We’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment which was ratified on August 18th, 1920 and then certified eight days later. The 19th Amendment inked women’s suffrage into American history, a culminating moment in an effort to win political power. But the ordained heroes of women’s suffrage – like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and later Alice Paul – often tossed out the leadership and movement-building of Black women. The absence of those voices from the popular historical record has obscured the centuries-long role that Black women have played in expanding voting rights. And, of course, we’re releasing this episode just days after presidential candidate Joe Biden announced Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, which marks the first time a woman of color is on a major party ticket.

Joining us to discuss how the history of voting rights has led us to this moment is Martha S. Jones, the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, and professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the author of a new book called Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.

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MOLLY KAPLAN
From the ACLU, this is At Liberty. I’m Molly Kaplan, your host.

We’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment which was ratified on August 18th, 1920 and then certified eight days later. The 19th Amendment inked women’s suffrage into American history, a culminating moment in an effort to win political power. But the ordained heroes of women’s suffrage – like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and later Alice Paul – often tossed out the leadership and movement-building of Black women. The absence of those voices from the popular historical record has obscured the centuries-long role that Black women have played in expanding voting rights. And, of course, we’re releasing this episode just days after presidential candidate Joe Biden announced Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, which marks the first time a woman of color is on a major party ticket.

Joining us to discuss how the history of voting rights has led us to this moment is Martha S. Jones, the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, and professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the author of a new book called Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.

Martha, welcome to the podcast.

MARTHA
[01:14] Thanks very much for having me.

MOLLY
Martha, I want to start by saying what an absolute pleasure it was to relearn everything I thought I knew about women's suffrage. When growing up in high school in your textbooks, there are two events that get recorded. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, which was recorded as the first women's rights convention and then much later the women's suffrage parade of 1913 that has been photographed widely, and it's this sort of image of women in white marching in D.C. on the eve of Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. And in preparing for this, what I learned is that those two events have become the moments of record. But actually, that's quite misleading. Can you tell us why that is misleading?

MARTHA
[02:03] Well, in both examples, Seneca Falls in 1848 and Washington, D.C., on the eve of Woodrow Wilson's inauguration in 1913, my reflection, if you will, was that there were very few African-American women, if any, part of those scenes. There are no black women recorded as having been at Seneca Falls at all. And we know that there were probably somewhere between two to three dozen African-American women of the many thousands of women who participated in the 1913 parade. So for me, the question became, where were African-American women then? And for a long time, that fact, the absence of Black women, fueled another kind of myth. And that myth was that black women had no interest in politics, had no interest in particular in women's rights and women's suffrage, that black women had somehow gone in the direction of race and left sex to white women. So partly I write Vanguard as a way of, you're right, revisiting some of those touchstone moments that many of us grew up with learning if we learned anything at all about the history of women's suffrage, but trying to rewrite them, then, from the perspective of the African-American women activists that are at the center of my story.

MOLLY
[03:30] And one really interesting facet of this sort of expansion of the historical frame around women's suffrage is that it really rewrites the timeline of when women's suffrage and fighting for women's access to the ballot started and ended. Can you speak a little bit more about that? You talk about, for example, Maria Stewart, an early activist on this front.

MARTHA
[03:51] So from the beginning of the story, yes, there's Maria Stewart. And I'd be happy to say something about her and why I begin there. But I think to orient listeners, perhaps it's easier to recognize in a sense that the story for African-American women continues beyond 1920 after ratification of the 19th Amendment is accomplished, and extends to 1965, at least to 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in that year. Yet we come forward in time, but yeah, it turns out we go backward in time. And for me, one of my questions was, what was the beginning of this analytic or this political philosophy, as I think of it, that we today oftentimes referred to as intersectionality. Where were the origins of this critique, this dual critique of American political culture?

I knew that black women, certainly in the 21st century, are conversant and work self-consciously through that framework. But as a historian, you sort of pull the thread backwards to see where you get. And for me, that took me back to the 18-teens and 20s and someone like Mariah Miller Stewart, born in Connecticut, an indentured servant as a child, a free woman in Boston by the end of the 1820s, who, after she is widowed, has a kind of consciousness raising that is partly religious but also partly political. And Stuart begins to put her pen to paper. And as she does, she's concerned about slavery or anti-slavery. She's concerned about civil rights. She lives in an increasingly free Black community in Massachusetts. And it turns out she's also vexed by the degree to which Black women are held back from bringing all of their strengths, all of their talents, all of their contributions to bear on those causes. And the result is an early iteration of this intersectional analysis.

Now for Mariah Stewart, it is not an easy road to hoe. It is to say she will publish a pamphlet. She will be widely read because she is republished in William Lloyd Garrison's antislavery newspaper, The Liberator. But when she takes to the podium, and becomes, it turns out, the very first American woman to speak publicly about politics to a mixed audience of men and women, when she steps to the podium and begins to speak these ideas, it is too much for her audiences. And her speaking career is brief. But a handful of extensive and powerful orations that let us see the place where African-American women begin to think deliberately out loud and together about how they come to American politics and to begin to articulate where the bar is for American politics, where they want the country to go. And it is to a place where neither race nor sex has any relationship to the mitigation of political power. And Mariah Stewart is very early in Boston already preaching that message that in some ways sounds very 21st century to us.

MOLLY
[07:12] And what's really interesting to me about opening the timeline a little bit is that what you've done is rather than locating Black women within an existing narrative that is very centered around these mostly white middle class women, you sort of question that frame and find where Black women were in this fight, because obviously they were asking the questions. They were fighting the fight. And one other element you sort of explore in that process is the location of where these fights were taking place.They weren't just happening in Seneca Falls or on the streets in D.C. Can you say a little bit more about that and why place is so important?

MARTHA
[07:51] One of the things I think that some readers will be surprised about is that a starting place for what emerges ultimately as a campaign for voting rights for Black women begins in Black churches, in particular in Black Methodist churches before the Civil War. In fact, that's where Black women were in 1848, when a small group of women and men were gathering in Seneca Falls, they were following on the heels of a May 1848 meeting in Philadelphia, where African-American women had come to that city to attend the general conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. And there women have come not just to serve meals or to make sure that the ministers are well accommodated. They've come with a political agenda and they speak on behalf of, in particular, preaching women, women who are traveling itinerants, stepping up on boxes, occasionally getting into pulpits and speaking about the many principles and objectives of the Methodist faith. Those women want licenses. They want legitimacy. They want formal approval of their denomination.

And in 1848, they organize, they commandeer a male ally and they petition that formidable, really intimidating conference of male church leaders and they win. And this begins for African-American women a long, really nearly two centuries long struggle over political power in one of the central institutions to African-American life. And so my work required me to, if you will, look away from women's conventions, look beyond suffrage associations to follow African-American women to where they were gathered and then to listen to what they had to say. And it turns out in 1848, Black women are not only well versed in the question of women's rights. They are bringing that analysis to bear in their church community. And they're even winning some concessions there.

MOLLY
[10:05] Well, one other point that's really interesting is that it wasn't just about necessarily expanding voting rights, but it was also in some ways about rectifying wrongs, and in some ways in the process of rectifying wrongs, the conversation seemed to get much bigger. There was a much more human rights lens to this than just expanding voting rights. And I'm wondering if you can say a little bit more about that.

MARTHA
[10:29] Legal historians are, I think, still in the throes of a long debate about where human rights begins. Is it really a post-World War II world view or does it have longer older roots in, for example, anti-slavery activism? I was really surprised, but I think it was an important surprise for me to discover, mid-19th century African-American women after the civil war in the throes of debates over that era's constitutional revolution, one that gives us the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. That moment when four million former slaves are being incorporated into the body politic, African-American women are part of a coalition where some people are speaking about the interests of educated women; educated as sort of a euphemism for white in this era. Others are speaking about the life and death concerns of African-American men. But Black women come to those debates and begin to speak about humanity.

MOLLY
And these are the debates around the 15th Amendment. The, expanding the right to vote to all men, and in this case, all Black men.

MARTHA
[11:42] Yes, exactly. So in the 1860s, an old coalition of anti-slavery and women's rights activists reconvene and they do so under the umbrella of the American Equal Rights Association. And these radical activists are now facing a new kind of political challenge. Congress is beginning to craft constitutional amendments that speak to the nature of political rights going forward. And the question for the coalition is to what degree African-Americans, to what degree of African-American men, to what degree women, white women, are going to be part of those considerations, part of those deliberations? Will they become part of this construction of the new body politic?

So oftentimes the story is told from the perspective of a face off, like it was a face off, in fact, between Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who is an advocate of educated suffrage and is quite deliberate when she insists that educated women, again here a code, if you will, for white women. Educated women should be first. Frederick Douglass, who will take the position that for Black men, the vote is a matter of life and death. Wendell Phillips will memorably say this is the Negroes hour. And so this coalition needs to support the 14th and then the 15th Amendment as it has been drafted.

What's left out of those stories oftentimes, however, are the ideas and the interjections of African-American women. And so I write about, for example, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, a poet, anti-slavery lecturer who's part of this coalition. And when she gets her turn at the podium, she has sharp words both for Black men and for white women. She doesn't think either of those factions are really a way forward. And certainly she doesn't think any political philosophy, any strategy that wants to, if you will, extract racism from sexism, that's just not going to work for African-American women.

MOLLY
[13:44] And she also had this beautiful way of expressing that. She said white women speak of rights. I speak of wrongs.

MARTHA
[13:52] And you're right. She speaks directly to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to Susan Anthony and the other white women there, because what Frances Harper tells us is not simply that she's being harassed, accosted, strong armed and more, but that white women watch that happen and do nothing. And this emerges in my research as a recurring theme, as a recurring story that African-American women tell. And it helped me to understand why it was so difficult to work in coalition. If you're a Black woman and you're on your way to the convention and you've been accosted or assaulted or insulted. And the white women around you watch that happen and do nothing. Isn't it difficult then to enter the meeting hall and speak as if you were in some natural or simple sisterhood alliance?

MOLLY
[14:47] And in some ways perpetrate that violence. I mean, the 1913 parade, famously Ida B. Wells, a famous anti-lynching Black activist, wanted to be in the parade and was told by leadership that she could only be in the parade if she marched at the very back with other Black women completely segregated. And that feels like a part of the conversation, too. But there's also a perpetration of violence from other women.

MARTHA
And that's certainly true, especially as we move into the 20th century when increasingly suffrage movement leaders will look to incorporate or to draw Southern white women, along with their husbands and their fathers into the movement for women's votes.

MOLLY
I think related too, you make a distinction between the word suffrage and voting rights. And I'm wondering why you make that distinction. What is the distinction?

MARTHA
[15:45] For me, there’s couple of things. One is, I use the word suffrage, my students have no idea what I'm talking about. In other words, suffrage has not survived well into 21st century parlance. So there is that we want to be better communicators. And so suffrage doesn't work so well. But more importantly, I think not only framing this as a movement for women's suffrage, but remembering it as a movement for women's suffrage has worked to exceptionalize the voting rights work that was the road to the 19th Amendment. And somehow, I think to distance it in our memories and in our analysis from the other voting rights work that is going on simultaneously, which is the work that's being done by Black Americans, Black men in particular, who by the 1890s have been in the American South and to some degree in the West, been disenfranchised, are also disenfranchised.

And so if we call it the movement for women's suffrage, it sounds like it's somehow a stand alone movement without any relationship to that and without any relationship to the long saga until today, the story of the struggle over voting rights in the United States. So in my book, I use suffrage in those sections where I'm speaking directly of the suffrage movement and the road to the 19th Amendment. But overall, I do adopt the framework of voting rights because I hope you can hear that brings us right to the present. And one of the reasons to write this history and to tell this history is to help us think better about the present. And for me, the framing of voting rights lets us go all the way back to the founding of the nation if we were inclined to go that way. And it also brings us up to where we are in an election season in the 21st century.

MOLLY
[17:36] And I'm curious about moving into the modern era and thinking about the expansion of voting rights for Black women. One marker is the Voting Rights Act, and you know, which was a huge piece of civil rights legislation that not only expanded the right, but also was marked that the government had to play a role in fighting discrimination and keeping people from the ballots. But why isn't that an end either? Why isn't that the marker of, OK, we've arrived. Now everybody can vote?

MARTHA
[18:03] Well, the short answer is Shelby v. Holder, which is to say the Voting Rights Act is not a constitutional amendment. It is vulnerable. It remains vulnerable to the shifting tides of American politics. And in 2013, we learn how dramatically those tides can shift when the Supreme Court is able to gut the most powerful components of the Voting Rights Act, leaving it without teeth. You know, one of the things about the Voting Rights Act is it gives teeth to these constitutional amendments, most notably the 15th and the 19th.

But I would say, you know, any act of Congress, any Supreme Court decision, any even constitutional amendment, I’m the sort of legal historian who knows that if people on the ground are not positioned, are not able, don't find their way to organize and breathe life into grand legal pronouncements, they remain hollow. That is the story of the 15th Amendment for a very long time. That is the story for certainly women of color in the United States of the 19th Amendment. It is a hollow landmark because there is nothing on the ground that permits them to wholly do the work it might best be intended to do. So even the Voting Rights Act and its enforcement requires vigilance, requires courage, requires work. And we know that because we can chronicle the kinds of challenges and contests that follow on the heels of its adoption in 1965. One of my takeaways from trying to write 200 years of voting rights history in the United States from the perspective of African-American women is that there really is no golden age of voting rights in the United States.

MOLLY
[20:00] Black women had seen already how the 15th Amendment wasn't enough. Right? That while Black men were officially granted the right to vote, that it in actuality, it didn't matter in the South. There were grandfather clauses, poll taxes. And I'm curious if that was also an influence in how Black women approach women having access to the ballot?

MARTHA
[20:21] Black women know as 1920 unfolds that many, many of them are still going to be disenfranchised. That's not a secret. That's an open premise of the 19th Amendment. And so they are already in suffrage schools and citizenship schools trying to train one another to overcome those barriers. As you mentioned, poll taxes, literacy tests and more, as best they can.

At the same time, there are women in places where not only will the 19th Amendment change very little, but in southern states, I write about Mary McLeod Bethune in the state of Florida. Voting rights work is harrowing, dangerous work in 1920. Black women do that work, but they also are nimble and I think ingenious and understand politics as resting on more than the vote, even as the vote is foundational.

So Mary McLeod Bethune, after waging some harrowing struggles over getting Black women to the polls in Florida, will come to Washington. And by the 1930s, she has come to know Franklin Roosevelt. She is going to help President Roosevelt organize what is often referred to as his Black cabinet. This is a coming together of a Black political leaders who are not elected at all, but are appointed by the president to New Deal administrative agencies and are going to see to it that the New Deal, which initially offered very little to Black Americans. They're going to see to it that the New Deal resources are reconfigured and redirected to African-American communities. And they do that regardless of being disenfranchised. Now, it's not to say they're indifferent to the vote at all, but it's to say that Black women don't wait until 1965 to organize, to strategize, to use political alliances, political friendships. Mrs. Bethune and Mrs. Roosevelt are great friends. That helps. But they use those alliances and friendships. They use federal patronage to put African-Americans into decision making posts within New Deal agencies. And this is critical, especially for Black communities that do not have a voice in Congress, that do not have representatives in Congress.

So these are women who also remind us that even as we're in a year where we want to commemorate women's voting rights, that in order for women to be powerful political actors, they have to do more than vote, a great deal more than vote. They have to learn how to get themselves into the back rooms at the table and in the rough and tumble of politics in a city like Washington. And in the 30s, in the 40s, Black women do a really effective job of just that.

MOLLY
[23:19] Just like Mariah Stewart did much before. And in your book, you trace Black women's efforts in the voting rights to the present day and you actually feature some of those women. Can you tell us about some of the people that you feature, like Stacey Abrams or Representative Ayanna Pressley?

MARTHA
[23:36] You know, I think one of the tests for my thesis in this book and my thesis is one word: vanguard. Right. That Black women have built a movement that has oftentimes been outfront and not only leading other Black women, but leading the nation to its best ideals. One of the tests was whether women whom we recognize as of our own moment, like Stacey Abrams or Ayanna Pressley, was whether they agreed at all, whether they thought this history was in any way germane. So I had to read them and listen to them and hear them tell their own stories. And what was remarkable and important for me to discover was that the history I was telling lives inside many of these women. Stacey Abrams, when she recounts her own political evolution, her consciousness, her vision for herself, her sense of possibility. Figures like Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan are indispensable. Sharon Pratt Kelly, Black woman mayor of Washington, D.C., indispensable. But also early 19th century figures of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.

When I heard Stacey Abrams crediting these women as helping to shape her political consciousness in her imagination, I realized there really was a story to tell. That if you want to understand, as I think many of us do, the influential Black women in our political midst, we must understand the history, the political philosophies, the experiences out of which they come. I've written about Ayanna Pressley just a little bit because I learned that her cat, her household pet, was named Sojo. And that this was short for Sojourner Truth. And again, I see the way in which, in a somewhat playful way, but not only playful way, Ayanna Pressley is signaling to us, right, who she is and how she's situated in history. Most recently, I've been reading about Val Demings, who we know is a Congress member from Florida, was a member of the House impeachment team, and more recently has been on some of the short lists for the vice president slot on the Democratic ticket. Val Demings when she explains how she, as a young African-American girl in Florida, imagined that she could be in politics. Val Demings credits Mary McLeod Bethune, who a century ago was in the trenches of voting rights facing off with the Ku Klux Klan and more. Those, to me, were the stories that affirmed why it was essential to tell this history, because you can't actually understand who the Black women are in our political midst today if you don't appreciate the histories, the traditions, the role models, the inspirations out of which they emerge.

MOLLY
[26:37] But also not just to tell the history, but to open up the people who are part of that history.
Maybe after reading your book, Ayanna Pressley will name her next cat someone who she didn't know before but learned about in the book, like Mariah Stewart. And also, you know, it's daunting to enter an election amidst, again, another cycle of voter suppression, what we're seeing in Florida with disenfranchising former felons and knowing that this is part of a much larger history and a much larger fight that that has been fought by people for generations, in some ways feels helpful because we know that this is all part of a much bigger picture. It's not just that, you know, we're doomed right now. You know, there’s hope.

MARTHA
[27:21] The women in this book are many things to me, but they're just incredibly inspiring. Right. I mean, you know, the 19th Amendment is ratified and the deal on the table is that Black women in the south won't be able to vote. That's not a secret. That's not some backroom, you know, chatter. That's said on the floor of the U.S. Senate. It's said on the floors of state legislatures. It's said in the newspapers. And yet, you know, as we say, these women persist. Right. And really believe that political power is one facet of freedom and liberation, but also of democracy. And so here we are having to really fight for that and being asked to take extraordinary risks to do so. Having their stories in my head is is really useful. Even as you know, it's easy to fall into, you know, “Nothing has changed.” But it's not true that nothing has changed. It's just that too little has changed. And so when I see more Black women are running for Congress than in any other election cycle before, that is not nothing. And in even these Black women veep candidates. It doesn’t matter to me too much who Joe Biden picks on some level. But the notion that there are not one, two, three Black women are not tokens in this and all that. These are all formidable candidates and they're not interchangeable.

MOLLY
[28:51] Well, Martha, thank you so much for opening up our eyes and being a part of giving us a much broader spectrum on how we think about voting rights. Obviously, it couldn't have come at a better time. We are going into a national election with big consequences on the state level and on the national level. So this book is so well-timed.

MARTHA
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

MOLLY
Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation subscribe to At Liberty wherever you get your podcasts and rate and review the show. We really appreciate the feedback. Until next week, stay strong.