What Keeping American Democracy Alive Looks Like

In the wake of the “Stop the Steal” campaign, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the wave of voter suppression bills making their way through Republican legislatures across the country, the struggle for American democracy feels, for many, visceral and even existential. But for Martha S. Jones, a legal and cultural historian at Johns Hopkins University, the moment we find ourselves in is anything but an aberration. “I’m not someone who tells stories about a Whiggish arc in which we are always getting better, doing better, improving upon,” Jones says. “Much of American history is a story about contest, about conflict, about disagreement over fundamental ideas and fundamental precepts, fundamental principles, like citizenship and voting rights.” Jones has spent her career documenting the contestation over American democracy. Her 2018 book, “Birthright Citizens,” tells the story of how Black Americans in the 19th century fought to address the Constitution’s silence on the question of who counts as a citizen, ultimately securing the establishment of birthright citizenship through the 14th Amendment. And her 2020 book “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All” is a sweeping account of Black women’s 200-year fight for equal suffrage. This conversation is about how the political struggles waged by marginalized groups have forged American democracy as we know it — and the virtues, habits and practices of democratic citizenship we can glean from those struggles. But it also explores the need to reimagine America’s true “founders,” how 19th- and 20th-century Black women were modeling intersectionality long before it became a buzzword, what current discussion around “Black women voters” gets wrong, how worried we should be about current threats to American democracy and much more. Mentioned: A Voice from the South by Anna J. Cooper Book recommendations: All That She Carried by Tiya Miles The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom This episode is guest-hosted by Jamelle Bouie, a New York Times columnist whose work focuses on the intersection of politics and history. Before joining The Times in 2019, he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. You can read his work here and follow him on Twitter @jbouie. (Learn more about the other guest hosts during Ezra’s parental leave here.) You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  I'm Ezra Klein, and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Hey, it is Ezra Klein. While I'm on paternity leave, we've got an all-star team of guest hosts. First up, my Times opinion colleague, Jamel Bouie, who is unusually brilliant at putting today's debates and divisions in their deep historical context. Enjoy.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  My guest today is Martha Jones. Jones is a legal and cultural historian at the John Hopkins University. She focuses on the ways that Black Americans have shaped the culture and practice of US democracy. I was first introduced to Jones's work through her book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America. Something a lot of people don't know is that the Constitution is almost completely silent on the question of citizenship, a question that seems pretty crucial to establishing what a democracy would mean for everyone. And the book is a fascinating exploration of how Black American activists fought to fix this glaring omission. Jones's most recent book, Vanguard, does something similar for the 19th Amendment. Vanguard corrects

• 1:24Speaker 00

  myths that the 19th Amendment in practice guaranteed all women the ability to vote. Jones shows how hard Black women have had to fight over 200 years for truly equal suffrage. Taken together, Jones's recent books provide a detailed look into the practice of democratic citizenship. And that's really what I wanted to explore with her in this conversation, the way that Black Americans, and Black women in particular, have acted as a vanguard of sorts in American political life, how they have pushed America to actually live up to its professed ideals, and in doing so, presented a model of democratic citizenship and political participation that we can all learn from. In many ways, my conversation

• 2:07Speaker 00

  with Jones was a continuation of my conversation with Woody Holton. Holton urged listeners to broaden their sense of the founders of American democracy and to look for new heroes to place at the center of our national story. Jones's work shows us where to look to find those heroes. Jones is a remarkable scholar and storyteller, and I cannot say enough about how much I enjoy this conversation.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  Hi, Martha. Welcome to the podcast.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Hi, Jamelle. It's great to be here.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  In an interview you did about Vanguard, your most recent book, you made a statement that I thought was very, very striking. You said that, "I aim to rewrite history." Is there anything in particular that you're trying to get readers to really understand about American history, or any core idea you would like readers to come away from after working through your books?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  There are two major ideas, I think, that run through my work today. The first is a look at the failure of legal institutions to fulfill the kinds of promise and the kind of charge that they take up. That means, in the example of citizenship in the 19th century, really, the failure of lawmakers to address and to remedy, for a very long time, an absence, a silence in the Constitution about who is a citizen. That takes many generations, until 1868 and the 14th Amendment. And law really fails, up until that point, to fulfill that obligation.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  And in Vanguard, my focus, or the pivot point in the book, is the 19th Amendment, an amendment that sometimes, we oftentimes misremember as having guaranteed to American women the vote, but really, an amendment that failed in that regard. Because of the way it was drafted, because of Congress's unwillingness to give teeth to that amendment through federal legislation, too many Black American women remain disenfranchised, even after a momentous event like the amendment to the Constitution. So I'm interested in the ways in which law fails. And I'm someone who, at the same time, really believes that much of American history is a story about--

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Contest about conflict, about disagreement over fundamental ideas and fundamental precepts, fundamental principles like citizenship and voting rights. I'm not someone who tells stories about Whiggish arc in which we are always getting better, doing better, improving upon, but more I see US history as a series of episodes of conflict and reoccurring conflict over central themes like voting rights and citizenship.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  One thing I was taken with in both books, both Birthright Citizens and Vanguard, is exactly that. I think that there's a conception of American democracy, and you should hear this a lot, right, that the country hasn't always lived up to its ideals and kind of that formulation assumes that there's like this fixed and static set of ideals we call American democracy, and the course of American history is trying to live up to them. But what I took away, at least from your books, is that what even constitutes those ideals is something that is a product of conflict and contestation and political

• 5:51Speaker 00

  activity and struggle in that we, as readers, as modern day Americans, should take seriously not just that, but also the fact that the people involved in constructing those ideas weren't necessarily the people we identify as, quote unquote, "the founders."

• 6:09Speaker 01

  I have argued, I'm not sure successfully, but I have argued that the, you know, the women in Vanguard, for example, should be honored as among the founders, to the degree to which they are alone for most of our history in insisting, promoting, working toward an ideal that says, "No racism, no sexism in arbitrating political rights in the United States." They are, as the title of the book suggests, the kind of vanguard who stand for those ideals. They might sound nearly commonsensical to many Americans in the 21st century, but for most of our history, they were not. And I think that it is important

• 6:51Speaker 01

  to understanding US history to appreciate the ways in which the denigrated, the despised, the marginalized are oftentimes at the

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Root of our best ideas, our most enduring ideas, precisely because they are positioned to think in not only concerted but creative ways about how to bring themselves closer to the center of, in my work, it's the center of the body politic, to the center of the constitution.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  I wonder if you have any thoughts on why it is difficult to persuade people that the denigrated, the people at the bottom of the hierarchy ought to be considered founders in that way. And what do you think is the source of resistance to that idea? Because I think that's animating some of the current controversy over history education. So I'd be interested to know your thoughts there.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  When I think about my own education in the 1960s and 1970s, it resonates with me when people say, this isn't the history I learned in school. This isn't the way I understand the American past. Many of us have had educations that fall short by way of a 21st century measure. And so the first thing I want to bring to that kind of consideration is a kind of compassion for the ways in which we are all unlearning histories that were taught to us, promoted to us, and that persist in many places in our public culture even today. So I think compassion is important. And at the same time, there is the really

• 8:35Speaker 01

  difficult work of dislodging myths and misunderstandings about the past. But I believe that there are examples that suggest to us it can be done. And I'm going to borrow an example from France. France, now two decades ago, created a national day for remembering slavery and the slave trade. And they declared slavery to have been a crime against humanity. And there's a plaque in the Luxembourg Garden in Paris that pays tribute to enslaved people for their struggles having been

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Really, those struggles that helped to define the abstract French ideals, right? Liberty, equality, fraternity. That's a place we have not yet arrived to in the US. Is an appreciation for the ways in which outsiders, the denigrated and the despised, are actually bequeathing to us the kinds of ideals that become commonplace, if not commonsensical, in the 21st century. But the example of France is one I hold on to as a sign of what might be possible for us.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  I think that's a good place to move to the books themselves, like really get into them. So I wanted to start with a passage in Vanguard, and I wanted to ask you about it. You write in Vanguard that black women pointed the nation toward its best ideals. And I would love to hear you talk both about how those black women developed those ideals and what, you know, relationship that may have had to sort of what we recognize as like the founding ideals in the Constitution and the Declaration. Were they drawing from that, or is this something forged more out of their own experiences?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Ideas are important, and in the telling in Vanguard, I talk about women who develop political theory of a sort in unexpected places. For example, in their churches. This is a crucible in which black women are not only helping by the early decades of the 19th century to build institutions, they are raising the funds, they are filling the pews, they are outfitting the ministers and more, but they have serious questions about why limits are being placed upon them when it comes to, say, occupying the pulpit. Well, there is a moment in which black women are developing a political critique of sexism

• 11:13Speaker 01

  that importantly travels and informs their work in the secular world.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  In subsequent decades, those same ideas will animate women who then come to what were known in the 19th century as the Colored Conventions, a Black political movement built in a time when African-American men were excluded from the State House, were excluded from legislatures. They build their own political culture. Well, women show up there, yes, to serve meals and to otherwise make sure that the men are able to do their work. But women also show up there looking to be seated as delegates, looking to participate in debates about civil rights, about antislavery, about education, about criminal justice reform,

• 12:04Speaker 01

  and more. So it is to say that I write about folks who are not developing their ideas in an ivory tower at all, though they are certainly conversant in founding documents like the Constitution and the Declaration. They are very much developing a critique of racism and sexism that today we call intersectionality in many circles. They are developing that out of experience.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Could you say a little about sort of how these ideas traveled? Because I actually, I found this very interesting, just sort of the way through women ministers or women speakers going from church to church, just the way through newspaper writing, just the way ideas traveled across communities and into communities. So could you just speak a little bit about that?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Sure. I'll take us to the latter decades of the 19th century. So now we're at a moment when a women's suffrage movement is taking form. At the same time, early precursors to civil rights organizations like the NAACP are beginning to gather. And Black women are going to found the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. And the group of women who found that organization, an organization that still is active and with us today. The women who found that organization come from a diverse set of experiences. Some of them are educators, women who have come from places like Oberlin College,

• 13:32Speaker 01

  where in that experiment, in both education across the sex line and across the color line, Black women are forging ideas about their place in higher education, yes, but in politics. But alongside them are women who have been many decades in battles within, for example, Black Methodist churches, fighting to, for example, be ordained to the ministry, which they are in this same moment. So when those women come together under the auspices of a new political organization, they are importing ideas that come out of their churches,

• 14:10Speaker 01

  ideas that come out of their education, ideas that come out of their own political communities, and they are now honing them into a mission that both says Black women need their own space and their own autonomous organizations in order to work intersectionally. And as we follow the work of the NACW, what we discover are women who work simultaneously on winning federal anti-lynching legislation while they are also working for what becomes the 19th Amendment. So in order to capture this as a historian, it was important to move away from, if you will, institutional history,

• 14:55Speaker 01

  to follow the lives of women as they move in and across institutions. And that's how I think we best discover how ideas move.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Yes, both Birthright Citizens and Vanguard seem to rely really heavily on biography as the method for tracing this history, tracing it through the lives of individual people. And could you talk a little bit about why you made that choice, both as a historian and maybe just as a writer as well?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hope that my version of biography is something perhaps more like life history. Because for me to understand the past, particularly Black women's pasts, institutional histories often do a kind of violence in the sense that they chop lives up into increments that don't really permit us to see the continuities and the change across time that the study of lives do. So I write about women like Mary McLeod Bethune. Bethune is born in 1875 during Reconstruction, during that extraordinary moment of both political tumult, but of political possibility.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  And she lives till 1955 and the dawn of the modern civil rights revolution. And that's the kind of story that I think a life permits us to tell, that an institutional history of Reconstruction or of the modern civil rights revolution might miss. The other reason to write biography, I think, is partly a continued intervention into what is often shorthandedly referred to as older dead white men's history. That many of us come to history having studied luminaries, having studied greats, having in our educations imbibe the kind of pantheon.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  And I'm still interested in expanding the American pantheon and adding, in the case of Vanguard, African American women to that. I think that that is not the only kind of intervention that I can make, but it's one of the interventions I can make is by sort of expanding our list of founders, heroes, and more who have shaped the American past.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  So here it might be a little useful to talk about one of my intellectual interests, which is I am very Much a reader of and someone who has drawn a lot of value out of plus for in social theorists, John Dewey, and in particular, his vision of democracy is not simply a solid state like a thing that exists, but as a practice, as a set of habits, as sort of a method of organizing a society. And in Vanguard, especially, I really sense this Deweyan sense of citizenship as being like a practice that you're you're describing how Black women aren't just forging ideas and ideals,

• 17:57Speaker 00

  but like forging a way of being a citizen and specifically being a citizen in very difficult circumstances.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  One of the things I learned from the women in Vanguard is democracy as a practice across generations. So these are women who were, yes, doing the work of democracy, breathing life into democracy, animating it, defining it in their own times. But they are also keenly aware that that work isn't going to be completed or ended or somehow tied up in their own lifetimes. And we watch as they invest in next generations as organizers, as mentors, as educators. And this, to me, was a critical lesson because I think that understandably,

• 18:46Speaker 01

  we are impatient in the 21st century with our democracy. We are impatient with its shortcomings. But the women in Vanguard, yes, feel the urgency of their concerns, but also understand democracy as a long game. And we watch how they prepare next generations of women and men to do the work that they will not see through. One of the things in Vanguard, you know, is that most of the women I write about in this book don't live long enough, for example, to see the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And we might see that as a lament, but it is also something that they would have, I think, understood and anticipated,

• 19:30Speaker 01

  that the work would continue even as they were no longer active.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  I really like that phrase, democracy as a long game. It speaks to something that, to me, seems like is often missing in our own present day political culture, which is the sense that carries of democracy being a communal project that must be passed along. You begin Vanguard with the story of Jerina Lee, a black woman who receives the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and decides she has to preach. So, thinking about this sense of democracy as a long game and the ways the story is intergenerational as much as individual, could you speak a little about Lee and sort

• 20:15Speaker 00

  of black churches in this moment in the early 19th century and what her impact becomes for subsequent generations of black women?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Lee is a young woman in the city of Philadelphia in the moment that the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a new denomination, is being created under the leadership of Bishop Richard Allen. She understands, as you suggest, that she is called to preach by God. Her challenge, of course, is to persuade men like Allen that her calling is genuine and that she should enjoy the same privileges within the church that men who are called to preach enjoy. She tries marriage to a minister. It's not a good fit.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  And when her husband dies, she returns to Allen's congregation and makes her play, if you will, to persuade the men there that she is as good as any of them. And it turns out she is. Allen makes an exception for Jerina Lee and authorizes her to preach. And I chronicle the thousands of miles that she travels, bringing converts to this new black-led Methodist denomination in the early decades of the 19th century.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  But she is not alone, and that's important to say, that she is now joined by women organized through the Daughters of Conference, and they will scheme together to open the door not only for Jerena Lee, but for many other Black women who aspire to preach. They will scheme and succeed in 1848 in winning preaching licenses for women in the AME church. I mention the year 1848 because it's a year that we often associate with the story of women's suffrage in the United States, because that summer, there was a meeting in Seneca Falls,

• 22:17Speaker 01

  New York, where white American women gathered to issue a declaration of sentiments that included a demand for the right to vote. Black women are not there, but they are not absent from the story because they are in Philadelphia at the AME Conference, inspired by Jerena Lee, organized under the Daughters of Conference, and battling with a male leadership that is reluctant, but ultimately overcome by their insistence that they should have rights equal to men in the church.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  And so these battles are part of what helped develop the political consciousness of Black women in this period. And so could you talk about how this sort of relates to the colored conventions movement? Because it seems that Black women will be fighting many of those same battles within the colored conventions and drawing on that experience of claiming leadership in their churches.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  So it's no mistake that the colored conventions also get their start in Philadelphia in the same moment that Jerena Lee is breaking barriers as a preacher. It's 1830, the very first colored convention, drawn together to Think concertedly about the problem of colonization, the proposal that Black Americans who are not enslaved should be removed from the United States to Africa. And Black laws, these are discriminatory laws that are limiting the lives and the vocations, the property holding of Black Americans in many states in the North. The colored conventions are their own political culture.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  And Black women are present because we see the appreciations that are extended to them for preparing the meals, for example. But as the 1840s progress, Black women are also going to begin to seek a place among the delegates, a voice within the proceedings. And they will spark very sharp debates among men, some of them well-known to us, like Frederick Douglass, but others of them less well-known, among men who are struggling with where they should land on the question of women's rights. And Black women are forcing that question upon Black men in the 1840s and 1850s

• 24:43Speaker 01

  out of their own aspirations, but also because they are reasoning that, like racism, sexism is an arbitrary, man-made hierarchy that Black Americans should not honor, just as they don't honor racism. And while the conventions remain divided on this point for a very long time, their records are a sign of the ways in which, for a very long time, before we get to a moment like 1920 and debates around the 19th Amendment, for a very long time, Black Americans have been thinking hard about the question of women's rights and who women should be within Black public culture.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  So this is a little bit of a sidebar, but can we talk about the colonization movement?

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Please, let's talk about the colonization movement because I think it is really under-regarded. Let's put it that way.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  I was just about to say something similar. It's it seems under regarded. It seems somewhat obscure. It's not something that people tend to think about, even though it was sort of the mainstream anti-slavery position, such that there was one at the time. And I think it's interesting because it poses a contrast almost to the work the black women you write about are doing, who are trying to forge a place for equality within the United States, within American democracy. And the colonization movement is saying, in short, that that's impossible, that there can be no racial equality in the United States, that for slavery to end, black people must go.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Colonization is the most popular political movement of the early 19th century in the United States. It crosses party lines. It crosses lines of region. It includes men and women. The American Colonization Society is founded in 1816, but the ideas that animate colonization go back to the 18th century. This vision that slavery will ultimately end in the United States. It might take years. It might take decades. It might take a century, but slavery will end. But colonizationists' central concern is what then?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  And what they are sure about is that the US is to remain a white man's country. And what that means in their vision is that black Americans, those who are not enslaved, can and should be removed to West Africa, perhaps to Canada, to the Caribbean, but should be removed because there is no future in an interracial democracy for the United States. And colonizationists create an environment, create a condition against which black Americans struggle, that threat that they might be removed.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  By encouragement, by coercion, or even by force, is ever-present, really, I think, until 1868 and the Fourteenth Amendment's establishment of birthright citizenship. And so, many of the struggles that we associate with early America for Black Americans are framed by this very specific challenge to them, the challenge that they are not citizens, that they are people who can be arbitrarily and at will physically exiled from the country. For me, colonization and the ideas that animate colonization are really what endures almost

• 28:27Speaker 01

  unabated through the Civil War and through Reconstruction. This vision that the US must remain a white man's country, the rise of white supremacy in the wake of Reconstruction's destruction, I think, is very much attributable to a colonization mindset that has not been set aside, even in the height of Reconstruction.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  When you put it that way, that mindset seems to be part of the story in the post-Civil War women's movement, as women like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper are pushing white women to take seriously racism as an obstacle to the advancement of American women. You write about a speech Harper gave at the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, which was a gathering that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony also attended. Lots of white women there. And in the speech, Harper says that "we," meaning everyone, "are all bound up together

• 29:38Speaker 00

  in one great bundle of humanity." And then she also says something, I think, is incredibly striking. "You white women speak of rights; I speak of wrongs." Could you talk about Harper, talk about that speech, and sort of the ways in which Black women were in this post-abolition moment, trying to assert the importance of racial equality along with gender equality?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  I'm so glad you brought up Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. And I think the very first time we met, we talked about her.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  And my friend, historian Brittany Cooper, has termed me a Harperian, which is to say I'm someone who's been deeply affected by Harper's ideas. And she is best known, as you suggest, for this, the eloquence of, we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity. She was a poet, as well as a political orator in the 19th century. But there, in the 1860s, she has come to a gathering of mostly old friends from the women's rights and anti-slavery movement, who are looking to forge a way forward in the face of the 14th and 15th Amendment in particular, which looks like it is going to buttress the voting rights of African-American men

• 31:01Speaker 01

  and leave women's voting rights to the side. What to do as members of this old coalition? And Frances Harper is distinct in this group because she really refuses bifurcation of her political vision. She's not going to accept a vision that promotes white women over black men, which is what someone like Elizabeth Cady Stanton is promoting. She's also not 100% on board with Frederick Douglass's view that this is the Negro's hour, that the vote for black men is a matter of life and death. Harper thinks black women, too, face extraordinary risks

• 31:44Speaker 01

  in a world where they don't enjoy political rights. But what's most interesting to me about her at that meeting is that she doesn't come to talk about the vote. And she doesn't come to talk about economic justice or property rights. There are others who talk about those things. She comes to talk about her experience on the streetcars of Philadelphia. And what it is like for Black women to travel, whether it's across town or across country, the ways in which Black women are being brutalized on public transportation, especially when they look to be accommodated as ladies. And so when she says, I'm here to talk about wrongs,

• 32:30Speaker 01

  she is speaking directly to white women who have watched her and women like her be brutalized by conductors and brakemen and by other passengers when they look to take their seats. And this offense, which is yes, about equality, but also about dignity, which is also about bodily integrity in some fundamental way, is what Watkins Harper expects any progressive movement for voting rights to take into account. And this concern, the violence to which Black women are being subjected in the regular course of their everyday lives

• 33:12Speaker 01

  is something that Black women will keep on the table throughout the struggle for the 19th Amendment and beyond. And it will distinguish their concerns in many ways from the ways in which someone like Elizabeth Cady Stanton will frame the issues.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  A few decades after Harper delivers that speech, Anna Julia Cooper, who this is an aside, but we named my daughter after Cooper because I'm a big admirer of her. Her name's Julia. Anna Julia Cooper wrote in A Voice from the South, a passage that I like quite a bit. She writes, "Women's cause is the cause of the weak. And when all the weak shall have received their due consideration, then women will have her rights, and the Indian will have his rights, and the Negro will have his rights, and all the strong will learn to at least deal justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly." And you said this earlier in our conversation, but what it seems to me we have here is this sort of theory of intersectionality that's developed in the 19th century

• 34:14Speaker 00

  by these Black women thinkers and activists and speakers.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  I love the story about your daughter and thank you for sharing that. This is Anna Julia Cooper's Feminist Manifesto from 1892, A Voice from the South. And yes, by the time we get to the 1890s, Black women have been for decades working on political theory and a critique of American democracy. We come by the 1980s and 1990s through the work of scholars like Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberle Crenshaw to call that intersectionality. Cooper doesn't use that academic sort of term in her book. She's really trying to speak more broadly. My students think they invented intersectionality in the 21st century, of course.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  So it's great to have them read Anna Julia Cooper and to recognize those ideas as already having been worked out there.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  It seems to me that these figures, Harper, Cooper, are unfortunately obscure to even people familiar with the Civil Rights Movement and familiar with Black history in the 20th century. And I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on why in mainstream discourse their voices have been somewhat obscured?

• 35:37Speaker 01

  So many ways to go with that.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  We could talk about, for example, the way in which history has been written and produced and circulated and taught in the United States. Anna Julia Cooper is writing her book, A Voice from the South, in the 1890s, where some of the first histories of Black Americans are being written. That work will continue with real verve by the time we get to the eve of the First World War, as Carter G. Woodson will establish the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and the Journal of Negro History. But in my telling of that, what I hope folks hear is the way in which

• 36:25Speaker 01

  historical research, historical writing, historical knowledge was the victim of American apartheid for much of the 20th century. And so in some rooms, a name like Anna Julia Cooper is familiar and admired and well understood. That is still true today. And in others, when we introduce her, it is a first introduction. And we live with the legacy of that apartheid in the production of American and the teaching of American historical knowledge. I'll mention something that might help us appreciate how that might be changing,

• 37:05Speaker 01

  which is what happened in August 2020, 100 years after the 19th Amendment, but August of 2020, when then Senator Kamala Harris accepts the Democratic nomination for Vice President. And she talks about the women on whose shoulders she stands. And she doesn't name Susan Anthony, or Elizabeth Stanton, or Alice Paul, the great lights of women's suffrage. Instead, she names Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, Constance Baker Motley, Shirley Chisholm. It's sort of a pop quiz, right? In American political history, in a moment in which if, as I think many of us do, want to understand the political philosophy, the political tradition out of which someone

• 37:50Speaker 01

  like Kamala Harris has emerged, we have to go back and do that remedial education to know women who are not household names, certainly, but are of consequence for us even in the 21st century.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  You end Vanguard by talking a bit about Stacey Abrams, the Georgia lawmaker, politician, activist. And Stacey Abrams has become sort of this very important and visible figure in her own right. And I think over the last few years, there has been a greater public recognition of the role Black women play in sort of American politics and American democracy. Is there anything that strikes you about how Black women are being discussed in those terms in this moment?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  It's still true, I think, in some quarters, that someone like leader Stacey Abrams is spoken of as if she was a unicorn, or as if she parachuted in from some other world, right? As if she was outside of history. But all we have to do is listen to Abrams or read Abrams. She's the first to tell us that she comes out of a history. Some of that history is the history of activism and women in her own family. But it is also women like Harriet Tubman in Sojourner Truth, women of the 19th century, formerly enslaved women, who Abrams herself invokes and uses them to explain the tradition

• 39:51Speaker 01

  out of which she is working even today in the 21st century. The other thing that has been important to me is to not simply dub someone like Abrams a first. I think dubbing Black women in politics in 21st century first is sort of faint praise. And there's a woman in Vanguard, Patricia Roberts Harris, who herself is a first, the first Black woman diplomat. She's ambassador Luxembourg in the 1960s. But when she is sworn in, what Harris says is, please don't call me a first. Because really what that means is that I'm someone who has finally arrived

• 40:35Speaker 01

  after many other women before me have been denied. That that's really the story of the first, is the story of a long record of the denial of Black women to places like In the diplomatic corps and more. So I have been trying to work with the notion that in the 21st century, women like Abrams really are part of Black women as a force in American politics. And when we recognize that she was one of six Black women vetted by Joe Biden to run alongside him as vice president, six, that tells us how ready Black women are to hold the highest office in this country.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Ultimately, in 2020, 130 Black women run for Congress. That is a record-shattering number that tells us, I think, something about how Black women have arrived in politics. And if we add to that the many, many Black women, strategists, operatives, and more behind the scenes in a campaign like that of Biden and Harris, we recognize that we are long beyond simply breaking barriers or shattering glass ceilings. The question for us as a country is what do we do with the force of Black women in politics, not how do we regard individual women who might be breaking barriers?

• 42:00Speaker 00

  It's not just that Black women are a pre-existing force in American politics. But as you write, there's an entire tradition of Black women's political thought that has been brought to bear in American politics. And part of what we ought to do is sort of highlight that and show and emphasize the extent to which that's always been true.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  One of the things that we've come to learn about Black women in recent years is that more so than any constituency, they vote as a block. We saw that in 2020. Certainly, we saw it four years before in 2016. That is not happenstance. That is not a naive factoid. It is a product of a long-held and effectively-wielded strategy by Black women that goes back to the 1920s. When the great Ida B. Wells is in Chicago organizing black women, it is black women in Chicago voting as a block for the Republican candidate,

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Oscar De Priest, in 1928, that's going to send the first black man to Congress since 1901 to Washington. When I ask my political science colleagues about this, sometimes what they say is that this is understudied because it is assumed that somehow black women come to vote as a block, either naively or out of no other choice. But when we study that historically, what we understand is this is a very deliberate strategy that actually has effect even in the 20s in the face of voter suppression. And it is a tradition that continues until today. And we learn again in 2020 what that can mean for the outcome on Election Day.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  So one thing I have been struck by, both last year and this year to an extent, kind of the past few years of American politics, is this language of recognizing the importance of black women to American politics. But sometimes it seems to me that I can almost tilt over into sort of like deferring responsibility onto black women, if you know what I mean, of saying like, oh, they're going to save us because of their insights. And I wonder if you sense that at all in sort of the way, you know, things are talked about?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  No, there was a hashtag that got traction back in November of 2020. I think it was #ThankBlackWomen. I'm not gonna lie, I had friends who came on Twitter and put up their Venmo, you know, and, you know, said, "Thank me, sure." But it's a serious question. This one about the vexed place, which is, on the one hand, the recognition of the critical force that black women can be in any given election cycle. And on the other hand, the burden that that then encourages. As a collective, as a nation, we wrestle with our ongoing ambivalence about doing the work,

• 45:06Speaker 01

  the work of democracy. I think it's a really unenviable. Position for any community but for Black women, it's an unenviable burden to bear, to be recognized as having perhaps saved our democracy, right, as it sort of rested at the precipice. That's not enviable. And I don't think as much as, you know, it is fun from time to time to dive into a Twitter fest about thank Black women. The real question is not thanking Black women. It is following Black women. Can we transform that recognition of Black women's insights and their capacities as

• 45:51Speaker 01

  agents of democracy? Can we follow their lead? Can we defer to their wisdom? Can we permit them to be out front, upfront as we struggle to go forward as a democracy? I think that's the moment where we sit. Right now, it's not a question that I, as a historian, certainly can answer, but I recognize that it is a question we have to ask.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  Right, we are living in this moment. And I think a lot of Americans feel that, you know, we are witnessing maybe democratic backsliding, that sort of our electoral democracy in the US is kind of, if not at stake, then is at least under threat. And it seems to me that one of the really wonderful things your work does is show us, the public, that the resources for reshaping our democracy, transforming it, strengthening it, don't just lie in some founding documents and the notes of James Madison or whomever,

• 46:59Speaker 00

  that they lie in the experiences of people who have, in this country's history, rarely been in the spotlight, but who have nonetheless forged important understandings of what democratic life is.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  You know, there was a moment earlier this year when I woke up to learn that Vanguard had been suppressed, not banned, but suppressed by a public library in Louisiana.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  I had just never expected that that might be a turn in the life of this book. And it was part of a bigger program that was proposed at the library. And when the library board declined the program and the book, they said it was too one sided. And this, to me, I think, was a reminder that, on the one hand, there is something very powerful in this story, isn't it, about the way democracy actually works? And the reason for some folks, I think, to suppress a story like that of Vanguard

• 48:11Speaker 01

  is to attempt to constrain and to limit and to hamstring our thinking about what democracy is and how it works and who we are in relationship to it. And that moment taught me not only to appreciate the lessons from the women of Vanguard, but to appreciate that there are folks active in our democratic culture here in the 21st century who would look to keep that from us, who would look to excise that from a public conversation about voting rights. That is the moment that we're in, as I see it.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  And that means someone like me, I spend a lot of time, you know, with K through 12 educators and with young people, trying to take the book directly to folks who I hope can put their hands on it and make use of it, because I worry that there are gatekeepers who are also working in the other direction.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Now, having asked about your books, could you recommend a few books for our listeners?

• 49:19Speaker 01

  I'm going to start with two books that really resonate for me with Vanguard, though they're styled very differently. One of the things we've said about Vanguard is about how it really looks across generations, across long lives, to tell the past. This is also true in the latest book from historian Tiya Miles called All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  It is one part, the history of an object, a cotton sack with some poignant embroidery. It is the story of a family and how Black women expressed and sustained and passed on love, even through the challenges of slavery. And it is also the story of Miles as a historian and her sort of dogged insistence on discovering this story. I've been listening to this as an audiobook in the car. And in the evenings, I've been slowly savoring Honoré Jeffers' latest book, a novel, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois. It's a girl's search for her identity.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  I recognize my own search for identity in her characters. And it is filled with the stories of successive generations, Native Americans, Africans, Europeans. It's a kind of new American origin story. It is epic. And it is a book that gives me, as a historian, a chance to indulge in the license of imagination. We don't always talk about that as historians, but I think without imagination, our work isn't possible. And these two books really are great companions for seeing how a historian, on the one hand, and a novelist, on the other, constructs an epic story about Black women's pasts.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  A book that has come off the shelf and onto my desk is Tressie McMillan Cottom's Thicke and Other Essays. This is a 2019 book, which I took off the shelf as I was trying to do some real conceptual work rooted in the women of Vanguard. It is a brilliant set of first-person essays that are framed through social scientific capacities, Cottom's capacities, as an observer and as an analyst. But her- Concept of thick beyond its kind of colloquial meaning and use among Black Americans is really a category of analysis. It is a category that helps us, I think, capture the ways in which I think the women

• 51:55Speaker 01

  of vanguard are really outsized, do not fit, stretch, defy, and really trouble the kinds of boundaries, both material, philosophical, and more, that hamstring American politics. So Cottum is someone to read for those of us who want to stretch our categories and are thinking about who Black women are and who they can and should be in the past, but also in the present and the future.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  Thank you, Martha. This was a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Thanks very much. It was a pleasure to be with you, Jamel.

• 52:44Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Rajesh Karma, and Annie Galvin. It is fact-checked by Michelle Harris and original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld.