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or@booktv.org. tears history professor martha jones who explores the efforts by black women to win the right to vote. >> good evening, everyone and welcome. thank you for joining us tonight. my name is hilary carr and i'm very pleased to introduce this event with professor martha s. jones presented her brand-new book "vanguard: how black women broke barriers, won the vote, and insisted on equality for all." join a conversation by nikole hannah-jones. thank you for joining us virtually tonight. virtual events tonight we bring authors and the work to our committee at our new digital community through these unprecedented times. we will be hosting events on our account. our event schedule appears on a website@harvard.com/.com/events where you can sign up. this will conclude with time for your questions. after, if you have a question at any time during the talk click on the q&a button at the bottom and will get to as many as time

allows. in the chat i will be posting a link to purchase "vanguard" ." your purchases and financial contributions make events like tonight possible and help ensure the future of the landmark independent bookstore. thank you for showing up into any gain in support of her authors and the incredible staff at harvard bookstore. we appreciate your support now and always. finally, technical issues may arise because the duke we will do our best to resolve them quickly and we thank you again for your patience and understanding. i am so please introduce tonight speakers. professor martha s. jones the society of black alumni presidential professor and professor of history at johns hopkins and the copresident of virtual conference of women historians. her work is been recognized by y the american council of learned societies, the american society for legal history and the national humanities center. she's held numerous scholarships with the columbia university

center for her critical analysis of social difference in the university of pencil lawful content pennsylvania law school. the smithsonian national portrait gallery and the charles wright museum african american history as well as in work by pbs and netflix among others and also been published in the "washington post" among many others. she is the coeditor of history of black women on health of all bound up together. the multi-award-winning. tonight she'll be joined by nikole hannah-jones him, correspond for the "new york times" magazine and the 2020 when of the pulitzer prize in commentary. it will be discussing the brand-new book published today "vanguard: how black women broke barriers, won the vote, and insisted on equality for all."

the "new york times" calls her an assiduous scholar and an absorbent writer describing united states as elegant and expansive history of black women who sought to build political power where they could. national book award-winning author said martha jones is the political historian 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. we are so happy to have them both here tonight so without further ado the digital podium is yours, martha and goal. >> thank you so much for that introduction and just so honored to be here tonight with dr. jones whom i admire so much both as a scholar and as a black woman and someone who has been so supportive of my work over the last year. this book is very much a dogeared right now and i'm so

glad to get into this talk so thank you for inviting me and happy publication date. >> thank you, knuckle. good to be here with you. >> let's just start with the 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 precisely because i knew the 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 setting me that we were in danger perhaps of entering into this anniversary year and overlooking black women quite literally. so it was time to try and pull

together really three generations of black women historians work 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 that this is a book that would be filled with black women first, black women breaking barriers, shattering ceilings. that's true but as i began to reflect on what i was finding i realized that first it was a core principle that black women had really arrived at 200 years ago at the beginning of the 19th century and had carried forward really until her own time, and this is the idea that american politics should have no place for racism and sexism.

when i recognized how long black women had been championing that view, when i realized how long they had been alone in carrying that foreword and setting that ideal in front of us, i realized they were indeed an intellectual and political vanguard showing this country it's very best ideals. >> thank you. i should have 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, you open the book with a story about your ancestor, a woman who was born into slavery in 1808 in danville, kentucky, and for obvious reasons i'm interested in the power of using personal memoirs to tell these national stories and history of a people who can you tell us a bit about your great, great, great

grandmother and her descendents of the power starting this book with his personal story about 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 in my office now, and on the wall, you all can't see it, are portraits of my four medicine including my great, great, great grandmother, nancy. when i work i am very aware that i am accountable to them in everything i do. i became self conscience in fact, that is writing this book about history of woman suffrage and the really didn't know where they fit. for all my interest in them and only thinking about them i've never had a chance to ask them about where they were in 1920.

of course nancy belle graves is no longer living then but her daughter, granddaughter and great granddaughter are all alive and making 20. black women in places like kentucky and north carolina in missouri. and it did know what they were doing. but i realized that before i was done with the book i was going to have to dig for those stories and let those stories help guide me to tell what i think is a uniquely black women's perspective on political rights and voting rights. >> so 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, i couldn't learn. i was trying to find my own grandmother in the 1920s and i

tried in missouri where she lived in 1920 come later in greensboro in north carolina where she lived later in the 20s, in the records just were not there and i really thought i had struck out frankly which for history is a devastating thing. the one thing to think you know how to do is if the archives and answer your question, and no one had valued those records that we might use to recover black women's first votes in the 1920s. and then 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 called bennett college, a black women's school in north carolina, and greensboro where the land is kind of seybold and 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, register voters, do that arduous and dangerous work at getting black americans on the voter rolls in the '50s and '60s. that was the story that she would have me tell, and so this book comes all the way to 1965 which is what 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 the vote. >> we are going to come back to that but the fact that she wanted to talk about 1965 in the '60s the '60s as opposed to 1920 speaks to the reason this book exists in many ways. we will come back.

when did you know that you were 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 including williams in the field of critical race theory. one of the interventions that critical race theory made into legal scholarship was to surface the word i, and to give us the latitude to come when we didn't find her own narratives in casebooks, to introduce them to our own storytelling. so in some ways my training from a long time ago had already given me a sense of why and how

it can be important that we use our own stories. and, of course, you have done this so beautifully in your essay to the 1619 project, introducing us to your father and giving us an advantage . on history of this country and the stakes in the history. but it was a departure for me because my very first paper from graduate school had been about my family, a wonderful advisor eric holder taught me the word hagiography. maybe i didn't quite have the distance to write about my family. so it is taken me a lot of you 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 as much it is is using them

as the weight into my approach to a book. so readers will tell me if i'm successful or not but it definitely was a a departure fr 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 am writing about myself or my family because journalism jos should be telling the stories of others and a transition somewhat as i moved on in my career and i think it speaks to the fact that when you are a black women writing about this history, these are our stories. there isn't the same type of distance sometimes other people can have when they're writing about american history. i want to move on to the politics of writing. like women's history in particular. and, i mean, we know the

unearthing a black women's roles in movements, , resistance, and organizing is critical because our work has been -- by white society but also by the men of our own race who, we were fighting alongside. this is one of the many cases where history is so instructed because black women were being accused of derailing the 54 black male suffrage as was being accused for derailing the fight for white women's rights suffrage. they were sidelined at colored people's of convention, marginalized for trying to take leadership roles and churches in anti-slavery movement. you have this illuminating passage about -- reported back on a women's suffrage and rights convention. did she plain black when for introducing the color question? you quarter of writing the

convention was not called to discuss the rights of color and we think altogether irrelevant and unwise to introduce this question. she basically said black women should not be seeking to aspire more than to raise come to the level of their own class, which is to stay in a black women's place. in fact, you write about how white women at the time, to use in a metaphorical way while literally black women were enduring actual slavery and people like sojourner truth pushback against that and she said i am women's rights. what's fascinating about that is we clearly see today that black women are still finding themselves fighting off both racism and sexism and still finding ourselves pinned into the same corners. you talk about the suffrages monument that is being proposed for newark city were black women

are quite literally written out of that. can you talk about those lessons from history and that kind of original intersectional fight that black women had to engage in and now that is instructed us and how black women had to deal with political power today? >> one of the things that the jane quote reminds us of his away in which the presence, the bodily presence of black women in a political gathering, in a conference, in the public square somehow seems to deprive folks of the village actually hear the words are read there were excluded. so there's this juncture.

sojourner truth is sort of speaking narrowly and specifically and insistently about racism when, in fact, when we read her own words we recognize she deeply as invested in the question of who was a woman, what does it mean to be a woman for her, how does a woman like her get 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 somehow puts cotton into the ears of listers 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 word i didn't expect, in the interest of all humanity.

we see that again and again and it becomes clear that it's not that black women don't have extraordinary ambitions and political visions that encompass all americans and some internationalist moments, the whole globe but also can hear black women have come to speak about themselves in some parochial, inward looking way. that is trouble for black women that runs through "vanguard" and i think we 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 some of internal arguments and discussions that are still going on today. i think about how often even today the women movement really

struggled to incorporate the fact that people can be black and a woman. language is always women and black people, which seems to say we will be one or the other and then put a silent white in front of the word women. we know it was the inability to have true intersectionality that derailed the women's march, that they were unable to really resolve the tension of women of color sync with to deal with more than just discrimination based on our gender or sex. i talked about this when we did that event for the 19th but i just always what encapsulates it best in my mind is a sign a lot of white women were holding during the women's march that says if hilary had gotten elected we would be a brunch right now which completely raised the struggles of black women and other marginalized groups of women that somehow

this one women, and not donald trump, were in the office that wouldn't be a need to be at out there 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 part of our oppression? we either have to focus on a race or focus on our gender when clearly we are compelled to focus on both. >> for me the moment that always come to mind when we talk about this is the primary contest between barack obama and hillary clinton, which fisher mac it was a contest between white women of black men as if there were no black women. there were no black women in the body politic and it was 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 that recently. i will take us back to the 1860s to a kind of iconic moment, and iconic moment in history of women's suffrage. it's the years after the civil war, an old coalition of women's rights activist and abolitionists are coming back together to chart out their future politically in response to slavery abolition, citizenship and the 14th amendment, and the prospect of black men's voting rights in the 15th amendment. that story has been told and continues to be told as if there was 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 the one hand, and on the other hand, frederick douglass who says the vote is

matter of life and death for black men. what about the black women who were in those meetings and actually on the record? we have the voices, we have thoughts. i invoke always harper, , she's one my most beloved figures from this book. watkins harper not only speaks, she has a different political philosophy to put on the table. she's a poet, so her eloquent we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity is her way of saying i am not going to discount elizabeth cady stanton mayor mayor of you know a life count douglass. in fact, i think it is black women because i live at the crossroads of racism and sexism i should get 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 man but in both instances it is a story told that there's a kind of violence to black women as if they were not there, as if there were not their ideas. in fact, frances watkins harper faced off against both douglas and stan because she wants to speak about pilots come she wants to speak about sexual violence. she wants to speak about the specific plight of african-american women in the country and in 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 a legacy that black women will pick up and work on and work through, we could see even until today. >> you also quote frances harper as saying white women speak of

rights but black women speak of wrongs which i i thought was a kind of perfect encapsulation. i also really appreciate you bringing up the primary when 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 for make an excellent president but having to choose the race over the gender. clearly black women chosen the race and it 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 we had to split our self. it seems like that struggle, how

can that struggle be resolved in this country built on the foundation upon which it was built? >> i wish i knew the answer, but i'll tell you what i think. one, what becomes a regular chart of black women's political analysis, critical discourse in the wake of 2008 is taking that moment at the podium to articulate for the uninitiated how you came to be here and what your 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, right, of helping democrats understand how she comes to be

there and how she is situated in a very complex american political history that knows too little about black women's politics here so that is that burden i think that black women still carry which is to oregon folks and to help them read black women's bodies intelligently rather than ignorantly when they're 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 a 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 the major party platform, 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 biden's long, short list because black women were more than prepared to step right into that moment, right, when there was an election, when there was a candidate, when there was a party pick a turned out they were at least six that we can name, and many others, who could've been on that 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 force. that what we are seeing now is the force of black women in politics. people ask me how should we go forward? one of the way should go forward is finally tune in and understand and appreciate the study of black women and a black women have made politics away out of no way for very long time. but today turning out in

disproportionate numbers, really being voters of consequence in tight races and prepared to be in washington not to make in state and local legislatures into the business of this country. so i hope this is the year where folks find that necessary, to the internet necessary, understanding that necessary. i have tried to write a book that helped 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 the investment in the outcome of this -- as i think all americans do, black women will not go home in november even if things go the wrong way. the history reminds the black women have shown up even in the darkest, even in the most dire moments of this history, at the

height of jim crow lynching and more black women show up for this country. they are doing that now in 2020 and i don't have any reason to think we will pull back, whatever the outcome of the election is in november. i think black women are a force that is here to stay in american politics. and i too optimistic, do you think? >> i'm not an optimistic person but i don't think, i think what you are doing though is it is actually a fact. i love, you're not saying what the outcome will ultimately be but you are talking about what black women through organizing have accomplished. that's why i do think that framing you just talked about, not talking about first buddy force is so important because black women pretty much made it impossible for joe biden not to

pick a black woman as vice president. i think about the amount of organizing that we had this to say no, it's not okay just to commit to a woman. it needs to be a black woman because black women have been the most little consistency -- constituency for the democratic party pick what when you thinkt what the democratic principles are, the principles, that black women are the ones who promote and believe and vote for the common good at the highest rates and for all those things of the democratic party says it stands for, and get have often been used to win election and then forgotten about. i think it is been amazing to see black women come into their power and say not 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.

the first came because of the organizing of millions of nameless faces, black women who make sure this could happen. i wonder if you could talk, one of the things i was not as aware of is the relationship between the anti-slavery movement in the women's rights movement and have the women's rights movement is kind of bored of anti-slavery movement. i wonder if if you could talk briefly about that? >> sure. on the one hand, i think there is a predominate story that situate the political awakening particularly the political awakening about their own inequalities for white american women in their engagements with anti-slavery organizing. and indeed by the the 1830s -- >> why is that? what was it about that? >> it's partly a deliberate strategy on the part of this movement. the abolitionist movement

demands the immediate unequivocal in the slavery but early in its iterations it works for the principle of moral suasion. the idea is that you win people over by transforming hearts and minds. it's not a political question. it's a moral question. women are considered, if you will, vulnerable come susceptible of morality in american culture, in families, away to transformation of means thinking is through women's thinking. women are very much, white middle-class women very much the target of abolitionist writer, abolitionist organizing. you've got women who have history and own families or lies, public or political life for the first time being called controversially but importantly to the podium. they pick up the pen. they are arriving and the

thinking evolves that women,, white women begin to see themselves and their own plight, if you will, their own oppression as mirrored in the circumstance of enslaved people. some will term of the slavery of sex. it's important to say as he is doing a black women it is very unusual to find a black woman in the same period, indecent same scenes the pics of slavery as a metaphor. slavery is too much a part of the lived experience with the legacy that black women, even in the north, even free women are living with through. i think for them to borrow slavery as a metaphor to talk about the scourge of sexism in their own life. that's one piece but i also say

in "vanguard" i think for black women the story begins much earlier and begins before anti-slavery. it really begins in black churches. it begins with the black women as literary associations. it begins in black women's interventions into racist civil rights work in the free states in the north. even before we get a radical anti-slavery movement, black women are developing the intellectual, the critical intellectual foundation as creatures, as women to speak at the podium, as women who write in garrisons liberator. they already have in hand by the time they get to anti-slavery ay organizing, they already have a critique in hand and that is a critique that says no racism, sexism in american politics. that is sort of where the bar sits and that is the principle

to which they will work. and it is not one that anti-slavery societies easily are readily embrace. it is one that is an easily with white women's ideas about what a political future of might look like. women like elizabeth stanton are always working by way of a complex hierarchy that places white educated women in a different strata than black women even those who are free and educated themselves. i don't think like women, the origins, really aren't anti-sleep sleep work at all. it's an important site for the work but i think they come to that work already with a critique in hand. >> so we are going to open up questions and about seven minutes, so if you have any

questions feel free to enter them in the q&a box. i want to talk about this year the 19th amendment, obviously this is the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment which ostensibly gave women the constitutional right to vote but that amendment came with a huge asterisk, and so you and said you're not celebrating the 19th amendment this year and i would love for you to talk to us about what the 19th amendment did and did not do for women writ large and why this is not a moment of celebration for you. >> the good news is i'm historian. i don't have to look at celebrations. but i certainly have been a celebration adjacent, let's put it that way. and i really declined. why?

my reason, the 19th amendment, its history, take on the problem the ways in which anti-black racism runs through and is one of the underlying logix that permits the 19th amendment to be ratified. what do i mean? the campaign for the 19th amendment rest to it an important degree on exclusion of black women, the marginalization of black women within the movement. why? because the movement, its leadership understand or believe that the only way to succeed is by winning the support of white southern women and ultimately their husbands who were going to vote on ratification of the federal amendment. what does it mean? jettisoning lack suffragists. but it's not enough to point to the end of dynamics of the suffrage movement, when we can look at the record on the floor

of congress or in state legislatures, we recognize the way in which anti-black racism, the fact that nothing in the 19th amendment is going to interfere with the capacity of the individual states come to use jim crow laws, to keep black women from the pole, that's a pillar of the 19th amendment. in tennessee, the 36 36 state o ratify this amendment does so it is openly understood that tennessee will not be obliged to include black women at the pulpit they can use its own laws to now regard black women as it does black man and disenfranchise them. this is not a moment to celebrate. the 19th amendment is a land apart. it does that mean and the likes of women over the long history of voting rights in the united

states. there are black women even in some southern jurisdiction who do vote after 1920. so i don't like to leave the impression that there's nothing remarkable about the moment. there certainly is. and at the same time i think that sitting in 2021, in a historical moment when as a country we are grappling with a question, how on earth did we get here, , such a racism and white supremacy still contaminates so much, , too much of law, politics, culture and more. one answer, is not the only answer the one answer lies in that dirty bargain in 1920. that did not take on jim crow in the interest of women's votes, for women's votes. instead left it intact and left like women and men to create a

new campaign for voting rights, that takes until 1965. that is not the raw material of a celebration for me, even if i deeply admire that black women who waged that fight before 1920 and after 1920. it's just not a moment that i can unequivocally celebrate. >> yeah, i think one of the things i say all the time is like people are just always inconvenient for the nerdiest, that we want the simplistic uplifting narrative about advancement and forward progress in order to have that, so often we have to erase the story of black americans and we have to erase the way that white americans have consistently been willing to compromise the rights

of black americans to meet their own agenda. we just have come on going to ask you one more question before we go to the q&a. i couldn't leave the conversation without talk about the roles of black women journalists in the book, which was some of my favorite parts of "vanguard" was you feature several black women journalists, marianne, and, of course, my spiritual grandmother. i would love if you talk about the role of black women journalists in particular in the role they played in the struggles for women's rights, along with the particular outcome that they faced. >> sure. well, there's nothing easy or straightforward about being a black woman journalist but in marianne shed case, being an editor owning and running a newspaper and a note you know

that she gives a enterprise disguising her identity -- that she is convinced that readers just will not -- newspaper that is led by a woman. and that is an ongoing challenge for black women journalists, editors and more. and at the same time it's hard to say too much about the way in which newspapers in particular are the crossroad that nips black americans together -- knits -- across space and time. i did have to tell you nikole, sometimes had to remind my students that there was no internet and all that. but the newspaper is that, right? it is the new media. it is a crossroads and it is

incredibly dynamic. when black women are at the helm we can then recover the ways they shape the coverage, they shape the debates. they are deciding what to know what's out and how to frame issues. and mary ann shadd is deeply interest in women's rights and women's suffrage. she will have her own political life as a journalist in the 1850s she is curating a forum that is thinking very hard about what it means to transform the relationship of women to black politics, to and the slavery politics, and more. i was afraid of ida wells in this book. i knew that if i spent too much time on ida wells she would just take over this book. and you know why. because wells is a journalist but wells is a social scientist

come she's an advocate, a lobbyist. i don't know what a sharper, her parent or her tongue, but the combination is remarkable -- her pen -- but you also know that means wells wins admirers and she wins detractors because her extraordinary brand of black womanhood is provocative and runs counter to still very present ideas about the relative subordination of black women, even within black institutions. so i think the last thing i want to say on this is a fat the gift that these women, , women with a pen, winning with a printing press, is that they leave their own record for us this couldn't be a history for me of my

heavy-handed historians interpretation of the past. this really needed to be a history that insisted that black women were there, that they understood and analyzed and thought through, organized and that they left us the record. so wells and mary ann shadd cary are among those women who leave unequivocally a record who they thought they were, what was happening around them and what the stakes were. so it's an honor in fact, to come back to that material and to try and ferret out for readers and help distill that for readers, and dispel the road that somehow we can't black attempt might black women's

history that was i told 25 years ago when i started inviting school by some, not all, that is just a lie that we had to be wanted to go with black women were and to go to their materials in order to tell the past. >> i think about just the tremendous platform that self-publishing provided black women who were being shut out of other avenues of expressing themselves and of organizing if you think of ida b. wells self-publishing southern horrors and single-handedly put lynching on a map as a global issue. and the power of that and while we didn't have twitter and social media, newspapers were transferable. you would read it and pass it on to someone else and they would pass it on to someone else. i think there was so much power in that particularly people for whom most of our history to that point had not been allowed to be literate and will be to have him

as much of a written record because of that newspapers began, lack of the newspapers, black women-owned newspapers began to create that written record that we have been deprived of. i really appreciated that part of your book, and hope it will lead people to further explore these women and read the biographies of these women at that their interest will be peaked. i'm going to go to the q&a and i'm going to start with, i didn't realize you were trained in critical race theory so this is a question about that. first i i want to start with my own opening to that which is, i hope, can you define critical race theory to me or for us? obviously the right has just discovered this thing as if it is brand-new and just existed

come came to existence a few months ago. clearly they have no idea what critical race theory is, so for all of the people on zoom tonight, i don't know you could divide a forest, and then the question is what you think about recent comments by president trump that diversity training and education is un-american? specifically was talking about critical race theory. >> i will just dispense with the latter part. [laughing] >> i think that is a rhetorical question. >> -- critique un-american knows nothing about american history. critical race theory emerges out of a very particular moment among mostly legal scholars in the 1980s who are looking to take stock of the civil rights era. it's successes but also are

recognizing what civil rights did not accomplish. so these are folks who are observed that despite the purging of race and racism from the face of american law, discrimination, inequality and more persistent in the united states for black americans in the 1980s. and so critical race theory begins by trying to answer the question, how is it that inequality persists despite having worked toward the colorblind ideal in the united states? and the work is to understand better language, coded language, the dog whistle. the language of race and racism as it had been sort of gussied up or sort of prettied up for lawyers and for judges in the united states.

it looks to history to restore, the legal thinking these histories that had been whitewashed and overlooked. it looks at the biographies. he goes be on the surface of legal writing, judges writing, legal treatises and learned tax to ask about the biographies, the politics, the motivations of printable actors. and as a school of thought about what scholarship might be, it is at this moment in which scholars of color, legal scholars of color, begin to critique what happens in the law classroom, what happens in the case book, and open the door to the eye, the storytelling, the narrative, the autobiography.

i i studied in the 1980s with patricia williamson whose work i think is well known by many people for really artful and powerful combining of the stories of her own family, including the history of slavery and her family with an explication of how those ideas animate our thinking about property, for example, in the 20th century. so that's what critical race theory begins. it's a companion to sociologists who, if you like that i'm giving a seminar. it's a companion to sociological work that has begun to refrain race as a social construction. so critical race theorists become interest in the ways in which within the law race and racism are being constructed

affirmatively through law as well as in other realms of american society. so there is no question that critical race theory asks why does racism persist? frankly, in the 21st century isn't that the question we have all been asking? i don't think that's a novel or provocative question at all. it seems to be the question i meet people, even if we don't know the answer, we know that that is the question. critical race theory is are asking that question going back now almost 40 years, and some among us are more, upbraided more pessimistic than others. some think racism is permanent, intractable in the united states and others think that by studying how we get here perhaps we find the keys to undoing that very problem. >> and where do you stand? >> that's a good question.

i think on many days i think as far as what i can see, racism, to keep racism at bay will require vigilance, extraordinary effort and commitment, that i don't yet see the formula, the analysis, the promise in any guise of eradication of racism. but i do believe that we have the capacity to minimize it, to keep it at bay, to recognize it even if there will always perhaps the folks who are prepared to get up and use it and exploit it in american life and politics. certainly in my lifetime, i'm sorry to say, i think racism will have been a permanent feature.

i hope for your daughter and young people we learn better how to keep it at bay. >> okay. so i think we probably just have time for one more question. this one asks, it says frances watkins harper face-off with both stanton and douglas that informed her intervention. does this come through in "vanguard" in terms of sexual violence, extreme financial limitations which are cut of violence, or both? >> it's all those things in harpers remarks at the meeting but the thread that runs through "vanguard" is one about sexual violence. violence including sexual violence for black women. one of the things i had never expected to discover was how from the 1850s forward, all the way until the modern civil rights era, black women

activists come to narrate their fears, their encounters, their experiences with sexual violence. this is nowhere else more acute than in the realm of transportation. frances harper talks about what it's like to be a black woman lecturer, and anti-slavery lecturer, writing streetcars are railcars alone. you know the story on this but nearly every woman i write about has a story about being accosted, about being did, about being assaulted, and harper comes up with that on the table. why? does it really goes to the core of how black women understand their particular vulnerabilities and have racism and sexism work to, for example, keep them out of the '80s cars. but she also brings it to the

table because what she knows is that white women have or are the witnesses to this denigration in the life of black women, and that they do nothing. in all of the stories that i collect and recount in "vanguard", ," there's only onen which a black woman reports someone even speaking up for her when she's being accosted on a streetcar. otherwise, white americans, particularly white women in the ladies car watch. it is a a spectacle, it is a theater, and they even cheer on conductors and brakemen and more. this is a core concern that in the 21st century equates to a movement that we refer to as me too, she is pulling on an old and vicious thread in the history of black women in

politics, the question of where are the politics that will excuse black women from the threat of sexual violence? >> it seems as much as how whiteness is defined by blackness and distance from blackness that is doubly true for white women, and part of that participate in that denigration is the need to define themselves as opposite of black womanhood, which we could have a whole nother talk about that. so those are my questions i think all the time we have for questions from the audience. i don't know, dr. jones, is or anything else besides, pick up this book, please buy the book, anything else you'd like to add before we close out tonight. >> was no. a think i just want to say thank you to you very much for being here with me and for the

conversation come for taking as food history, helping us think hard about what that history means for our present and for our immediate future because it is on the horizon. the women i wrote about, who i write about would tell you this is a season to engage the ground game in american politics and do the work as arduous as it is going to be in november. i think that is for me the best way to honor them in this season, adages what to say thanks to the harper bookstore for hosting us tonight. thanks so much, nikole. >> thank you, and again thank you for your work and we will let them close it out. thank you everyone for coming tonight. >> yes, thank you both so much. this is really a wonderful conversation and so thank you to professor martha jones and nikole hannah-jones. thank you particular to the people whose questions we couldn't quite get to. there were a lot of you we appreciate all your questions.

you guys can all than more about this important book and purchased "vanguard" on harvard.com and on behalf of harvard bookstore have a good night, keep reading and please everybody well. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2 every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. booktv on c-span2. .. >> hello, everyone out there. i want to thank you all for joining us today on zoom for a conversation about the new york times best selling book "finish the fight", the brave and