really, it's a book, unlike other books that we write, that are very pointedly
- [00:10:29.500]aiming at scholars' debates. This was a book I wrote really to try and insert the histories we
- [00:10:38.880]write into more popular discussions,
- [00:10:42.120]discussions that I think have consequences with us.
- [00:10:45.120]I'll end just by saying I'm a storyteller by trade, and I believe in the power of stories,
- [00:10:51.240]the stories we tell about ourselves, but the stories we tell about our nation.
- [00:10:54.920]And I believe that 2020 was a moment in which, if we could hit it right,
- [00:11:00.900]folks might learn something about Black women's political history.
- [00:11:05.820]And all that was before we
- [00:11:08.060]knew Kamala Harris was going to run for vice president, I'll just say.
- [00:11:15.060]Professor Jones, you introduce us to a whole range of Black women
- [00:11:19.810]who are active and working for the vote,
- [00:11:25.580]and including people like Hallie Quinn Brown.
- [00:11:30.660]And these are women I certainly had never seen
- [00:11:34.860]in history textbooks or in standard accounts. And so your book is full of these stories. And
- [00:11:45.000]I want to concentrate, though, just briefly on if you could address the significance of
- [00:11:51.120]Black women's clubs, the sort of club movement,
- [00:11:54.510]the National Association of Colored Women. And
- [00:11:57.880]you start the chapter we were reading for today with
- [00:12:01.022]Hallie Quinn Brown and the NACW. And just
- [00:12:04.860]could you speak a little bit about the significance of these clubs in
- [00:12:09.330]advocating for women's suffrage?
- [00:12:13.030]Yeah. Thank you for that.
- [00:12:14.940]And thank you for holding up Hallie Quinn Brown.
- [00:12:17.640]You know, she's someone whose work I had been
- [00:12:20.760]studying and really learning Black women's history from for a very long time.
- [00:12:27.390]And, so, it was really a very strong experience for me
- [00:12:35.965]to be able to put her at the center of this story at a critical
- [00:12:39.700]moment. So why are the clubs important? The clubs are important in part because
- [00:12:44.880]they demonstrate to us the ways in which this story set in the early decades of the 20th
- [00:12:54.240]century is really one that reaches all the way back to the Civil War era. The National
- [00:13:00.740]Association of Colored Women's Clubs and the networks that national networks that
- [00:13:05.680]that organization works by way of has its origins in the work that Black women did
- [00:13:14.820]for soldier relief and for refugee relief during the Civil War. So these are old
- [00:13:22.580]networks of philanthropy, of benevolence, of self-help and more that become increasingly
- [00:13:31.180]politicized over the course of the 19th century,
- [00:13:34.602]pointedly so in the wake of Reconstruction's
- [00:13:38.840]demise and the rise of Jim Crow.
- [00:13:41.269]The National Association of Colored Women's Clubs is going to be
- [00:13:44.760]founded in the 1890s expressly to challenge, to combat, to push back against the rise of
- [00:13:52.880]segregation, of disenfranchisement, of violence and more,
- [00:13:57.828]all that is plaguing so many Black American communities.
- [00:14:01.699]I like to say about the clubs that they are as close, but I mean this in the best
- [00:14:07.580]sense, they are as close as Black women get to suffrage organizations
- [00:14:12.096]that we're more familiar with in this period.
- [00:14:15.040]And I say they get as close because these are not
- [00:14:20.724]one issue clubs. These are not women
- [00:14:24.824]who are working by way of one particular political question.
- [00:14:29.679]They are working against lynching
- [00:14:32.020]and winning anti-lynching legislation in Congress, something that takes more than a
- [00:14:36.690]hundred years to finally pass. They are working for
- [00:14:41.195]education, for health care, across the
- [00:14:44.640]span of their communities' political interests, and suffrage is one of those interests.
- [00:14:53.300]Black women are there because they are
- [00:14:56.993]committed to working in this multifaceted way as a matter
- [00:15:01.980]of political taste and inclination. They are there because within the mainstream
- [00:15:08.562]women's suffrage organizations, there is a powerful and disturbing strain of
- [00:15:14.479]white supremacy that is fueling both the everyday
- [00:15:20.790]culture of those organizations, but also the agenda
- [00:15:23.660]within those organizations increasingly. And as when we meet Hallie Quinn Brown,
- [00:15:30.920]who has been a longtime club member, president in 1920,
- [00:15:35.621]what we learn is that this organization
- [00:15:39.170]and the women affiliated with it are going to be left to, in essence, build a new movement
- [00:15:47.080]for their voting rights in the wake of the disappointments of the 19th Amendment.
- [00:15:53.710]I don't think we can imagine how we get to 1965 and Voting Rights Act.
- [00:15:59.980]I know I'm not giving anything away here when I tell you that's where we're going in part.
- [00:16:04.800]That we can't imagine getting there without this
- [00:16:08.900]long-standing network, this long-standing really robust body of Black women organized
- [00:16:16.960]under the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.
- [00:16:24.970]One of the things that comes up in Vanguard again and again is the division
- [00:16:32.340]among Black women and Black men and different
- [00:16:38.650]organizations over strategy, over how to address disenfranchisement.
- [00:16:47.300]And clearly, Black Americans were not of one mind, right?
- [00:16:52.980]There were many, many different approaches to and disagreements among
- [00:16:59.423]Black Americans about how to effectively campaign for the franchise broadly.
- [00:17:06.750]Can you talk with us a little bit about
- [00:17:08.780]the significance of those splits or divisions and how they've played out over time?
- [00:17:20.400]Yeah, sure.
- [00:17:22.880]For me, there are probably two key moments, maybe one more familiar than the other.
- [00:17:31.280]I think many of us have encountered, again, if not in our studies in popular
- [00:17:38.720]culture, some version of a story about the immediate post-Civil War years and the real
- [00:17:47.600]tensions about how an old coalition that had been made up of longstanding women's rights
- [00:17:57.240]advocates and abolitionists alike, how that coalition was going to stand in the face of
- [00:18:08.660]new possibilities for voting rights after the Civil War. The door opens to the remaking of
- [00:18:15.260]voting rights after the Civil War with Reconstruction,
- [00:18:19.149]and the question is, how wide is that door
- [00:18:21.640]going to open? And oftentimes, this is a story that has been told as a
- [00:18:30.378]dispute between white women,
- [00:18:32.281]on the one hand, exemplified by someone like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who advocates the
- [00:18:38.300]educated suffrage, right? That is the suffrage for elites before universal suffrage,
- [00:18:45.610]and others like Frederick Douglass, who say for Black Americans, or Black men at least,
- [00:18:52.260]the vote is a matter of life and death.
- [00:18:54.335]What I hope we learn in Vanguard is that Black women are also part of these debates
- [00:19:01.900]and are, on the one hand, somebody
- [00:19:08.540]like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an abolitionist and poet and suffrage advocate.
- [00:19:13.640]Harper has two things to say. On the one hand,
- [00:19:19.730]the true measure of their political moment
- [00:19:22.820]is where Black women come out in this equation,
- [00:19:27.900]because neither Douglass nor Stanton is advocating
- [00:19:30.160]that Frances Ellen Watkins Harper should particularly get the vote,
- [00:19:34.470]that Black women are the measure in some sense of the vision,
- [00:19:39.576]the universal vision of this movement. And that's a very important
- [00:19:45.380]refrain that we will hear repeated again and again across the decades.
- [00:19:49.460]And at the same time, Harper understands politics,
- [00:19:54.383]which is to say she understands that there is a deal going to be cut
- [00:20:01.188]in the 1860s, that Black men are going to benefit from the terms of the
- [00:20:08.420]15th Amendment, and no American women are going to
- [00:20:12.260]benefit similarly when it comes to voting rights.
- [00:20:15.300]But Harper demonstrates in the years and the decades to come
- [00:20:21.080]that this is a long commitment, right, and that she and others who come out of the
- [00:20:26.460]shortcomings of that moment are going to continue
- [00:20:29.824]in that long road to women's suffrage going forward.
- [00:20:35.200]Just quickly, I think the other
- [00:20:38.360]key moment is probably at the end of the century,
- [00:20:41.330]at the end of the 1890s. And again, we've got now
- [00:20:45.300]a shift from the optimism and the sense of possibility
- [00:20:51.492]that was Reconstruction in the moment of the 15th Amendment
- [00:20:54.789]to the grave, grave disappointments of the 1890s and
- [00:20:59.982]early 1900s with the rise of segregation, disenfranchisement, violence, and more.
- [00:21:08.300]And here, there is a real tension as Black women,
- [00:21:12.308]the club women among them, are organized politically,
- [00:21:17.829]are looking to step into the limelight, if you will, or into the fray,
- [00:21:24.340]depending on how you see it, and to be real agents of political advocacy.
- [00:21:30.700]And they are going to meet up with men now who tell them, stand back.
- [00:21:39.003]Sit down, right?
- [00:21:41.880]Politics is men's business.
- [00:21:44.040]But I'll say that because for Black women,
- [00:21:52.664]the struggle for voting rights is so bound up with both racism and sexism,
- [00:21:58.580]the aftermath is really one of an extraordinary
- [00:22:08.180]support for women's suffrage on the part of Black men.
- [00:22:12.120]Black men who see this as another way of getting at how they have, in fact, lost the vote
- [00:22:19.161]in this critical period. So I guess I'm saying the thing historians always say, which is
- [00:22:26.648]it's complicated.
- [00:22:30.040]But one of my favorite moments, in 1920, comes out of St. Louis, Missouri,
- [00:22:38.120]where Black women organize a suffrage school.
- [00:22:40.360]They're teaching each other how to
- [00:22:43.230]take literacy tests and how to register to vote in the face of hostile registrars and things
- [00:22:49.290]like this. And Black men show up to their school because they, too,
- [00:22:56.280]are looking to figure out how to circumvent
- [00:22:58.391]the mechanisms that had been keeping them from the polls.
- [00:23:02.480]And so, this is almost it's also a moment of, I think, extraordinary
- [00:23:08.060]solidarity in appreciating what it will take in order to actually get registered,
- [00:23:14.095]cast a ballot in the 20th century.
- [00:23:19.340]Yeah, look, let's talk a little bit about that, what it would take to register and cast a ballot,
- [00:23:25.940]because I think it would help us to, as your book does,
- [00:23:30.100]unpack how disenfranchisement operated across the United States,
- [00:23:36.950]particularly the American South. And I'm hoping you can
- [00:23:41.430]talk about all the various facets of of how disenfranchisement operated.
- [00:23:47.020]But I also was struck by your analysis of the of the poll tax, you know,
- [00:23:53.840]and how the poll tax had gendered dimensions to it
- [00:23:57.824]that particularly operated to continue to disenfranchise black women
- [00:24:04.113]in the aftermath of the 19th Amendment.
- [00:24:07.940]Yeah. So, yeah, could you let's talk about all the facets, but the poll tax in particular.
- [00:24:16.000]Sure. So I'll say this is one of the surprises for me in doing the research on
- [00:24:22.370]Vanguard is that many of the poll tax laws.
- [00:24:26.160]So these are head taxes imposed on prospective voters
- [00:24:32.734]due on tax day, not on Election Day, which means
- [00:24:37.880]that if you've not paid your poll tax back when it was due,
- [00:24:44.990]when Election Day rolls around, you're not going to be eligible to vote.
- [00:24:49.880]And this is a tax that has, not surprisingly, a disproportionate effect
- [00:24:57.430]on poor and working people across the country.
- [00:25:02.880]And it is a tax that is further.
- [00:25:07.820]Its discriminatory effect is enhanced
- [00:25:11.300]when it is paired with what are called grandfather clauses.
- [00:25:15.820]These are laws that excuse you from paying a poll tax.
- [00:25:21.820]If your grandfather voted before 1870 or 1868 or 1865.
- [00:25:28.680]Well what does that mean? The only people excused are white southerners,
- [00:25:34.230]because black southerners couldn't vote before those years.
- [00:25:37.760]What I learned about the poll tax, is that frequently those laws were written in
- [00:25:44.420]gendered terms, which is to say,
- [00:25:48.220]they were express about imposing that they were tax on men.
- [00:25:53.760]Because they're written in the 1860s 1870s, you know, in the early
- [00:26:01.010]in the late part of the 19th century, when they're no one is
- [00:26:05.440]anticipating women as voters.
- [00:26:07.700]Which means, the laws have to be rewritten rather hurriedly
- [00:26:11.601]in 1920 if the poll tax is now going to apply to women and be used
- [00:26:18.522]again and continuing to be used to keep black women from the vote.
- [00:26:24.140]But, I think, that part of why the poll tax is such powerful example for us,
- [00:26:35.488]is that we see how southern lawmakers,
- [00:26:39.777]though they stood on the floor of legislatures and said, you know, the
- [00:26:47.280]quiet part out loud, we are here to disenfranchise black voters.
- [00:26:53.998]But, what they know is because of the
- [00:26:56.540]15th Amendment, which prohibits the states from using race
- [00:27:00.088]as a criteria, they have to devise
- [00:27:02.920]laws that are on their face neutral. I'm doing this and I know because I know there are laws
- [00:27:07.580]students in the room. I know you, know, you I know you students of law,
- [00:27:11.138]you know what I mean on their face, which is to say they have to devise laws that don't
- [00:27:15.322]use racial terms, that don't use race as an arbiter,
- [00:27:19.470]but are developed and written strategically to vastly
- [00:27:25.746]disproportionately affect black Americans. And this is the story of disenfranchisement,
- [00:27:31.192]whether it's grandfather clauses that open the door to voting for people
- [00:27:37.520]whose grandfathers vote. They don't say whether it's
- [00:27:40.473]black grandfathers or white grandfathers, but categorically it's only white grandfathers.
- [00:27:45.988]Poll taxes, etc. these are strategic ways in which states are openly
- [00:27:54.222]and notoriously looking to work around the terms of the 15th Amendment.
- [00:28:00.300]And as we know, I know we're going to talk maybe about Williams versus Mississippi, but
- [00:28:07.460]we know that the Supreme Court is going to buy that
- [00:28:11.426]and say if the law is neutral on its face,
- [00:28:15.000]it is constitutional, even if it might be used somewhere,
- [00:28:20.661]in some locality for discriminatory ends.
- [00:28:26.850]You point out that less than a dozen or a half dozen among 1,445 registrants
- [00:28:37.400]in Huntsville, Alabama, managed to register to vote.
- [00:28:42.000]So the effect of these disenfranchisement clauses was highly significant
- [00:28:49.720]and applied in the 1920s.
- [00:28:55.240]How does the Supreme Court justify this kind of legislation and constitutional provision
- [00:29:07.878]that Virginia and other states used in the late 19th and early 20th century
- [00:29:15.200]to disenfranchise effectively all but
- [00:29:19.640]a handful of people who were seeking to register to vote?
- [00:29:23.580]Well, this narrow, and I think maybe from our 20th, 21st century perspective,
- [00:29:36.123]disingenuous reading of the legislation on its face means that courts come again and again
- [00:29:46.740]to these sorts of provisions. It's important to say
- [00:29:52.314]that Black Americans going all the way back
- [00:29:56.400]to the 1890s are challenging these provisions using the 14th and the 15th amendments
- [00:30:04.175]to argue that their constitutional rights are being infringed upon
- [00:30:11.783]by the effects of these laws.
- [00:30:13.860]What we find are courts that are, by and large, willing to engage
- [00:30:21.974]in a profoundly narrow analysis,
- [00:30:25.320]one that looks at the literal language of the legislation.
- [00:30:31.380]The legislation does not say, by and large, does not say,
- [00:30:37.160]whites only or no Black people. It uses the subterfuge. The one exception we know is the
- [00:30:44.840]whites only primary. For a long time in Southern jurisdictions,
- [00:30:50.906]states deemed the political parties
- [00:30:56.040]to be private entities that could determine their own criteria for membership and for
- [00:31:07.100]voting, which is to say, if you have whites only primaries, then you have candidates that
- [00:31:17.040]are chosen by whites only and up and up and up the food chain. And this the courts will
- [00:31:26.440]ultimately see as a violation of the of the the colorblind ethos of this period.
- [00:31:37.040]And I would say, you know, it's worth saying, I think that, you know, today we live with
- [00:31:43.740]the legacy of this kind of reasoning. Right? And high courts that are still divided
- [00:31:52.640]at best. Right? About how to regard
- [00:31:55.720]facially neutral laws that have a discriminatory effect.
- [00:32:01.640]What should be the criteria by which
- [00:32:06.980]a court assesses the constitutionality of a given piece of legislation? We've seen it
- [00:32:14.320]in the 21st century in the context of voter I.D. and other 21st century disenfranchisement
- [00:32:28.300]strategies. Right? Still written facially neutral. Deliberated over non-neutral
- [00:32:36.920]terms and being applied in ways that are disproportionately discriminatory.
- [00:32:42.480]I'm not sure if I answered your question, Dr. Thomas. I feel like I just.
- [00:32:47.300]Well, absolutely. I have many questions.
- [00:32:50.080]Okay. Sorry.
- [00:32:51.080]But before, and I know my colleagues do as well, and I'm going to ask a couple more and
- [00:32:57.580]then invite my co-PIs, co-directors of the initiative,
- [00:33:04.960]Professor Jagodinsky and Professor Jones to
- [00:33:06.860]ask a question, and then we'll open it up to students who are with us today.
- [00:33:12.780]I do want to ask about, I want to come back to Hallie Quinn Brown, actually, and
- [00:33:20.480]homespun heroines, this volume that's published in 1926,
- [00:33:28.651]and how significant this is. And I guess
- [00:33:34.880]I'd like to hear from your perspective.
- [00:33:36.800]How does this book play a role in creating a history of Black women's political action and
- [00:33:49.560]legal action that's highly significant? You feature it in Vanguard, and, I guess, I just want
- [00:33:56.960]to hear your thoughts about what Hallie Quinn Brown is doing in homespun heroines.
- [00:34:03.800]Yeah. You know, I think for a long time,
- [00:34:06.740]I read homespun heroines for the biographical sketches. You know, one of the things that
- [00:34:15.640]Hallie Quinn Brown does so well is sort of take a snapshot of her own time. I think the book is
- [00:34:24.540]published in 1926, if I'm not mistaken. And it's a snapshot, right, of her political moment,
- [00:34:32.640]of the kind of political history that Black women,
- [00:34:36.680]in the club movement in particular, but also activist Black Methodist women,
- [00:34:43.663]are steeped in. And we've gone back there again and again to help us recover
- [00:34:49.960]figures who have been forgotten to history.
- [00:34:53.621]But I wanted to read it in Vanguard as, in a sense, a political text,
- [00:35:00.320]and to appreciate the ways in which
- [00:35:06.620]the moment in which she's writing, right, it's in the wake of the 19th Amendment.
- [00:35:13.200]It's the wake of the disappointment of the 19th Amendment.
- [00:35:17.430]It is at the start of building a new, long decades-long movement,
- [00:35:26.469]and it is, in many ways, I think, a political text,
- [00:35:30.590]and she tells us the various ways in which black women are prepared for full
- [00:35:38.710]citizenship, right, because this is at least one part of the argument that's being made, right,
- [00:35:44.990]is that black women are not suited to, are not prepared to, don't have the kind of
- [00:35:51.019]consciousness or sensibility or scope of vision
- [00:35:57.029]that is demanded of fully enfranchised citizens.
- [00:36:01.930]So she uses these stories, right, to teach us, in a sense
- [00:36:07.990]about the kinds of political concerns that black women have long championed,
- [00:36:16.001]how they have worked in concert with one another.
- [00:36:20.490]She teaches us about their integrity.
- [00:36:24.310]It's important to say, Holly Quinn Brown is a champion of the politics of respectability,
- [00:36:29.834]which is to say, she is promoting a vision of black women,
- [00:36:33.712]which is one that places them fully in the stream
- [00:36:37.970]of a kind of pseudo-Victorian bourgeois womanhood
- [00:36:44.413]that Brown and many club women hope will win them
- [00:36:50.410]political esteem and, ultimately, political rights.
- [00:36:57.230]We have to appreciate that like generations upon generations of American women
- [00:37:04.040]and not American women, Brown is a little stealthy.
- [00:37:07.630]Right, which is to say she doesn't write a political manifesto, though she might have.
- [00:37:13.470]She uses a kind of literature that, I think, she's right.
- [00:37:20.990]Readers are prepared to receive from a woman and from a Black woman
- [00:37:27.730]biography, right, short essays, not the political manifesto.
- [00:37:32.770]Brown is not, though she might have taken on the posture
- [00:37:37.610]and the voice of someone like W.E.B. Du Bois, right?
- [00:37:40.410]This is an era in which there are many kinds of voices and strategies available to her.
- [00:37:46.970]But I think she understands that homespun heroines, it's such a disarming title, isn't it?
- [00:37:55.410]And yet I think it really packs an extraordinary punch
- [00:37:59.385]when it comes to making the case for Black women's political competencies.
- [00:38:07.590]Let me invite Professor Jeanette Jones and Professor Katrina Jagodinsky to join this conversation.
- [00:38:15.010]Either one of you want to leap in here?
- [00:38:21.180]Sure. First of all, thank you so much for, you know, that overview of some of the most
- [00:38:26.080]important, I mean, the entire book I love.
- [00:38:27.930]But for those who haven't read the entire book, just kind of parsing out those pieces.
- [00:38:35.010]But I did want to, I think we've had this conversation
- [00:38:37.800]at another webinar, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself,
- [00:38:42.850]but I think this idea of biography in the politics of respectability is so important.
- [00:38:49.530]And I think that we might have a tendency
- [00:38:54.501]from a 21st century viewpoint to be like, oh, why would you do that?
- [00:38:58.410]But understanding that itself as a political strategy for Black women's advancement.
- [00:39:04.050]And as you said, that most Black women's clubs, and we talked about,
- [00:39:07.550]sororities as well, had this multifaceted idea of Black liberation and freedom.
- [00:39:13.750]And so can you talk a little bit about how, more about how that respectability politics
- [00:39:19.350]is deployed by Black women's clubs, by the sororities, by the Black colleges to advance
- [00:39:28.330]suffrage, particularly for women?
- [00:39:30.270]And I think when I talked, I told you I was a Delta,
- [00:39:32.550]so specifically, thinking about the parade and why that was important and
- [00:39:37.530]Mary Church Terrell and others.
- [00:39:39.610]Yeah.
- [00:39:41.390]So I think you can't say too much, right?
- [00:39:46.310]You know, in other words, the force of
- [00:39:50.810]organized Black women's politics, yes, among sorority
- [00:39:57.190]women, and they are, as you know well, they're, you know, in some
- [00:40:04.527]of the most fraught scenes in Washington
- [00:40:07.510]during that hard fought campaign for the 19th Amendment,
- [00:40:13.190]but they are alongside women from
- [00:40:15.870]the Baptist Church, from Black Methodist churches, from the club movement, and more.
- [00:40:22.330]And so, in some ways, to think of these all, right, these various
- [00:40:31.590]sites of Black women's organizing is, I think, you're right, part of a whole.
- [00:40:37.990]And when we see them together,
- [00:40:42.278]what is important for me is recognizing now we are talking about
- [00:40:47.110]millions of Black women, millions of Black women.
- [00:40:52.170]And I don't think it's possible when we take that view to brand or dismiss this as
- [00:41:07.470]a superficial or an elite or an exclusive approach to Black politics.
- [00:41:20.810]It is not the only approach, but it is one that is joined, certainly by some women.
- [00:41:31.330]Mary Church Terrell, you know, I'm a huge admirer of Mary Church Terrell,
- [00:41:36.760]but Terrell is the elite of the elite, right?
- [00:41:38.900]Coming from, you know, a wealthy, you know, complicated family scene, you know, all the
- [00:41:47.330]way to her own education, her travel, her influence in Washington, and more.
- [00:41:53.590]But in some ways, I don't think Terrell is representative of the membership
- [00:41:58.255]of these organizations at all.
- [00:41:59.970]Now, there's so much I could say, but I really just want to say one more thing,
- [00:42:04.651]you know, which is,
- [00:42:06.320]I think I could have, and it's important to say, you know, someone else could have written
- [00:42:12.450]a version of this book, and other people have written versions of this book from a
- [00:42:15.990]very different vantage point.
- [00:42:17.390]But I really wanted to triple down on the women that you have invoked, because I think
- [00:42:26.170]that they've gotten short shrift and that they have been overread
- [00:42:30.367]through a 21st century lens.
- [00:42:32.110]If we, if they knew then what we knew now,
- [00:42:37.410]about the brutal limits of the politics of respectability, they might have written a
- [00:42:44.870]very different story for themselves.
- [00:42:46.430]And yet they didn't.
- [00:42:50.070]And, perhaps, no one except the most visionary, you know,
- [00:42:55.830]Du Bois tells us the problem of
- [00:42:57.550]the 20th century is the problem of the color line, but it's rhetorical.
- [00:43:01.950]And Du Bois doesn't really wish that upon us or will that to be
- [00:43:07.390]the case, he throws that down as a kind of gauntlet so that the nation will
- [00:43:12.166]rise above the color line.
- [00:43:13.850]Well, no one knows, right, the profound extent to which so much of that will fail.
- [00:43:20.930]And so I am, I think, more sympathetic.
- [00:43:25.810]And I think that we still have more work to do to appreciate the nuance,
- [00:43:33.710]the complexity, and the subtlety.
- [00:43:37.370]And more of these women.
- [00:43:40.970]Thank you so much.
- [00:43:44.370]Thank you so much.
- [00:43:45.650]Thank you.
- [00:43:46.390]It's lovely to see you again.
- [00:43:48.310]You too.
- [00:43:49.330]Students, get your questions ready.
- [00:43:52.050]You can raise your hand or just.
- [00:43:54.290]I'm ready, students. You can ask me anything.
- [00:43:56.270]But Professor Jagodinsky, did you have a question?
- [00:43:59.330]Yeah, thank you.
- [00:44:01.290]I just, I always want to start by saying thank you for your work overall.
- [00:44:09.650]Every book you write has new stories about these really
- [00:44:16.950]pivotal actors in the broader history of Black rights
- [00:44:21.690]mobilization and bringing gendered analysis into that is
- [00:44:25.990]always really important.
- [00:44:27.690]One of the things I appreciated about Vanguard, and you
- [00:44:31.650]mentioned it a little bit already this morning, is your
- [00:44:34.850]point that for Black women,
- [00:44:37.330]suffrage was one topic in a much broader platform of political activism.
- [00:44:47.850]And in particular, I think something that might be
- [00:44:52.350]difficult for a 21st century audience to really understand
- [00:44:55.870]is the embodied aspects of Black women's politics.
- [00:45:00.350]I think, for some women's historians,
- [00:45:03.880]the personal is political and the political is personal
- [00:45:07.310]a common slogan, but I think that means something really
- [00:45:10.070]distinct for Black women, as you show in Vanguard.
- [00:45:12.750]And so I just wondered if you could take a minute to talk a
- [00:45:16.070]little bit more about, you know, maybe some of these other
- [00:45:20.070]political concerns they had and the way in which, and I do
- [00:45:25.150]think this relates to the politics of respectability
- [00:45:27.410]because of the expectations of presentation and public
- [00:45:32.490]behavior norms for Black women and just sort of how
- [00:45:37.290]they engaged with that.
- [00:45:39.150]I know you have a number of stories in the book that
- [00:45:43.330]address that, all of which I appreciated.
- [00:45:45.330]Thank you so much for that.
- [00:45:48.610]Something else I think I didn't understand until writing
- [00:45:54.830]Vanguard was the ubiquitousness of violence in the lives
- [00:46:03.650]of Black activist women.
- [00:46:07.270]How profoundly risky it was to travel, whether it was by car
- [00:46:15.070]or by coach, across town or across the state.
- [00:46:19.670]Hardly a woman in this book doesn't have a story about
- [00:46:28.910]having been accosted, put out of a lady's car,
- [00:46:37.250]forced into segregated accommodations, hands laid on her.
- [00:46:42.690]And this, I think, is core to why Black women stay committed
- [00:46:51.410]to organizations that speak to the range of their concerns.
- [00:46:57.330]They use the term dignity, right?
- [00:47:00.490]Equality, yes, but dignity, right?
- [00:47:03.570]And dignity takes us to those scenes.
- [00:47:07.230]In which women famous like Mary Churchill Terrell
- [00:47:11.230]and Ida B. Wells, but women nameless for us,
- [00:47:15.230]were subject to brutality in the simple act
- [00:47:19.850]of traveling for work, traveling to a political meeting, et cetera.
- [00:47:24.290]This means that when Black and white women arrive
- [00:47:30.710]at conventions and other gatherings,
- [00:47:34.570]they've come already by way
- [00:47:37.210]of a profoundly different experience.
- [00:47:39.910]And it helps us appreciate then why, for example,
- [00:47:45.870]Black women are as committed to anti-lynching advocacy
- [00:47:53.122]as they are to advocating for women's votes.
- [00:47:56.730]Because they can't imagine, even if you get a 19th Amendment,
- [00:48:01.170]as we learn in the example of Mary McLeod Bethune in Florida,
- [00:48:04.890]you can have a 19th Amendment,
- [00:48:07.527]you might even get to register to vote,
- [00:48:10.070]but if the Ku Klux Klan is going to march,
- [00:48:13.150]as they do in her hometown of Daytona, Florida,
- [00:48:17.130]on the eve of Election Day,
- [00:48:19.530]you might not make it to the polls.
- [00:48:23.510]And so Black women have to be thinking
- [00:48:26.010]in this multifaceted way.
- [00:48:28.410]But for me, I think the violence had been
- [00:48:32.830]maybe, I don't know,
- [00:48:37.170]I don't want to say underplayed,
- [00:48:38.770]but maybe it was the accumulation of the story.
- [00:48:41.250]You know, Sojourner Truth is injured
- [00:48:45.070]during the Civil War in Washington
- [00:48:48.650]when she is ejected or refused from a streetcar.
- [00:48:52.870]So we're going, now we're reaching back.
- [00:48:55.270]We're reaching back, right? So this is a story that goes back
- [00:48:58.150]to the early decades of the 19th century
- [00:49:00.350]and continues, right, and continues
- [00:49:02.410]all the way through the 20th century.
- [00:49:07.150]And it's difficult to underplay, I think,
- [00:49:12.670]what the women I write about call dignity
- [00:49:17.450]is really what they are after in this political activism.
- [00:49:25.183]Okay. Thank you.
- [00:49:28.050]Thank you.
- [00:49:29.350]Students, would you introduce yourselves to Professor Jones when you come on?
- [00:49:34.290]So let's see, Grant.
- [00:49:35.650]Hi, Grant.
- [00:49:37.650]Hey, Professor Jones. Thanks for joining us.
- [00:49:39.820]I know that your book pertains to the efforts
- [00:49:44.050]of African-American women getting the right to vote.
- [00:49:48.030]But I'm just wondering, in your studies,
- [00:49:49.570]what have you found regarding other minorities,
- [00:49:52.590]such as Latina women, Native American women
- [00:49:56.530]during that period? Was there anything similar?
- [00:49:58.630]I'll say the answer is yes.
- [00:50:03.170]But of course, this is not my work.
- [00:50:07.110]One of my favorite historians on this is Cathleen Cahill,
- [00:50:12.110]whose book is Somebody's Gonna Help Me,
- [00:50:16.750]Something to Vote.
- [00:50:20.190]But Cahill really looks at Indigenous,
- [00:50:23.690]Latina, Black, and Asian women,
- [00:50:28.670]all of whom are very much a part of the story,
- [00:50:32.550]and at the same time are not,
- [00:50:36.290]easily positioned as the same within it.
- [00:50:41.670]Ah, she gave a talk last semester, wonderful.
- [00:50:44.230]You know, she tells us, for example,
- [00:50:47.510]that Latina women are, in 1920,
- [00:50:53.790]in a very provocative moment
- [00:50:58.810]because they are being made and remade
- [00:51:02.300]as racialized subjects. And there's an open question.
- [00:51:07.070]As to whether they are white
- [00:51:08.450]or being Mexican is something other than being white.
- [00:51:12.390]In other words, how do laws
- [00:51:14.530]that are affecting voting rights
- [00:51:17.230]apply to Latina women is not the same story
- [00:51:22.570]as it is for Black American women,
- [00:51:25.390]Indigenous women who are in this moment,
- [00:51:32.690]many of them not citizens of the United States,
- [00:51:37.050]many of them by deliberate choice.
- [00:51:42.070]That is, they live within autonomous,
- [00:51:46.050]though increasingly under pressure,
- [00:51:49.110]autonomous sovereignties, native nations,
- [00:51:53.310]and where they sit in relation to the body politic
- [00:51:59.870]is not an open question,
- [00:52:05.110]but is a shifting question
- [00:52:07.030]and Asian American women,
- [00:52:09.450]many of whom are immigrant women
- [00:52:13.990]who are excluded from citizenship
- [00:52:16.630]by way of federal law.
- [00:52:19.470]So you can see the ways in which Cathleen Cahill
- [00:52:23.030]really helps us recasting the vote.
- [00:52:25.210]Help me. Is that right?
- [00:52:26.390]If I got it right. Thank you.
- [00:52:28.130]Cahill really helps us see
- [00:52:31.030]the broader spectrum
- [00:52:33.630]of the questions here
- [00:52:35.190]and the ways in which
- [00:52:37.010]we have to think with care, right?
- [00:52:40.170]About the way in which
- [00:52:41.470]various communities, women are sitting.
- [00:52:43.310]It's important to say, you know, white American women
- [00:52:45.610]don't all simply vote in 1920 either.
- [00:52:50.830]It's still true in 1920
- [00:52:53.270]that white American women
- [00:52:55.230]who marry non-U.S. citizens,
- [00:52:57.970]give up their citizenship,
- [00:53:00.610]and cannot vote in 1920.
- [00:53:03.790]And so one of the myths of the 19th Amendment
- [00:53:06.990]is that it gives, or guarantees,
- [00:53:09.870]or ushers in the vote
- [00:53:11.670]for all American women.
- [00:53:12.850]But in fact, the picture
- [00:53:14.410]is far, far more uneven than that.
- [00:53:18.350]Thanks so much for the question.
- [00:53:20.890]Thank you.
- [00:53:21.910]Thank you, Grant.
- [00:53:24.450]Actually, that brings us...
- [00:53:26.530]Luke, you had a question in the chat,
- [00:53:28.590]but do you want to ask it in person here?
- [00:53:31.050]Hi, Luke.
- [00:53:32.670]Hi, I had a question.
- [00:53:35.130]So you talked a lot
- [00:53:36.970]about kind of the intersection of race and gender.
- [00:53:39.530]And I was wondering, because poll taxes seem
- [00:53:42.590]to have such a broad implication
- [00:53:44.030]for Americans of all races and genders,
- [00:53:48.330]I was wondering if you could talk about how class might have intersected
- [00:53:51.230]with kind of the rhetoric
- [00:53:52.950]and the strategies that suffragists
- [00:53:54.450]end up using to kind of drum up
- [00:53:56.650]support for their movement.
- [00:53:57.590]Yeah, I think one of the things
- [00:54:01.310]we know about,
- [00:54:02.730]and we know this from the debates
- [00:54:05.670]that precede ultimately the ratification
- [00:54:11.990]of the 19th Amendment,
- [00:54:13.510]whether these are the debates
- [00:54:15.350]in Congress, during the drafting
- [00:54:18.710]of the proposed amendment
- [00:54:20.350]or the debates remember, it has to be
- [00:54:23.790]Then the amendment has to be approved
- [00:54:25.650]by the individual states and we're able to peer in
- [00:54:28.450]on the debates happening in individual states.
- [00:54:31.230]Is that there are a lot of promises made,
- [00:54:36.050]Not promises you could hold anybody to,
- [00:54:39.710]but there are a lot of promises made to lawmakers and by lawmakers
- [00:54:43.250]about what the effect
- [00:54:44.610]of the 19th Amendment will be.
- [00:54:46.570]And among the promises are that nothing in the 19th Amendment
- [00:54:52.670]will interfere with poll taxes,
- [00:54:55.490]or grandfather clauses, or whites-only primaries,
- [00:54:59.250]and other impediments to the vote.
- [00:55:04.110]So I say that to say
- [00:55:06.910]that there is anticipated,
- [00:55:08.910]by the very terms of the 19th Amendment,
- [00:55:12.190]the continuation of the same mechanisms
- [00:55:16.190]that had been enforced prior to the amendment.
- [00:55:19.010]And these are certainly mechanisms
- [00:55:22.090]that are going to disproportionately affect
- [00:55:25.610]immigrant women, working women, women of color
- [00:55:30.070]because they are designed that way.
- [00:55:33.770]And when they are not designed that way,
- [00:55:36.890]they are implemented that way.
- [00:55:39.610]A wonderful, terrible example are literacy tests.
- [00:55:43.630]Literacy tests are, you can probably imagine this:
- [00:55:52.510]You go to your county registrar
- [00:55:54.930]seeking to register to vote, right?
- [00:55:58.350]You're not even trying to cast a ballot yet.
- [00:56:00.050]You're just trying to get your name on the rolls.
- [00:56:02.150]And now you meet with an individual,
- [00:56:06.870]who is charged with examining you
- [00:56:10.490]to determine whether you are sufficiently literate to vote.
- [00:56:16.090]Well, there's nothing on the face of that law
- [00:56:21.950]or that process that says working people can't vote,
- [00:56:26.410]immigrants can't vote, right?
- [00:56:27.950]It's a test, except that what we know
- [00:56:31.570]are the ways in which those tests are administered.
- [00:56:36.850]And they are administered in discriminatory ways, right?
- [00:56:40.950]And you can imagine what it's like
- [00:56:45.330]to the questions you might be asked.
- [00:56:47.750]And you can see some of the later 20th century versions
- [00:56:52.950]of these tests online and take them for yourself and see how you do.
- [00:56:58.230]But, you'll probably do well because you all are great students.
- [00:57:02.650]But it's to say, if I asked you to,
- [00:57:06.830]explain an understanding tests, right?
- [00:57:10.850]Explain to me how the Electoral College works.
- [00:57:14.130]Well, guess what?
- [00:57:15.750]I think I might not pass a test
- [00:57:18.690]that asked me to explain the workings of the Electoral College.
- [00:57:24.050]So part of what's happening on the ground,
- [00:57:26.750]is that registrars, administrators,
- [00:57:31.050]are looking people in the eye
- [00:57:33.790]and then pitching the test
- [00:57:36.810]in ways that help to ensure
- [00:57:39.850]that some people will pass
- [00:57:41.250]and other people won't pass.
- [00:57:43.190]And that's part of the story.
- [00:57:45.870]And so in a given community,
- [00:57:47.910]that's certainly in the conversation
- [00:57:51.110]we're embedded in today
- [00:57:52.610]is about the disenfranchisement
- [00:57:54.590]of Black Americans principally.
- [00:57:56.630]But you can imagine how that is used in many different ways
- [00:57:59.690]to keep some people off the rolls.
- [00:58:04.425]And you can imagine the debates about
- [00:58:07.660]You know, the underlying debates
- [00:58:10.130]that today we live with the legacy of
- [00:58:13.650]is the educated suffrage. Who should vote?
- [00:58:16.690]Who should have the privilege of voting?
- [00:58:19.610]Because no one has the right to vote.
- [00:58:21.390]And what criteria should determine that?
- [00:58:24.490]And that's happening not only in lawmaking,
- [00:58:27.330]that's happening in the implementation of law
- [00:58:29.770]in everyday ways.
- [00:58:32.590]Thank you.
- [00:58:34.290]Yeah, thank you.
- [00:58:41.209]All right, more questions?
- [00:58:47.771]If you can't press your raise hand,
- [00:58:51.590]you can always just wave and jump in.
- [00:58:55.430]I'm going to pause for a second
- [00:58:57.810]and see if students can step forward here.
- [00:59:01.810]Yes, Kaylin?
- [00:59:04.270]Hi, Kaylin.
- [00:59:06.350]Hi, Dr. Jones.
- [00:59:07.090]I got to read your book last semester,
- [00:59:10.170]so I'm really excited that I get to speak with you on Zoom.
- [00:59:12.990]But I was really interested in your book
- [00:59:15.970]about the use of space
- [00:59:17.530]and kind of like how political spaces are formed.
- [00:59:20.190]I think a lot of the times we see spaces
- [00:59:22.670]that are originally formed for the political purpose,
- [00:59:24.510]like courthouses, legislative buildings,
- [00:59:26.590]but then there's also spaces that are adapted for politics,
- [00:59:29.650]so like colleges, churches, and then like homes.
- [00:59:32.510]So I just wanted to ask your opinion
- [00:59:34.410]on like how those adapted spaces, in the Black political sphere,
- [00:59:37.790]emulated white political spaces,
- [00:59:39.830]or maybe even diverged from them.
- [00:59:41.790]So I'm thinking of like salons in people's homes,
- [00:59:44.130]or the color convention in Philadelphia.
- [00:59:46.055]I'm just kind of getting your thoughts on that.
- [00:59:48.399]Yeah, thank you so much for that.
- [00:59:50.530]Because you point to, I think,
- [00:59:53.150]an important facet of Black political culture,
- [00:59:56.270]the ways in which churches, first and foremost,
- [01:00:00.890]but odd fellows halls, Masonic lodges,
- [01:00:06.710]and the auditorium at the Historically Black College
- [01:00:11.630]and more, all become adapted to political uses in this story.
- [01:00:19.130]But it's an important one because it is a reminder
- [01:00:26.250]of how, in some ways, we overlooked these stories
- [01:00:29.990]because we were looking for them to happen in places marked politics.
- [01:00:36.690]And so, you know, part of my work has been, for example,
- [01:00:44.730]to look very deliberately at Black churches,
- [01:00:48.470]principally Baptist and Methodist churches,
- [01:00:52.590]to appreciate the ways in which, oftentimes,
- [01:00:58.110]the Baptist or the Methodist sanctuary
- [01:01:01.170]is also the largest meeting place for Black people
- [01:01:06.210]in a given locality.
- [01:01:07.750]And how at great risk, in many cases,
- [01:01:16.070]congregations give over their spaces to political purposes.
- [01:01:23.290]This is a tension, but a possibility
- [01:01:26.810]that takes us all the way back to the pre-Civil War era
- [01:01:29.870]and the abolitionist organizing,
- [01:01:32.570]but all the way forward to the modern civil rights movement
- [01:01:36.650]but there are also contests over this, right?
- [01:01:40.750]Because this is not without risk
- [01:01:43.130]and it requires a commitment
- [01:01:47.330]both on the part of a congregation
- [01:01:49.470]but on the part of a denomination, right?
- [01:01:52.010]To see itself as committed to
- [01:01:55.430]as expressly part of political work.
- [01:01:58.830]But for Black women who are controlling, in many ways,
- [01:02:04.790]these kinds of spaces,
- [01:02:06.630]these are natural sites for political organizing.
- [01:02:09.950]And we see the ways in which
- [01:02:12.290]not only the configurations of Black women,
- [01:02:17.390]but the ideas that are produced within church communities
- [01:02:21.850]get picked up and exported into the political sphere.
- [01:02:26.630]Many of the women I write about
- [01:02:28.390]who are active at the end of the 19th
- [01:02:30.510]and into the 20th century in this campaign
- [01:02:32.990]for women's votes, including,
- [01:02:36.610]Hallie Quinn Brown have really cut their teeth politically
- [01:02:41.470]in church politics,
- [01:02:43.150]where they've been talking about the rights of church women for a long time,
- [01:02:47.210]even before they expressly begin to talk about the rights
- [01:02:50.750]of Black women in the secular realm.
- [01:02:55.030]So I think we overlooked these spaces,
- [01:02:58.570]thought they must be one purpose and apolitical.
- [01:03:03.450]But when we delve into
- [01:03:06.590]what goes on there, we discover, I think,
- [01:03:08.850]a whole new facet of political culture.
- [01:03:12.570]And it's really exciting.
- [01:03:14.590]Thank you.
- [01:03:17.050]Yeah, thank you. Lovely to see you.
- [01:03:19.230]All right. We have about five minutes.
- [01:03:22.930]So maybe one or two more questions.
- [01:03:26.350]Let's see. Students, leap forward here.
- [01:03:30.390]I'm going to look around my boxes.
- [01:03:32.890]Who's got the next question?
- [01:03:36.570]Just jump right in.
- [01:03:57.873]Okay. Well, while you're thinking,
- [01:04:00.410]I'll invite Professor Sinegal-DeCuir from
- [01:04:06.550]From Xavier University, who's on our call.
- [01:04:10.630]Professor Sinegal-DeCuir, do you have...
- [01:04:12.970]Do you have a question you'd like to jump in with?
- [01:04:15.410]Welcome. We're glad you're here.
- [01:04:16.950]Thank you. Thank you for having me.
- [01:04:19.470]I actually do not have a question.
- [01:04:21.470]I've been listening to all of the conversations
- [01:04:23.750]and I haven't had a chance to read the book,
- [01:04:25.410]but I just finished up a chapter
- [01:04:27.730]that's going to be published, I believe, next semester
- [01:04:31.690]about Black women and democracy.
- [01:04:34.250]So I'm very in tune
- [01:04:36.814]to all of the conversations
- [01:04:38.330]and the discussions that were going on today.
- [01:04:41.130]So I just found it very enlightening,
- [01:04:43.610]but I don't have any questions at the moment.
- [01:04:45.670]I'm just excited.
- [01:04:47.700]I'll say thank you in advance for the work
- [01:04:51.050]because one of the stories of this book
- [01:04:54.970]is that it is published in the fall of 2020,
- [01:04:59.650]very much pegged to the anniversary
- [01:05:04.050]of the 19th Amendment.
- [01:05:06.510]And there's no way I could have anticipated
- [01:05:10.550]how Black women voting rights at the polls
- [01:05:16.070]and more would be such a critical facet
- [01:05:21.270]of our struggles as a democracy
- [01:05:27.090]in that election cycle and going forward.
- [01:05:31.270]I was very lucky to be able to,
- [01:05:34.370]when we released the
- [01:05:36.490]paperback edition to write a new preface
- [01:05:40.330]that sort of brought things up to date
- [01:05:44.670]because I know you'll remember
- [01:05:47.570]and others of us will too,
- [01:05:50.090]that in August of 2020,
- [01:05:54.110]when then Senator Harris accepts the Democratic nomination,
- [01:05:59.130]she invokes the women of Vanguard
- [01:06:02.070]to explain who she is and how she came to be.
- [01:06:06.470]As now a candidate
- [01:06:10.230]for vice president of the United States,
- [01:06:12.650]I'd say, but I can remember,
- [01:06:13.790]I don't always remember, there's six.
- [01:06:15.790]There's Mary McLeod Bethune,
- [01:06:17.530]Shirley Chisholm.
- [01:06:19.850]Shirley Chisholm.
- [01:06:21.650]Constance Baker Motley,
- [01:06:24.850]Oh, help me.
- [01:06:27.410]Fannie Lou Hamer, is that right?
- [01:06:29.030]Fannie Lou Hamer is in there.
- [01:06:29.890]Yeah, there are two more.
- [01:06:31.630]But it's extraordinary, right?
- [01:06:34.710]It's an extraordinary moment
- [01:06:36.450]when we see Kamala Harris
- [01:06:40.590]really giving the nation a lesson
- [01:06:43.010]in political history, a new lesson in political history,
- [01:06:46.450]one that I think many folks
- [01:06:49.450]were not as conversant in as they might have been.
- [01:06:51.990]So I think this is part of our work going forward.
- [01:06:56.390]And I very much look forward
- [01:06:57.810]to your chapter, Professor.
- [01:07:00.070]Yeah, the title of it is
- [01:07:02.670]Black Women, Backbone of Democracy.
- [01:07:05.990]And so just kind of going back to the history
- [01:07:09.550]as far back as Sojourner Truth
- [01:07:11.650]and her speech in Ohio that she gave
- [01:07:16.150]and all of the other women that were after her
- [01:07:18.850]and the importance of voting.
- [01:07:20.490]And then I even talked about how that voting,
- [01:07:24.810]when we think about the suffragist right
- [01:07:28.150]and how voting was so different
- [01:07:30.810]for African-American women
- [01:07:32.190]and also the suffragists,
- [01:07:33.530]because then it was, is it gender?
- [01:07:36.110]Or is it color?
- [01:07:37.050]And that's the thing that Black women
- [01:07:39.130]have also had to struggle with,
- [01:07:41.310]the two: gender and color.
- [01:07:43.650]And even in the civil rights movement,
- [01:07:45.390]it was not about color,
- [01:07:46.810]but then it was about gender and their leadership. So it was always a battle,
- [01:07:50.750]but they always were steadfast
- [01:07:53.370]and trying to fight for democracy,
- [01:07:55.390]but not just for themselves, but for everyone.
- [01:07:57.770]And so the chapter kind of talks
- [01:07:59.810]and looks at all of the intricacies
- [01:08:01.930]that's going on with gender and race as well
- [01:08:06.390]in the African-American community
- [01:08:07.690]as well as outside of it.
- [01:08:09.450]Yeah, well, hear, hear to that.
- [01:08:12.290]You know, the title of my book,
- [01:08:14.910]Vanguard, is premised in this view
- [01:08:20.410]of Black women as always having championed
- [01:08:24.890]the most capacious view
- [01:08:26.890]of the American body politic
- [01:08:29.170]and having done that alone
- [01:08:31.610]for many, many generations.
- [01:08:36.370]So thank you so much for that.
- [01:08:38.690]We look forward to it.
- [01:08:39.870]Great.
- [01:08:41.370]Thank you.
- [01:08:42.910]Thank you, Professor Jones.
- [01:08:45.130]And I think we're going to wrap up
- [01:08:47.870]our discussion and our webinar.
- [01:08:50.390]And I'd invite Elodie
- [01:08:52.730]to bring us to a conclusion here.
- [01:08:55.650]Elodie, are you on?
- [01:08:56.970]Yes, I'm here. So first, thank you very much,
- [01:09:01.490]Professor Martha Jones,
- [01:09:02.650]but also Dr. Thomas, Dr. Jagadinsky,
- [01:09:05.050]and Dr. Jones for,
- [01:09:06.210]for this conversation.
- [01:09:07.490]It's been an honor to have you on here
- [01:09:10.210]and we're so grateful for your time
- [01:09:12.270]and appreciate the way that your projects
- [01:09:14.670]are laying the foundation
- [01:09:16.210]for the questions that we're asking
- [01:09:18.030]at the U.S. Law and Race Initiative.
- [01:09:19.810]I also want to take the time
- [01:09:22.090]to thank our audience for watching and sending me the questions
- [01:09:25.110]and to the U.S. Law and Race Team
- [01:09:28.790]for the support during the webinar.
- [01:09:30.890]You can learn more about what we're doing
- [01:09:33.830]at the U.S. Law and Race Initiative
- [01:09:35.310]at uslawandrace.unl.edu.
- [01:09:39.110]Additional information about our event series, as well as
- [01:09:42.510]YouTube videos of our past events
- [01:09:44.650]and webinars are posted at
- [01:09:46.750]events.unl.edu/uslawandrace
- [01:09:50.810]And the last thing,
- [01:09:52.550]we're thrilled to announce our next webinar
- [01:09:54.670]that will be next week on April 18,
- [01:09:56.990]same time from 9.30 to 10.45 a.m. Central Time.
- [01:10:01.110]Once again, you can join
- [01:10:03.150]our American Constitutional History class
- [01:10:05.650]for a discussion with guest speaker, Professor Alicia Gutierrez-Romine,
- [01:10:10.110]who is the author of
- [01:10:11.670]From Black Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California,
- [01:10:15.030]from 1920 to 1969.
- [01:10:17.290]So thank you all again for being here
- [01:10:19.870]and have a great rest of your day.
- [01:10:21.750]See you all next week.
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