quick military victory is. anvictory. and the problems identified whether it was iraq or afghanistan or somalia or haiti or others is once we had achieved military victory, we then changed our mission and we then decided to try to move to bring democracy to. ..

>> and our new digital community during unprecedented times and as always our event schedule appears on our website you can sign up for newsletter and browse from home we will have time for questions if you have a question at any time click on a q&a button we will allow as much as time allows your purchases and financial contribution make event late tonight a possible and ensure the landmark possible thank you for tuning in to support our staff we appreciate your support now and always also technical issues may arise we will do our best to resolve

them quickly and we thank you for your patience and understanding i am pleased to introduce tonight speaker professor martha jones professor of history at johns hopkins and the co- president and her work has been recognized by the organization of american historians american society for history and numerous scholarships including the columbia university's center for critical analysis and pennsylvania law school those including the color line along with the museum and the smithsonian am portrait gallery in african-american history as well as netflix among others and has been published in the atlantic and the "washington post" among many others coeditor of the intellectual history of black

women and a multi- award-winning book a history of race tonight professor joey and jones as joan joined by hannah jones in the 2020 winner of the pulitzer for her essay in the 1619 project discussing professor jones brand-new book published today, vanguard "the new york times" call professor jones the exorbitant greater as an elegant and expansive history those seeking political power with a could in a national book award-winning author said she is a historian of african-american story and this is the struggle for political power all americans would be better off to learn this history we are so happy

to have them here tonight the digital podium is yours. >> thank you for the introduction we are so honored to be here tonight with doctor jones who might admire so much as a scholar and a black woman has been supportive of my work over the last year i am so excited to get into this talk so thank you for inviting me on publication day. >> am happy to be here with you. >> so i will start with a pretty simple question why did you decide to write this book and why did you title it vanguard? >> the idea for this book came

precisely because i knew the 10h anniversary of the 19th amendment was coming and a story about a proposed monument in central park that would celebrate elizabeth cady stanton and susan b anthony was circulating saying that we were in danger to enter into the anniversary year overlooking black women quite literally so i thought this is time to put together three generations of black women historians and to offer up one volume that would permit all of us to fully appreciate the role of black women played in political culture. >> vanguard started as the notion this is the book filled

with black women first and breaking barriers and shattering ceilings and that is absolutely true. as i began to reflect what i was finding a realized that first it was a core principle that women had arrived at 200 years ago and carried forward to our own time that america's politics should have no place for racism and sexism. when i recognized how long they had championing that view in a realized how long they had been alone to carry that forward to set that ideal in front of us they realized they were the intellectual and political vanguard showing the country to the very best ideals. >> thank you i should've said this when i started but

welcome to everyone who is joining us tonight and please feel free to put your questions in the box and we will get to them at the end of the talk. you open with the story of your ancestor, a woman born into slavery in kentucky. i'm interested in the power to use a personal memoir to tell the stories of the people so can you tell us about your great great great great grandmother and also this personal story of the women's fight for equality. >> i also want to say thank you to harvard bookstore for hosting us. i work in an office i'm sitting at home now and on the wall are portraits are my foremothers including my great

great great grandmother. when i work a very aware i am accountable to them and everything that i do and i became so conscious in fact writing about the history of women's suffrage i didn't know where they fit all my interest in them never had a chance to ask them where they were in 1920. of course nancy wasn't living than that her daughter and great-granddaughter were all alive and in places like kentucky and north carolina and missouri. but i didn't know what they were doing but i realized before i was done with the book i would have to speak to those stories and let those stories guide me to tell what i think is a uniquely black

perspective on voting rights. >> are you saying you didn't know they are involvement prior to beginning the research? >> no i didn't. >> that must've been an amazing discovery. >> it was amazing but it was tough because they were things i wanted to know that i could not learn i was trying to find my own grandmother in the 19 twenties i tried in missouri and in north carolina later in the twenties and the records were just not there and i really thought i struck out frankly for a historian is devastating. the one thing you thank you know how to do it at the archives. but nobody valued these records we might use to

recover black women's first row in the 19 twenties but then i got lucky and they stumbled onto an interview she gave in 1978. she and my grandfather for many years there is a black women's school in north carolina and greensboro where they lived was fabled for students it ends but in the course of the interview she talks about voting rights but not 1920 at all. but 18 fifties because the 19 fifties and 19 sixties because the story was women who wed knock on doors and do that work to get black americans on the voter rolls. and that was the story she

would have me tell so the book comes through 1965 which is a think it should arrive back with the voting rights act that those like my grandmother get the vot vote. >>host: we will come back to that but the fact that she wanted to talk about 55 versus 1920 is the reason why the book exist but when did you know you word include the memoir of this personal story at the beginning of your book? and why as a historian? >> a long time ago i went to law school and i was trained by people in the field of critical race theory and one

of the things they made into legal scholarship was to give us the latitude when we couldn't find our own narrative to introduce stuff through our own storytelling so in some ways my training from a long time ago gave me a sense why it's important we use our own stories. of course you have done this so beautifully in your essay in your project giving us his vantage point on the history of this country but it was definitely a departure for me because and my wonderful beloved advisor and thought

maybe i didn't have the distance to write about my family so it took me a lot of years to come back around to admire and to be loving and compassionate as im but also know how to teach bigger lessons as a way to use them to be my approach to a book so people tell me if i am successful or not but it is a departure for me but it was important. >>host: i would agree as a trained journalist most of my career i also writing about myself or my family because journalism should tell the story of others and as i have

moved on in my career it speaks to the fact when you are a black woman writing about history, these are our stories. there is in that same distance sometimes people could have when writing about american history. so moving on to the politics of writing a black history in particular and how we know the black women's role of organizing is critical because our work has the man of our own raise if we were fighting alongside so this is one of the many cases where history is so instructive as they are fighting for male suffrage as well as fighting for white

women's rights and suffrage and then to be sidelined as people were marginalized with churches and antislavery movements and then you have the illuminating passage that james was reporting on the women's suffrage blamed black women for introducing the color question and you told her that was not the rights of color and all together to introduce this question and said black women's not be seeking to aspire to the level of their own class to take a black woman's place. in fact you write about to use that in a metaphorical way

when black women were an actual slavery and to talk about sojourner truth push back and said iam women's rights. but what's fascinating about that is we clearly see today black women still see themselves fighting off racism and sexism and still fighting ourselves into those corners and you talk about the suffragist monument with new york city where black women were literally written out of that. so talk about those lessons from history and that original existential fight women have to engage in and how they have to deal with political power today. >> one of the things that

quotation reminds us of is the way in which the presence, the bodily presence of black women in a gathering in a conference or the public square, seems to have people that sojourner truth is speaking narrowly and specifically about racism but to read her own words we recognize she is deeply invested in the question what does it mean to be a woman for her how does a woman like her fit into a movement that is framed around women's rights so the reflections are the way

the very presence of a black woman those who don't hear what i hear in the women throughout vanguard who say ye yes, we are here to claim our political power and exercise our political right, but we come to do that in the interest in this is the word i did not expect but in all humanity. i would see that again and again and it becomes clear is not like extraordinary ambitious political ambition but to encompass all americans and in those moments but also as they come to speak about themselves as a parochial and

inward looking way. that is trouble for black women that runs through vanguard and we look at those examples in our own time for those who cannot hear the words of the black women political leaders and assume they know the message. >> it is like reading those internal arguments and discussions that are still going on today and i think about how often even today the women's movement really struggled to incorporate the fact how people can be black and the woman. it's women and black people we seem to say we will be one or the other and then the silent white in front of women and that it was the inability that would derail the women's march and then to resolve the

tensions to say we have to deal with more than discrimination based on gender and sex. i talked about this when we did the event but the way in my mind is that though white women and saying if they were elected that you race the struggles of black women and other marginalized groups of women that somehow this one woman and not donald trump or in the office that would it be a need to march in protest for people's rights. so talk about how black women have generationally been expected to turn off identity and oppression to focus on race and gender when clearly we are compelled to focus on both.

>> for me, the moment that always comes to mind when we talk about this between barack obama and hillary clinton which if it was a contest between white women and black men as if there were no black women in the body of politics and it was that black women stepped to the podium but it has to be dispelled recently but i will take us back to the 18 sixties with that iconic moment in history of the women's suffrage even after the civil war and the coalition of women's rights activist and abolitionist coming back together to chart out there future politically

in response to abolition and citizenship and that process of voting rights in the 15th amendment that story has been told and continues to be told it is a face-off between white women like elizabeth cady stanton that calls for educated suffrage which is white women suffrage on one hand and then on the other hand frederick douglass who says the vote is a matter of life and death for black men. what about the black women that were in the meetings and were on the record? we have their thoughts francis ellen harper one of my most beloved figures from this book she not only speaks but has a different political philosophy to put on the table and we're all bound up together in

humanity it really says it's not the elizabeth cady stanton narrow view but in fact as a black woman because i'm at the crossroads of racism and sexism women like me should be at the center because the coalition manages to lift me up we are all lifted up politically and empowered. but my point is that story is often told to vilify white women or black men. but in both instances it is a story told as if the women were not there in fact francis harper fought off both stanton and douglas she spoke about

violence and sexual violence and the specific plate of african-american women in the country and in the face of freedom and the struggle around citizenship. she doesn't get the hearing she might in that meeting, but her ideas leave a legacy that will pick up and work through even through today. >> you also quote her to say that white right on - - white women speak of rights and black women speak of wrongs. i appreciate you bringing up the primary with barack obama facing off with hillary clinton because i interviewed a lot of black women during the next presidential primary when and hillary clinton was running to replace barack

obama and they spoke about how painful it was to make that choice what they felt they knew both of them were qualified for president but having to choose race over gender and clearly black women chose their race and they felt they had to vindicate that split by supporting hillary clinton and i heard that again and again a chance to redeem that we had to split ourselves. and that struggle how can that be resolved in this country built on the foundation of which it was built? >> i wish i knew. [laughter] but i will tell you what i think. becoming a regular part of black women's political narrative and discourse in the

race of 2008 takes that moment at the podium to articulate for the uninitiated and what her own political trajectory has been we watch senator harris do that a few weeks ago at the convention as a way to help democrats understand how she comes to be there in the american political history we know too little about black women's politics so there is that group that black women still carry to help them to look at their bodies intelligently when they are at the podium. at the same time as folks have branded me too often i will

tell you what i think. i am ready to the dispense with the black women first analysis if we call it that. that is to say the most interesting thing about kamala harris she's the first black woman to be nominated in the first major party et cetera et cetera more interesting is black women have emerged as a force she was one of six on the short list because black women were more than prepared to step into that moment when there was the election cycle and a candidate and a party it turned out there were at least six that we could name and many others who could have been on the short list. 120 black women running for

congress it is a record shattering number in 2020. so what we see now is the force of women and politics and people asked me how do we vote? finally to tune in and i appreciate to study black women and how they made politics for a very long time but today to turn out and disproportionate number numbers, and to be voting of consequence and prepared of the state and local legislatures doing the business of this country i hope this is a year where folks find that necessary. i tried to write a book how we

got here. but i would go so far as to say that the history reminds us black women have shown up even in the darkest and most dire moments the height the jim crow lynching and more and they show up for this country now in 2020 i don't think we will pull back whatever the outcome of the election in november and that's here to stay.

is that to optimistic? >> i'm not an optimistic person. [laughter] but i think what you are arguing is a fact. you're not saying what the outcome will be but what what black women organizing have accomplished in that framing that you talk about of course it is so important because black women pretty much made it impossible for joe biden not to take a black woman as president so the amount of organizing to say it's not okay just to commit to a woman and needs to be a black woman because they had been the most loyal constituency for the democratic party. and when you think of the democratic principles that

black women promote and believe and vote for the highest race and yet are often used to win elections and are forgotten about and then to say to keep showing up for you so that is a great framing and we shouldn't think about it because it doesn't come out of nowhere those that make sure so one of the things that i was not aware of is that relationship with the antislavery movement and the women's rights movement are born of the antislavery movement so talk about that. >> on the one hand there was a

predominant story that situate the political awakening of their own inequalities for white american women with their engagements of antislavery organizing and by the 18 thirties. >> what was it? >> partly as strategy of the abolitionist movement demanded the end of slavery but earlier it works through persuasion i do with that you win people over by transforming hearts and minds. women are considered vulnerable and susceptible to american culture and families as a way for transformation to think it through.

white middle-class women are very much the target of the abolitionist rhetoric and organizing women who have read history and their own families are lives of their political life to be called controversial but to the podium and pick up the pen and the thinking he falls as white women began to see themselves and their own expression of enslaved people. some say that slavery of sex. it's important to say it is very unusual to find a black

woman who picks up slavery as a metaphor as part of the legacy that free women are living through and for them to borrow slavery as a metaphor so that's one piece but also in vanguard the black woman story begins much earlier before anti- slavery and before black churches in literary associations or interventions into race and civil rights work in the free

states in the north even before we get the radical antislavery movement black women are developing the critical intellectual foundation as women who speak at the podium. they already by the time they get to anti- slavery to have a critique in hand that says no racism no sexism in american politics. that is where the bars sits the principle to which they will work. and is not one of anti- slavery or society embraces but it is an even with white women's ideas of what a political future might look like or elizabeth stanton

always always working by that hierarchy to place white educated women in a different strata than black women even those who are free and educated themselves. i don't think the black women's origins really are anti- slavery work, but they come to that work already with a critique in hand. >>host: we will open to questions in about seven minutes. please feel free to enter them in the q&a box. so to talk about the 19th amendment because obviously this is the 100th anniversary which gave women the constitutional right to vote but that came with a huge *.

you said you are not celebrating the 19th amendment this year and i would love for you to talk about what it did and did not do for women and why this is not a moment of celebration for use. >> the good news is i am a historian. i certainly see the celebration and i declined with the 19th amendment history takes on the problems and the ways of which of anti- black racism runs through and is one of the underlying logics that permits the 19th amendment to be ratified and what do i need in a campaign for the 19th amendment rest to an important degree on the

exclusion black women and the marginalization. why? because it is leadership only way to succeed is winning the support of white southern women and their husbands ratification on the federal amendment that jettisons black suffragist. is not enough to point to the dynamics but then to look at the record of congress or state legislatures we recognize the way in which antiblack racism come in fact nothing in the 19th amendment will interfere with the capacity of the individual state to use jim crow laws or poll taxes to get black women from the polls and when tennessee ratified the

amendment does so it is open the understood tennessee does not have to include black women it can use its own laws now to regard black women as they do black men to disenfranchise the them. this is not a moment to celebrate it is a landmark it does have meaning in the lives of black women of the long history of voting rights in the united states there are black women even in some southern jurisdictions voting after 1920. i want to leave the impression there is nothing remarkable about the moment. there is. but at the same time, sitting 2021 in a historical moment where as a country we are grappling with the question how on earth did we get here?

racism and white supremacy still contaminate too much of politics and culture, one answer lies in the bargain in 1920 that did not take on jim crow in the interest of women's votes or for women's votes instead left it in tact the left black women and men to create a new campaign for voting rights that takes 35 years through 1965. that is the raw material for celebration even if i deeply admire the black women who waged that fight before and after 1920 just not a moment i can celebrate.

>>host: i say all the time it seems to be so inconvenient to be up with the narrative and then to have that so often we have to be brave with the story of black americans and raise the way white americans have consistently been willing to compromise the right of black americans to meet their own agenda. so i will just ask you one more question. but i cannot leave the conversation of talking about some of my favorite parts of vanguard is black women journalists and then my

spiritual grandmother i had the walls so talk about black women in particular and the role they played in the struggle for women's rights along with the obstacles that they faced. >> there is nothing easy or straightforward about being a black woman journalist but being and editor owning and running a newspaper and then she disguises her identity and is convinced readers will not buy a newspaper that is led by a woman. and that is an ongoing challenge for black women journalists and editors. at the same time to say too much on the way in which and

in particular the crossroads to unit them together across space and time and i have to tell you but it is a crossroads and incredibly dynamic and when at the helm we can recover the way they shape the debate what is in and what is out and you have a women's rights and suffrage and as a journalist and 18 fifties thinking very hard

what it means to transform the relationship of women to antislavery politics i knew if i spent too much time on wells she would take over the book and you know why because she is a journalist but a social scientist and an advocate and a lobbyist i of her pen or the tongue is sharper but that combination is remarkable but that also means she wins admirers and detractors because her extraordinary the brand of black womanhood is provocative and runs counter

to fill the ideas of the relative subordination. so the last thing i would say on this is these women with the pen or the printing press they leave their own records for us. just couldn't be a history of the heavy handed historians interpretation of the past it is plat past that insisted that they understood to analyze and those that are so

it is an honor to come back to that to help distill that for readers and dispel the rat we can't write black women's history. but we have to be willing to talk about the past. >> talk about the platform that was shut out of other avenues to organize and

single-handedly put lynching on the map as a issue but newspapers were transferable to pass it on to someone else and pass it to someone else and there was so much power for whom they were not allowed to be literate black armed women newspapers created that written record. so i appreciate that part of your book and then to further explore the women to read the biographies and their interest will be peaked so we will go to q&a i didn't realize you

were trained and critical race theory so can you define that because obviously the right has just discovered this is clear they have no idea what critical race theory is and if you could justifying it and the question is what do you think about the comment diversity training is un-american talking about critical race theory. >> yes. i will dispense with the latter part. [laughter] that is a rhetorical question

so un-american and who knows nothing about american history. but to emerge of legal scholars in the 1980s who are looking to take stock of the civil rights era of what civil rights did not accomplish so these are folks who observe despite the purging of race and racism discrimination and inequality persist so that

begins on trying to answer the question how does that inequality persist despite working toward that a deal in the united states? the work is to understand better the language like race and racism or prettied up for lawyers and judges in the united states it looks to history to restore to legal thinking the histories that have been whitewashed and overlooked and it looks at the biographies in the treatise with the biographies and the

politics of principal actors in the school of thought of what scholarship might be it is this moment legal scholars of color and the casebook in open to the storytelling in the narrative and the autobiography steadying in the 18 eighties one - - in the 1980s that is artful and powerful combining of the stories of their own family and history of slavery and how those animate in the 20th

century that's how it begins with the sociologist now i feel like i'm giving you a seminar it is a companion that reef a on - - reframes race to become those that and is constructed in other realms of american society critical race theory why does racism persist? that is not a normal or provocative question and then

we asked that question going back 30 years. branded more pessimistic and intractable in the united states and with those keys to undoing that problem. >> to keep racism at bay with that vigilance extraordinary effort and commitment and that formula and the analysis and the promise in that

eradication of racism but i do believe we can minimize that to keep it at bay even if those that are prepared to exploit that the american life and politics sorry to say racism will be a permanent feature and we learn better how to keep that at bay. >> does this come through in vanguard with sexual violence or financial limitations.

but that threat that runs that runs through vanguard's sexual violence. and one thing i never expected to discover from the 18 fifties forward all the way to the modern civil rights era activists come to narrate their experiences with sexual violence nowhere else that is more acute that francis harper talks about what it's like to be a black woman lecturer writing streetcars in railroads you know i wells

story but every woman that i write about has a story to be accosted and denigrated harper comes to put this on the table but it goes to the core of how black women understand their vulnerabilities and it works to keep this out of ladies cars so it is witness to the denigration and that they do nothing because evil and someone speaking up when they are accosted on the street car.

and then to cheer on conductors. and that is a area where the movement with the old and vicious thread of politics and that question of with the threat of sexual violence how that is defined for white women heard and part of that participation is the need to define themselves a black women heard which is another

topic that's all the questions we have from the audience there is anything else you would like to add before we close out? to be here with me and take us through the history how to think hard and for that immediate future is on the horizon that we write about that this is the season with the ground game with american politics to be as arduous that is the best way to honor them in the season and thinks to

the harvard bookstore for hosting us tonight. >> thank you for your work and you can close it out thank you for coming. >> this is a wonderful conversation and to all of you out there who spent your evening with us there were a lot of questions we appreciate all of them you can learn more about this at harvard.com be well. . . . .