Vanguard: Black Women and the Right to Vote
U.S. Law and Race Initiative
Author
09/10/2024
Added
10
Plays
Description
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.
Searchable Transcript
Toggle between list and paragraph view.
- [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.
The screen size you are trying to search captions on is too small!
You can always jump over to MediaHub and check it out there.
- Tags:
- digital history
- history
- law
- legal history
- race
- webinar
- women
- african americans
- voting
- suffrage
- black suffrage
Log in to post comments
Embed
Copy the following code into your page
HTML
<div style="padding-top: 56.25%; overflow: hidden; position:relative; -webkit-box-flex: 1; flex-grow: 1;">
<iframe
style="bottom: 0; left: 0; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; border: 0; height: 100%; width: 100%;"
src="https://mediahub.unl.edu/media/22932?format=iframe&autoplay=0"
title="Video Player: Vanguard: Black Women and the Right to Vote"
allowfullscreen
></iframe>
</div>
Comments
0 Comments