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>> good evening, everyone and welcome. thank you for joining us tonight. my name is hilary carr and on behalf of harvard bookstore i'm pleased to introduce this event with professor martha jones presented her brand-new book "vanguard: how black women broke barriers, won the vote, and insisted on equality for all" joining conversation by nikole hannah-jones. thank you for joining us virtually tonight. events like to our books are confused to bring authors and their work to our community and her new digital community through these unprecedented times. we will be hosting are on our account or our event schedule. on a website@harbor.com/events we can sign up for our e-mail newsletter. this discussion will conclude with time for your questions. you have a question -- if you have questions adding time during the talk dick on the q&a button at the bottom of the screen and will get to as many as time allows. i will be posting a link to purchase "vanguard" as both a link to donate.

your purchases and financial contributions make events like tonight as possible and helps ensure the future of landmark independent bookstore. thank you for showing up and turning it in support of our authors and in-q-tel staff. we sincerely appreciate your support now and always. finally as you make spirit in virtual gatherings is less you must technical issues may arise. if they do will do our best to resolve them quickly and we thank you again for your patience and understanding. so now i'm so pleased introduced tonight speakers. professor martha jones is a society of black alumni for presidential press are in place of history johns hopkins university and the copresident of the virtual conference of women historians. her work is been recognized by the american council of learned societies, the american society for legal history and the national community center and she's of numerous fellowships including with the columbia university center for analysis of social difference and the university of pennsylvania law school. her writing has appeared in

reframing the color line and the smithsonian national portrait gallery and the charles wright museum of african american history as well as in work by pbs and netflix among others and also been published in the "washington post," the atlantic among many others. she is also the co-editor of history of black women on the author bound up together, and the multi-award-winning birthright citizens of race and rights. tonight she will be joined by nikole hannah-jones, correspondent for the "new york times" magazine and 2020 when the pulitzer prize and commentary for essay in the 1619 project. they will discuss our brand-new book published today "vanguard: how black women broke barriers, won the vote, and insisted on equality for all" the "new york times" called her and absorbing

scholar, a history of black women who sought to go political power where they could and national book award-winning author said martha jones is the political history of african-american women in this book is the commanding history of the remarkable struggle of african-american women for political power, all americans would be better off learning this history and just how much we owe it quality than carpet were happy to have them both your tonight so without further ado the digital podium is yours, martha and nicole. >> thank you so much for the introduction and just so honored to beer tonight with dr. jones whom i admire so much both as a scholar and as a black woman in someone who has been so supportive of my work over the last year. so this book is very much a dogeared right now, and i am so glad to get into this talk, so thank you for inviting me and happy publication date.

>> thank you, no call. good to be with you. >> let's just start with a pretty simple question. why did you decide to write this book and why did you title this book "vanguard"? >> the idea for this book came for such because i knew the 100th 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment was coming, and a story about a proposed monument in central park, one that would celebrate elizabeth cady stanton and susan b. anthony was circulating. this set to me that we were in danger perhaps of entering into this anniversary year and overlooking black women quite literally. so it was time i thought to try and pull together three generations of black women's historians work and to offer up

one volume that would really permit all of us to fully appreciate the role black women have played in political culture. "vanguard" started as as a notn that this was a book that would be filled black women first, black women breaking berries, shattering ceilings and that's absolutely true. but as a really begin to reflect on what i was finding i realized that first it was a core principle that black women had really arrived at 200 yours ago at the beginning of the 19th century and had carried forward really until our own time. and this was the idea that american politics should have no place for racism and sexism. when a recognize how long black women had been championing that view, when i realized how long

they had been alone in sort of carrying that forward and setting that ideal in front of us, i realized that they were indeed an intellectual and political vanguard showing this country to its very best ideals. >> thank you. i should've said this when i first started, but welcome to everyone who is joining us tonight, and please feel free to put your questions in the q&a box and we will get to them at the end of our talk today. dr. jones compu open book with a story about your ancestor, nnacy belle graves, a woman who was born into slavery in 1808 in danville, kentucky. i am interested in the power of using personal memoir to tell these national stories and the stories of people. can you tell us about your great, great, great grandmother and her descendents and how starting this book with a

personal story with these women's fight for equality? >> i also want to say thanks to harvard bookstore for hosting us. i work in an office. i'm sitting at home working in my office now, and on the welcome you all can see, our portraits of my foremothers including a great, great, great grandmother, nnacy belle graves. when i work i am very aware that i am accountable to them in everything i do. and i became so conscious in fact, that is writing this book about women suffrage and he really didn't know where they fit. for all my interest in them and all my thinking about them i i have never had a chance to ask him about with the war in 1920. of course nancy belle graves is no longer living in but her daughter, her granddaughter and a great-granddaughter are all alive in 1920, black women in

places like kentucky and north carolina and missouri. and he did know what they were doing. but i realized before i was done with the book i was going to have to dig for those stories and let the stories help guide me to tell what i think is a uniquely black women's perspective on political rights and voting rights. >> are you saying that you didn't know their involvement in this work prior to beginning the research of this book? >> no, i didn't. >> that must've been an amazing discovery. >> it was amazing except it was also tough because there were things i wanted to know that i couldn't learn. i was particularly trying to find my own grandmother in the 1920s, and a trite in missouri where she lived in 1920, later in greensboro and north carolina

where she lived later in the 20s and the records just were not there. i really thought i had struck out frankly which for his story is a devastating thing. one thing you think you know how to do is hit the archives and answer your questions. but no one had valued those kind of records that we might use to recover black women's first votes in the 1920s. i got lucky and i stumbled onto an interview that she gave in 1978. she and my grandfather had for many years run a place, and black women's school in north carolina and greensboro where you lived, you know, fabled in civil rights history for student sit ins. the interview was about that but in the course of the interview she talked about voting rights. she doesn't talk about 1920 at all. she talked about the 1950s and

the 1960s because for her the story, a brilliant story, is about young women who began to knock on doors or register voters, to that arduous and dangerous work of getting black americans on the voting rolls in the '50s and '60s. that was the story she would have me tell, and so this book comes all the way to 1965 which is where i think it aptly should arrive at because it is with the voting rights act in that year that black southerners like my grandmother unequivocally get to vote. >> we'll come back to that but the fact that she wanted to talk about 1965 and the '60s as 60s as opposed the 1920, the speaks to the reason this book exists in many ways but we will come back. when did you know that you are going to include this memoir,

this personal story at the beginning of your book? why do you think as a historian this was a good tool to use? >> a long time ago i went to law school, and i was trained by people in the field of critical race theory. one of the interventions that critical race three made into legal scholarship was to surface the word i, and to give us the latitude to, when we didn't find her own narratives in casebooks, to introduce us to her own storytelling. so in some ways my training from a long time ago had already given me a sense of why how they can be important to use our own stories. of course you've done this so beautifully in your essay to the

1619 project, introducing as to your father and giving us his vantage point on the history of this country and the stakes in the history. but it was definitely a departure for me because i, like very first paper in graduate school had been about my family, and the wonderful advisor, i beloved advisor eric taught me the word hagiography. maybe i didn't quite have the distance to write about my family. so we does take me a lot of years to come back around and to have a voice that is admiring and loving and compassionate as i am to the women who come before me but also knows how to teach bigger lessons about them. it's not family for families sake is budget is using them as the way into my approach to a book.

readers will tell if i'm successful or not, but it definitely was a departure for me but i think was an important one. >> i would agree, and as a trained journalist who practice journalism for almost two decades, most of my career, i also was writing about myself with helmet because journalists should be telling the stories of others. a transition somewhat as a moved on in my career and i think it speaks to the fact that when you're a black woman writing about this history, these are our stories. there is in that same type of distance sometimes of the people can have when you're writing about american history. i want to move on to the politics of writing, black women's history in particular, and we know about the black women's roles in movements and resistant and organizing is critical because our work has

been -- by white society but also by the men of her own race fighting alongside. this is one of the many cases where history is so instructive because black women were being accused of derailing the fight for black male suffrage as well as being accused of derailing the fight for white women's rights and suffrage. you catalog how they were sidelined at color, people of convention, it was suspicion and marginalized to try to take leadership roles in churches and antislavery movement. then you have this will aluminate passage about a reporter back on women suffrage and rights convention. she blamed black women for introducing the color question. you called her as writing the convention was not called to discuss the rights of color. we think it was altogether irrelevant and unwise to introduce this question.

she basically said black women should not be seeking to aspire more than to raise to the love of the own class, which is to say in a black women's place. in fact, you write about how white women at the time like to aspersion themselves as wacom to use in the metaphorical way while literally black women were enduring actual slavery and people like sojourner truth pushed back against that and she said i am women's right. what's fascinating about that is we clearly to say today that black women are still find themselves fighting out both racism and sexism and still finding ourselves and into those same corners. you talk about the suffrage is a monument that was being proposed for new york city where black women were quite literally written out of that. can you talk about those lessons

from history and that original intersectional fight that black women had to engage in and out that is instructive in how black women have to do with political power today? >> one of the things that the gene quote reminds us of is the way in which the presence, like the bodily presence of black women in a political gathering, in a conference, in the public square somehow seems to deprive folks of the ability to actually hear the words or read their words. there's this disjunction, right, that sojourner truth is sort of

speaking narrowly and specifically and consistently about racism when, in fact, when we read her own words we recognize she is deeply invested in the question of who is a woman, what does it mean to be a woman to her, how does a woman like her fit into a movement that is framed around women's rights? part of my reflection is the way in which the very presence of a black woman some outputs cotton in the ears of listeners, who don't hear what i hear in the women throughout "vanguard" who say yes, we are here to claim our political power, we are here to exercise our political rights. but we have come to do that in the interests of -- and this would i didn't expect -- we come to do this in the interest of all humanity. we see that again and again, and it becomes clear, right, that is not that black women don't have

extraordinary ambitions political vision. right, that encompasses all americans and international moments, the whole globe but also we can imagine black women have come to speak about themselves in some parochial or inward looking way. that is trouble for black women that runs through "vanguard," and i think he can point to examples in her own time of folks who can't really hear the words of black women political leaders and assume they know the message because they read the person. >> yes. reading some of this it is like reading an internal argument,, discussions are still going on today. i think about how often even today the women's movement really struggle to incorporate the fact that people can be

black and a woman. the language is always women and black people, which seems to say we will be one or the other, of inputs a silent white in front of the word women. we know it was kind of inability to have section alley that derailed the women's march, that they were unable to really resolve women of color say we have to do with more than just discrimination based on our gender or sex. and i talked about this when we did that event for the 19th but i just always, what encapsulates it best to my mind is assigned a lot of white women holding during the women's march the said if hillary had gotten elected we would be at brunch right now. which completely erased the struggles of black women and other marginalized groups of women that somehow if this one woman, and not donald trump, were in the office there

wouldn't be a need to do after marching and protesting for people's rights. can you talk about kind of how black women have generationally been expected to kind of turn off critical parts of our identity and oppression that we either have to focus on a race or we had to focus on our gender when clearly we are compelled to focus on both? >> for me the moment that always comes in mind when we talk about this is the primary contest between barack obama and hillary clinton, which partly it was a contest between white women and black men as if there were no black women, no black women in the body politic and it was this very naïve reading that i think black women stepped to the podium, stepped to the blogosphere, stepped to the microphone and more, but it has

to be dispelled recently. i will take us back to the 1860s to an iconic moment in history of women's suffrage, years after the civil war, an old coalition of women's rights activists and abolitionists are coming back together to chart out their future politically in response to slavery abolition citizenship in the 14th amendment and the prospect of black men's voting rights in the 15th amendment. that story has been told. it continues to be told as if it were a face-off between white women as embodied in the figure of elizabeth cady stanton who called for educated suffrage,, which is basically white women suffrage, on on the one hand, d on the other hand, frederick douglass who says the vote is a of life and death for black men. what about the black women who were in those meetings and

accident on the record, we have their voices, we have the thoughts. i invoke always francis harper, what are my beloved figures from this book and she not only speaks. just a different political philosophy to put on the table. she's a poet so eloquent we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, it's a way of saying i am not going to travel with elizabeth cady stanton narrow view nor will i frederick douglass. i think as a black woman because i live at crossroads of racism and sexism. i should be at the center. women like me should be at the center because this coalition manages to lift me up, we will all be lifted up politically. we will all be empowered politically. but my point is that story is often told either to vilify

white women or to vilify black men but in both instances it is a story told that does a kind of violence to black women as if they were not there, as if there were not these ideas. in fact, francis harper comes to face off against both douglas and stanton if you will because she wants to speak about by restriction once to speak about sexual violence. she wants to speak about the specific plight of african-american women in the country and then the face of freedom and in the struggle around citizenship. she doesn't get the hearing that she might in that meeting but her ideas leave a legacy that black women will pick up and work on and work through we could say even intel today. >> you also note how frances harper think white women speak of rights that black women speak of wrongs, , which i thought waa kind of perfect encapsulation.

i really appreciate you bringing up the primary win barack obama was facing off with hillary clinton because i went and interviewed a lot of black women during the next presidential primary when hillary clinton was of course running to replace barack obama. they spoke about how painful it was having to make that choice, what they felt was making a choice between, because they knew both of them are qualified and would make an excellent president, but having to choose their race over their gender clearly black women chose their race and they felt like they had to vindicate though that split by then supporting hillary clinton. i heard that again and again that this is a chance to redeem the fact way to split ourselves. it seems like that struggle, how can the struggle be resolved in

this country built on the foundations upon which it was built? >> i wish i knew, but i'll tell you what i think. one, i think was, becomes a regular part of black women's political narrative, political discourse in the wake of 2008 in taking that moment at the podium to articulate for the uninitiated, how you came to be here and watch her own political trajectory has been. we watched senator harris do that a few weeks ago at the convention. she name check mary mcleod bethune, mary church terrell, shirley chisholm, and more as a way of helping democrats understand how she comes to be there and how she is situate in a very complex american political history that no still

little about black women's politics. it is that burden i think that black women still carry, which is to orient folks and to help them read black women's bodies intelligently rather than ignorantly and there at the podium. at the same time, and folks have branded me perhaps too optimistic but i want to tell you what i think, which is i'm ready to dispense with the black women's first analysis, if we can call it that, which is to say i don't think most interesting thing about kamala harris is a fact that she is the first black woman to be nominated on a major party, et cetera, et cetera. i think what's more interesting is that black women have emerged as a force. it's more interesting she was one of six on bidens long shortlist because black women were more than prepared to step

right into that moment. right, when there was election cycle, and it was a candidate, when there was a party. it turned out they were at least six that we can name, and many others, who could even on the short list. there are more than 120 black women running for congress. it is a record shattering number in 2020, and so my preferred term is forced. that what we see now is the force of black women in politics, and people ask me how should we go vote? one of the recent jet to go vote is finally at might be to tune in and understand, appreciate the study of black women and how black women have made politics a way out of no way for a long time. but today turning out in disproportionate numbers, really being voters of consequence in

tight races, and prepared to sit in washington, not to mention state and local legislatures and do the basis of this country. so i hope this is the year where folks find that necessary, tuning into that necessary, understanding that necessary. i tried to write a book that help at least appreciate the history of how we got here but the real consequence of course is what we're going to do with it. i will go so far as to say while i have an investment in the outcome of this next election, i think all americans do, black women will not go home in november even if things go the wrong way. that the history minds that black women had have shown up n in the darkest, right, even in the most dire moment of this history, at the height of jim crow lynching and more.

black women showed up for this country. they are doing that now in 2020 and i don't have any reason to think that we will pull back whatever the outcome of the election is in november. i think black women as a force is here to stay in american politics. i too optimistic? >> i'm not an optimistic person but i don't think that, i think what you are doing though is actually a fact. i love, you are not saying what the outcome will ultimately be what you are talking about what black women through, are organizing come have accomplished. that's what i do think that framing you just talked about, not talking about first but a force is so important because black women pretty much made it impossible for joe biden i could take a black woman as vice president. i think about the amount of organizing that way behind this to say no, it's not okay to submit to a woman.

it needs to be a black woman because black women have been the most loyal constituency for the democratic party. we have come out at the highest rate and we actually, when you think about what the democratic principles are an democratic, big d and small d, a black women are the ones who promote and believe and vote for the common good at the highest rates and all those things that the democratic party says it stand for, and yet are often used to win election and then forgotten about. i think it is been amazing to see black women come into the power and say this time. you will pick a black woman if you expect us to keep showing up for you. i think that is a great framing and we should think about it more that way because the first didn't come out of nowhere, and the first game because of the organizing of millions of nameless faces, black women who

made sure that this could happen. i wonder if you could talk, one of the things i was not as aware of is the relationship between the antislavery movement in the women's rights movement, now the women's rights movement is kind of board of antislavery movement. i wonder speedy we will eat booktv for bit to bring you live coverage of the georgia briefing on the 2020 vote count with the republican secretary of state after this date republican senators are facing runoff elections called for him to step down. live now from atlanta. [background