May 5, 2025 • 47 mins
In this episode of Leadership and Legacy, historian and legal scholar Dr. Martha S. Jones delves into black women’s battle for voting rights that began, rather than ended, with the passage of the 19th Amendment. Through the stories of several inspirational leaders of the Black Women’s Club movement, Jones highlights how these women earned leverage in their communities, empowered themselves in their churches, and passed down invaluable lessons to the next generation. She also reflects on their lasting achievements, which continue to shape our world today. Tune in to gain insights on leadership, women’s history, resilience, and the relentless fight for equality and civil rights.
Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library is hosted by Washington Library Executive Director Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky. It is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and Primary Source Media. For more information about this program, go to www.GeorgeWashingtonPodcast.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Lindsay Chervinsky (00:01):
What can we learn about leadership from
Black Women's Fight for equality?
Welcome to Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington (00:06):
undefined
Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.
I'm Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky,director of the library.
In this podcast series, we talk withexperts about leadership and history,
how studying these stories helpsus understand our current moment,
and how we can apply lessons fromleaders in the past to our own lives.
(00:29):
Today I'm joined by Dr. Martha S. Jones,a writer, historian, legal scholar,
and public intellectual whose work isdevoted to understanding the politics,
culture, and poetics of Black America.
She's a professor at Johns HopkinsUniversity in the History department
and the SNF Agora Institute.
She's the author of several books,including her most recent, the
(00:49):
Trouble of Color, which is anexploration of her family's history
and her efforts to uncover it.
I hosted Dr. Jones at the GeorgeWashington Presidential Library
in March to discuss that book.
But while she was here, I wantedto talk with her about her previous
publication Vanguard, which covers Blackwomen's efforts to secure the vote.
Here's my conversation with Martha Jones.
(01:10):
Well, thank you so much for being here.
I'm so thrilled to have this conversationand really looking forward to talking with
you tonight about your new excellent book,Trouble of Color in front of our audience.
I think the Mount Vernon communitywill really get a lot from it.
But you've written so many books, Icouldn't miss the opportunity to talk
about your previous work, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the (01:27):
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Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.
So I'm wondering if we could, froma starting place, kind of just
explain, what's that story aboutand why you wanted to tell it?
Martha Jones (01:41):
First of all, thanks for having me.
You know, Vanguard was avery intentional book for me.
I knew as a lot of us did that in 2020,we'd be marking 100 years since the
ratification of the 19th Amendment, theso-called women's suffrage amendment.
I knew that there would be, in a way,a very unique, maybe unprecedented
(02:01):
opportunity to talk about women's history,to talk about women and voting rights.
Lindsay Chervinsky (02:06):
This work felt particularly important to highlight on
the podcast for a couple of reasons.
First, leadership exists in lots ofdifferent places and forms, and I
think we can learn from all of them.
Second, over the course of history,Black women endured generations
of disappointments, punctured bymoments of hope and achievement,
often followed by retrenchment.
(02:27):
Dr. Jones has a rare ability to sharethis history in unflinching detail while
weaving in a thread of hope and optimism.
Martha Jones (02:35):
I worried that African American women might be sidelined or
given short shrift in that discussion.
So could I write a book that would tell200 years of Black women's political
activism, including their strugglesfor voting rights, that I could
put in the hands of journalists andmuseum curators, students, and more?
(03:00):
Folks who were looking for the one book.
Maybe they'd then dig into thefootnotes and read the syllabus.
But I really wanted there to be onebook that I could put on the table and
say "this too is part of the story."
The other origin point is that I ama student of some of the historians
who really break the mold onthe history of women's suffrage.
(03:21):
In particular, the late RosalynTerborg- Penn, whose dissertation
turned book had really openedup the field in a dramatic way.
I work in her tradition and under hertutelage in this book, looking to dig
deeply into the distinct and the uniquestories of Black women in voting, rights.
(03:42):
And it's not giving too much away, Idon't think, to say I originally thought
it was a book that would conventionallyend in 1920 with the ratification
of the 19th Amendment, and only as Imyself went deeper did I realize that
I was gonna have to tell a story thatcame forward all the way to 1965,
because that in fact was the definingyear for Black women in voting rights.
(04:05):
1920 had been a disappointment.
Lindsay Chervinsky (04:07):
Well, I think it's amazing that you set this
goal for this particular yearand then actually achieved it.
Because I think so often we have theseideas about anniversaries and how
they might be opportunities for us toshare work, but actually doing it is
another thing and is quite impressive.
And as you were referring to the endof that story about why you had to
push it forward, I do think that'ssuch an important part of the story
(04:28):
because in some ways, you know, ofcourse the 19th Amendment was this
crowning moment of achievement, butit was very much a bittersweet moment.
And before we dig into some of thefigures that you talk about, could
you share why it was a bittersweetachievement and why it wasn't the end of
the story and why it took another fourdecades to actually come to fruition?
Martha Jones (04:46):
Sure.
As we look into the congressionaldebates and then the ratification
debates that surround that moment, whenthe 19th Amendment becomes part of the
Constitution in August of 1920, it isapparent that nearly everyone connected
with the 19th Amendment understandsthat nothing in the amendment will
(05:08):
prevent individual states from usingthe same laws and the same tactics
that had long been disenfranchisingAfrican-American men, would now be used
to disenfranchise African-American women.
Now, there are two qualifiers here.
One is that of course there are placesin the US where women, including Black
women, are voting even before 1920.
(05:29):
California, Illinois, New York.
So this is a very uneven terrain when itcomes to women's voting rights and Black
women's voting rights in particular.
And it is also true that in 1920 there areBlack women who organize, who register,
who cast ballots, some of them underharrowing conditions, but they do vote.
(05:50):
But by the fall, the late fall of 1920,when Black women look around, what
they see is a patchwork, a politicalpatchwork, where in too many places
they have been unable to cast ballots.
And this means that in essence,they need to build a new movement
for voting rights, a movement thatgives teeth to the 15th Amendment.
(06:12):
We have to remember, 1870, the 15thAmendment, which prohibits the states
from using race as a voting rightscriteria, and the 19th Amendment, which
prohibits the states from using sex.
And so it turns out this major chapterin the history of women and the
vote really is inaugurated in 1920.
And we follow Black women throughthe campaigns that cHallienge the
(06:36):
Constitution itself through campaignsat the grassroots that organize
the modern Civil Rights movement.
And Black women who continue wherethey can and as they can to use
the ballot to move the needle onelection day, that is a story that
takes another five, six decades.
My math is terrible today,but it takes a very long time.
Till 1965.
(06:57):
Oh, it takes 45 years.
Lindsay Chervinsky (06:59):
So I'd love to talk about some of the actual individuals that
were spearheading— I mean, I really do—I always think of this as very much a
collective action, but in any collectiveaction, there are people who are
dictating strategy or are out front or areencouraging in a lot of different ways.
And I was looking back at some of thereviews of the book, and I loved that
the New York Times described Vanguard asa rebuke of our obsession with firsts.
Martha Jones (07:21):
Hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (07:21):
I thought that was so interesting.
I think what they were saying is thatyour work is encouraging us to reject
maybe the people that we've heard of firstand instead to dig deeper and to look at
whose shoulders they were standing on.
So one of the names that really jumpedout at me, and I'm hoping I pronounce
her name correctly, and pleasetell me if I'm not, is Jarena Lee.
And so I'm wondering if you could tellus a little bit about her and some of the
(07:42):
very unique cHallienges she faced as awoman trying to assume a leadership role.
Martha Jones (07:48):
Mm. I'm so glad you asked about Jarena Lee because her
presence at really at the beginning ofthe story I tell in Vanguard surprises
many readers because she's not a womanof politics, she's a woman of faith.
Lindsay Chervinsky (08:02):
Jones emphasized that many Black women, like Jarena Lee, came to
political leadership through the church.
In a world where women werediscouraged from taking public roles,
establishing religious authorityhelped them to claim a source of power
beyond the everyday secular realm.
And it didn't hurt that Black women formedthe majority of many congregations and
already filled crucial organizational andfundraising roles in these communities.
Martha Jones (08:28):
And yet part of the way I came to understand the route
that black women take to a concernlike voting rights is indeed through
church, is indeed through struggleswithin their faith communities around
power and who holds office and whocan vote, and who controls the keys to
the sanctuary, who decides what musicis played during worship and more.
(08:52):
And Jarena Lee really embodies that.
Because she is, as she tellsit in her own memoir, compelled
by a call from God to preach.
She understands, and if she didn'tunderstand, she is told unapologetically
that that is a role that a woman shouldnot occupy, and her spiritual journey
(09:13):
is one that I think in some senseshares qualities with all kinds of
spiritual narratives (09:18):
her confrontation with the devil, her doubts, and more.
But there is another layer, and thelayer is the men in the A ME church,
the African Methodist Episcopal Church,who don't see a place for her and see
her preaching as nearly heretical.
The thing about Jarena Lee is thatshe's a great preacher, which is to
(09:40):
say she can command a crowd, she canmesmerize a sanctuary, she can bring
converts, right, to baptism, and more.
And so it is a cHallienge for the menin her denomination to reject her.
And so there is a awkward accordarrived at, and what that means is
(10:01):
that she becomes visible to so manyother women in the A ME church.
She becomes someone who inspiresgenerations, now, of women, and they
take in part from her the courageto be faith leaders themselves.
But they also take the lessons ofthose struggles within church into the
realm of politics, and they now wantto be seated in political conventions.
(10:25):
They now want to be regardedas members of the body politic.
They want to lead.
And that is a companion struggle acrossthe 19th century for Black women,
struggles within the church and struggleswithin the secular realm that are really
fueling and informing one another.
And Jarena Lee really sets that off.
And then she does that wonderful thingthat we as historians really appreciate.
(10:48):
She puts it to paper and wecan, and we can read that.
We can read that and understandfrom her vantage point what
those struggles were about.
Lindsay Chervinsky (10:57):
I love when they actually tell us what they're thinking.
Martha Jones (10:59):
Mm-hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (10:59):
It's so nice when we don't have to actually read between
the lines and it's right there for us.
Martha Jones (11:03):
Absolutely.
Lindsay Chervinsky (11:03):
In one place.
There's so many threads Iwanna pull on in that answer.
As I was reading about this, oneof the rebukes that I think she
faced was this criticism that womenwho stepped to positions of power,
including in the church, were akin todrunkards because they were leaving
their responsibilities at home.
And I don't know that I had everseen it put so bluntly before.
Martha Jones (11:24):
Mm-hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (11:25):
So what I'm wondering about, because this intersection between
faith and politics, I think is sofascinating and it's one that perhaps
people are familiar with male figureslike Martin Luther King Jr, and the
importance of the church, and I would sayeven the importance of the church today.
We have the, what is it, the pewsto the polls movement to get out the
vote in in particular communities.
Was there an argument that if womenwere gonna be in public life, church
(11:48):
was a safe place to do it becausethey were demonstrating either
their faith or their holiness?
Was there something about church thatprovided them an opportunity that other
public spaces were more closed in first?
Martha Jones (12:00):
Mm. Well, to go back to Jarena Lee on this point,
Jarena Lee says, I'm not hereby way of some manmade impulse.
I'm here because God called me to be here.
That's pretty powerful stuff.
Lindsay Chervinsky (12:12):
It's also probably hard to argue.
Martha Jones (12:13):
Yeah.
Well, you know, people do argue withit and that people doubt her calling,
but she believes herself called.
And so there's a way in which I thinkwhat we might call authenticity in
the church realm and authority in thechurch realm comes not from men, right?
It comes from God.
And Lee tells anyone who willlisten that her calling is from God.
(12:33):
I think the other explanation for howit is that Black women center so much of
their early political work in the churchis that they outnumber men in the pews.
They are the fundraisers.
They have a kind of leverage because itis not possible in early Black Baptist
or Methodist congregations to imagine asuccessful faith community, if the church
(12:58):
women aren't with you, behind you, raisingthe money, building the church edifice,
serving the meal, all of the things.
And so women have a kind ofleverage that they have earned.
And later in the century, theinheritors of Jarena Lee's work will
say as much, which is we earned this.
(13:19):
We are not only talented, we are notonly called by— but we have earned this.
And then the last thing I'll say is,and it connects to your point about
the way we understand the relationshipbetween church and politics in
the modern Civil Rights movement.
And, it's true in the 19th century,that the Black church, and that's
hardly a monolith, but Black churchesare frequently the largest sanctuary,
(13:43):
the most independent and well financed—they're hardly very well financed, but
they have a foundation, and politicsis very much a part of black religious
life, even in the early 19th century.
So no one is surprised that there isthis crossing of boundaries, 'cause maybe
those boundaries were always very porous.
Lindsay Chervinsky (14:04):
Well, to be sure, I think, you know, if we look at other
political figures and other churches,from, you know, the very beginning
of white settlement in North America,there's always that overlap between
who is a citizen and who is a churchmember, and then also places of power.
Martha Jones (14:19):
Yeah.
And I think to be transparent, I thinkpart of the misunderstanding about
the relationship between church andpolitics is the result of the way
historians drew lines that that reallyweren't, did not reflect, right,
lived experience or lived practice.
And so even when I'm doing some of theearliest work reflected in Vanguard
(14:40):
now, back in the 1990s, the work I wasdoing around someone like Jarena Lee
was called church History, and that wasa separate field from, say, political
history, and we have to work verydeliberately to wed those things and
to restore, for the record, the waysin which those things were intertwined.
(15:01):
Because previous generations of historianshad pulled them apart and called them
different fields and written aboutthem in separate books and journals.
So sometimes what we're wrestling withare questions about how to understand
the past, and sometimes we're tryingto wrestle with the way in which
historians before us have told the story.
Lindsay Chervinsky (15:20):
That's such an interesting point, and I think that
categorization applies to so manydifferent types of history because
we often think of social history asa separate category from political
history, and we know that our sociallives are never separate from politics
or, even in my own work, in my firstbook, I argued that we tend to treat
Washington— 'cause we are here at MountVernon— Washington the general as a
(15:42):
separate person than Washington thepresident, as though the experiences
in the first bucket didn't inform theexperiences and the second bucket.
I'm constantly pushing back onthat notion, arguing that humans
are 3D spherical characters, andwe can't separate one portion
of their lives from another.
Martha Jones (16:00):
The other thing that your work brings to mind, of course, is the
way in which women's history and womenwere for so long bracketed out as somehow
distinct from political history outside—and even outside of church history in
really now we would say curious ways.
And so I hope, what Vanguard accomplishesis restoring that more holistic vision
(16:23):
of what's happening for Black womenactivists in the 19th century, and
we're able to see, in fact, part of whatmakes them effective leaders is their
ability to move between the so-calledsacred realm and the secular realm.
You know, they are educators, theyare religious leaders, they are
political figures and individuals,and even organized individuals defy
(16:47):
those kinds of categorizations thatare sort of pseudo sociological.
And they deprive us, right, of seeingthe way women come to politics and
the way women are so important to thehistory of politics and leadership.
Lindsay Chervinsky (17:01):
It's so true, and as you were describing their activities,
that the skills that they refined in thechurch setting, and then demonstrated
their value, you called them leverage, butthings like fundraising and organizing,
and the ability to bring people together,understanding the essentialness of the
social element of the community, soaround a meal, bringing new people in.
(17:21):
Those skills translate really wellto politics, but they also translate
really well to leadership more broadly.
Martha Jones (17:28):
Mm-hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (17:28):
And I love that you describe them in that way and describe
them as leverage, because we so rarely,when we think of leadership, we so rarely
think of leverage in that particular way.
Or when we think of how did someonedevelop skills, we think about
previous leadership positions asopposed to the other things they've
done in their lives that maybeshaped them for those future things.
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Lindsay Chervinsky (18:40):
Jones pointed to the importance of Black women's
organizing during the Civil Warand the emergence of the Black
Women's club movement in the 1890s.
These organizational networks, she notes,created avenues for Black women to gain
leadership positions in their communities.
They preceeded the suffrage movement andhad goals that went far beyond just voting
rights, including activism around Blackwomen's access to safe forms of travel.
Martha Jones (19:05):
Now, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit, if it's okay,
Lindsay Chervinsky (19:08):
Please do.
Martha Jones (19:09):
To the middle of the century.
But to really understand, I think, forexample, how black women ultimately
do organize themselves around what weremember as women's suffrage as a distinct
movement, you have to know that duringthe Civil War, Black women are activated
through benevolent work, the supportof soldiers, the support of refugees.
(19:31):
They build regional networks thatliterally moves goods and money from
New England, for example, to this partof the country, where we have tens
of thousands of refugees in Virginiaand in the District of Columbia.
Well.
Those same networks don'tdisappear, even after the exigencies
(19:51):
of the war have dissipated.
They become reactivated and becomethe same networks that Black women
use to organize around votingrights in what we remember today
as the Black Women's club movement.
And so your point is so essential, whichis to say the kinds of ways of organizing,
fundraising, communicating and morethat Black women learn through the war
(20:14):
effort, they repurpose, if you will,into the building of a club movement that
does many things, including become thehome for their work on voting rights.
Lindsay Chervinsky (20:25):
One of the other things you talk about in the book is
some of the other goals in addition tovoting rights that they are exploring.
And one of the names that I thoughtwas so interesting, and I'd love for
you to tell us a little bit abouther is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
Martha Jones (20:37):
Mm-hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (20:37):
And there was this quote that you have that I think is so
powerful and it says, you white womenspeak of rights, I speak of wrongs.
And she was, I believe, if I'm rememberingcorrectly, that quote was in reference
to transportation and movement.
So how did these women leaders using theclub movement, using these connections,
how did they define their goals?
(20:58):
How did they pick the thingsthat they wanted to focus on?
Which is, you know, such anessential part of leadership.
It's defining a vision and gettingpeople to rally behind that vision.
Martha Jones (21:07):
Yeah.
Thank you for naming Frances EllenWatkins Harper, because I think
if I have one figure— actually myfirst book was titled after a speech
she gave, All Bound Up Together.
We are all bound up together in one greatbundle of humanity, she says in 1866.
Harper has been a poet, she has beenan anti-slavery lecturer, and by
(21:29):
the 1860s the post-war years, she'snow part of an old coalition that is
reconstituting itself, abolitionistsand early women's rights advocates.
And she comes to the 1866 meetingof what becomes the American
Equal Rights Association.
She's one of the very few Blackwomen present, I think the
(21:49):
only Black woman on the record.
And yes, you speak of rights, I speakof wrongs, because Harper is there to
say there are no voting rights, thereis no dignity, there are no voting
rights, if I cannot travel acrosstown or across the state or across
the nation without being molested.
(22:10):
And she is speaking for Black womenwho have been, and will continue even
certainly well after 1866, to highlightand focus women's rights questions
on a space called the ladies' car.
Right?
So the question is, are black womenladies, such that they can travel in
(22:30):
safety, they can travel in comfort,they can travel alongside white women,
and Harper knows the answer is no.
I would say nearly every womanin Vanguard in the 19th and into
the early 20th century, everyonehas a story about being molested,
ejected, harassed, while traveling.
And more pointedly what Harper issaying to women like Susan Anthony
(22:55):
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, andyou watch that happen, right?
Lindsay Chervinsky (22:58):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (22:59):
White women witness what happens to us.
They say nothing.
They do not intervene.
They do not come to us assisters to defend our right
to occupy the ladies' car.
White women are complicit in theindignities and the practices
that we come to call Jim Crow.
Harper does not carry the day, let'sput it that way, in these early years.
(23:22):
But she resets the terms andthey are terms that I think
really haunt the women's suffragemovement from that point forward.
Lindsay Chervinsky (23:30):
Such incredible political bravery, such incredible
personal bravery to be able tosay those things, which must have
been incredibly uncomfortable.
We know it's harder to say hardthings to people's face, and to
be able to say that just takessuch incredible political courage.
Martha Jones (23:44):
You know, one of the things about Harper is that
she's born in Baltimore in 1825.
We're in her anniversary year.
She's born free and part of a burgeoningfree Black community in Baltimore, an
orphan who's raised by an uncle who is aneducator, a minister, and an abolitionist,
and she leaves Baltimore ultimatelybecause she can't find work as a teacher.
(24:06):
And so she heads to Ohiowhere she is able to work.
But part of what's going on forFrances Harper is that she's taking
the gift, the talent, the skillthat she's developed as a poet, and
brought it to the political stage.
So how is she able tosay the difficult things?
I think this is part of our theme today.
Lindsay Chervinsky (24:27):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (24:27):
Maybe, right?
Lindsay Chervinsky (24:27):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (24:28):
Is that she takes those capacities, her capacity with language, to
say very difficult things in ways I don'tthink that are easy, but are eloquent.
Lindsay Chervinsky (24:38):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (24:39):
Uh uh, on a very high scale.
And in that way it almost is poetrywhen you read those speeches.
And you do have to wonder what it's likeif you are Frederick Douglass or you
know, Wendell Phillips, or Susan Anthonyand you're listening to Harper and
she's delivering a very tough message,but she's doing it with such, such
grace and such art that maybe you're alittle, you know, "ah!" At the same time.
Lindsay Chervinsky (25:05):
I wanted to hear more from Jones about one of
the most remarkable individualsto emerge as a leader from the
Black Women's club movement, thejournalist and activist Ida B. Wells.
Jones emphasized her tremendous abilityto pivot and remain flexible in the face
of difficult conditions— a leadershipskill, she suggests, still characterizes
many Black female leaders today.
(25:28):
It's such an incredible skill to beable to avoid the angry trope, which all
women have to be aware of, but especiallyBlack women have to be aware of.
Martha Jones (25:35):
Mm-hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (25:35):
And so to be able to deliver that message in a way that
does inspire awe, or at least reflectionis such an incredible artistic talent.
Martha Jones (25:44):
Yeah.
Lindsay Chervinsky (25:44):
So you talked about the schisms within the women's suffrage
movement, and I think this is a partof the American story, both between
different groups of women and then alsobetween different groups of men— this
is a big part of the Southern story,of how did the very elite plantation
white men in the South convince verypoor white men to go along with them.
(26:05):
And it's where do we draw our loyalties?
Where do we draw our communitiesand find those that we align with?
And one of the people that you talkabout who does such a remarkably
colorful job of driving a wedgethrough that is Ida B. Wells.
Martha Jones (26:19):
Hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (26:20):
Can you tell us a little bit about her?
Martha Jones (26:21):
Sure.
Ida B. Wells, southern bornwoman into a family facing
poverty, the death of parents.
A young educator who really cuts her teethpolitically when she is ejected from a
train for sitting in the ladies' car.
Long before she is a political figure,long before she is known publicly,
(26:42):
she's already fighting the fightthat Frances Harper has foregrounded.
Wells becomes a journalist.
She is the nation's foremostanti-lynching crusader in the latter
part of the 19th century, and sheis an unapologetic suffragist.
She's born in Tennessee but settles inChicago and there Wells is one of the
(27:05):
women who is going to be able to vote,I think in Illinois, maybe 19— I don't
wanna get it wrong, but before 19—
Lindsay Chervinsky (27:13):
That's okay.
We believe in acknowledgingwhen we don't remember dates.
Martha Jones (27:16):
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Lindsay Chervinsky: Historians are not Wikipedia. (27:17):
undefined
We are not the internet.
Martha Jones (27:21):
Thank you very much.
So with that, I'll say—
Lindsay Chervinsky (27:23):
She votes early.
We'll say it that way.
Martha Jones (27:24):
She votes early, before 1920, and she's part of
a community of women in Chicagowho after 1920 become staunch
Republican party members, operatives.
They raise money, they influencethe selection of candidates.
Now we're in the height of Jim Crow.
(27:44):
No Black man has gone to Congresssince 1901, but Wells and her organized
club women in Chicago are able to dothe thing that Black women voters do
until today, which is to use theirvote as a block to move the needle.
And in 1928, they will send Oscar DePriest to Congress from Chicago, the
(28:09):
first Black man to sit in Congress since1901, since the real landing of Jim Crow.
So Wells is a, a remarkable figure.
Who, well, we can't see heron the podcast, but Google her
'cause you'll appreciate, she justhas an extraordinary presence.
She's brilliant.
She's sharp tongue.
Her pen is sharper still.
(28:29):
She has a great appetite for fashion.
She raises a family and she faces herown share of disappointments because
there are men in her circles who donot think that a woman should be wholly
out front, should be wholly— she'sdisappointed by W.E.B. Du Bois around
the founding of the NAACP for example.
(28:50):
So she faces disappointments, butI think even today, Wells is well
remembered and well celebrated as oneof the great mothers of journalism.
Her anti- lynching bill, which metwith defeat and was ignored during
her lifetime, was finally seen throughvery, very recently by Kamala Harris,
(29:10):
while Harris was still in the Senate.
So we live with the legacies of Ida Wells.
When we study or explain the historyof lynching, we still use Ida Wells's
statistics because she was also akind of social scientist who, that
kind of journalist, who understoodin order to make the case against
(29:31):
lynching, she was also going to haveto document its fact, and she does,
and we use her numbers until today.
So she's someone worth knowing,'cause we know her, we just don't
realize that we know her, if you will.
Lindsay Chervinsky (29:43):
Yeah.
Or even like all of the differentways that one might know her, we—
maybe you learn about her reportingif you are taking a class and you
hear about her lynching reporting,but you don't necessarily see all the
different pieces that went into that.
Martha Jones (29:55):
And that's, I think one of the things that characterizes
the leadership that grows up inand around the Black Women's club
movement, is this versatility.
Wells knows how to move from one registerof leadership to another register of
leadership, to yet another, and she needsthat, in order to be effective, there are
doors that are gonna be closed to her.
(30:17):
There are gonna be avenuesthat she just cannot go down.
And so this capacity to pivot isessential for women of her generation.
And I still think it's a leadershipcharacteristic that we see
among Black women today, even.
Lindsay Chervinsky (30:32):
You used the word pivot, which I think is a great one.
There's a certain flexibility, almost likea, a realism to the approach of, if this
path won't work, I'll try another one.
Rather than being so ideologicallybent on, it must be this way.
The goal is more important than actuallywhich route you take to get there.
Martha Jones (30:50):
Yeah.
There are two consequences of that.
You know, on the one hand it runsvery counter, I think, to 21st century
ideas about professionalization, right?
Lindsay Chervinsky (30:58):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (30:58):
That you have to sort of choose a path and invest in that
path and build your reputation inthat path, and you have to follow
it to its logical or illogical end.
This is not a time where Black women aresaying, I am a this, or I am a that, or
I'm gonna be a this, I'm gonna be a that.
The question is, how doI get at the questions?
How do I get at the concerns I have?
(31:19):
And that may require me to workin a a range of ways over the
course of an active lifetime.
This has made it, I think, difficultto see Black women leaders as leaders
because they are not defined by singularvocations or by singular interests.
This certainly has confounded thehistory of Black women and the suffrage.
(31:42):
Which is to say, Dr. Rosalyn Terborg- Penngoes back and she literally has to recover
individual by individual, by individual,because Black women club movement
organizers didn't have an organizationthat said suffrage in its title.
Lindsay Chervinsky (31:55):
Wow.
Martha Jones (31:55):
Right.
You might overlook them all together.
But you have to dig deeper.
We know how to do that.
And when you dig deeper, you not onlydiscover there's a suffrage department
within the National Association of ColoredWomen's Clubs, but that many of the women
like Ida Wells are very much in line withthe interests of women's suffrage, even
(32:16):
as they're not a part of the suffrageorganizations that are labeled as such.
So that kind of overlooking womenleaders because they don't wear,
I don't know, the lapel pin.
Lindsay Chervinsky (32:27):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (32:27):
That says "I am a suffragist."
Lindsay Chervinsky (32:29):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (32:29):
Because Wells was a suffragist and a great deal more.
Lindsay Chervinsky (32:32):
One of my themes for the last year has been that we write
history based on the questions we ask,and we often ask questions based on our
own experiences and what we've seen.
And it strikes me that in that exampleyou just gave, you can't necessarily
find these people in their impact ifyou're not asking the right questions,
which is why I don't think of, youknow, new generations of history as
(32:55):
being revisionist so much as they arebringing new questions to the table.
And that might get at stories that wewouldn't have necessarily seen before.
Jones emphasized the importance of howasking new questions and persistent
research in the face of initialdiscouragement helps us uncover
stories about Black women's leadershipin places we might not expect it.
(33:16):
Because the Black women's suffragemovement was ultimately not successful
in 1920, it might be easy for us todismiss, but Jones' work shows how
moments of disappointment can reveal newstories about leadership and resilience.
Martha Jones (33:30):
And this is absolutely true in Vanguard.
We started with Jarena Lee, whowould go looking for the origins of
a story about Black women's politicsand political leadership in church?
But I think that years ago, uh,there's a line from the historian
Mary Ryan, and Ryan urged us toseek out women in unexpected places.
(33:54):
It was a view about women's history,which is that it was right in front
of us, but it wasn't marked as such.
And we shouldn't be misled, eitherby the histories or by the archives
that say there's nothing here for you.
And it was certainly true in my earlywork that I visited church archives and
(34:15):
was told there's nothing here for you.
I went to the records of Black politicalconventions and the received wisdom
was, there's nothing here for you.
So what is it about us?
That there are moments in which we arepersistent and we are dogged, and we
don't defer to the received wisdom.
I think over the last generations, we'vetaught so many, of course, students and
(34:39):
readers, but we've also taught generationsof archivists and librarians about what
they have because we hang around and say,you know, I'm gonna have a look anyway.
I know you said there was nothinghere for me, but I, I'm gonna
spend a couple of days here.
And then you're able to show therichness, the complexity, the nuances
of a collection that perhaps hadn'tbeen labeled as women's history.
(35:04):
And that opens the doors for yourown work, but it also opens the
doors for work that comes behind you.
And it's incredibly exciting.
Lindsay Chervinsky (35:13):
It is.
Two of the themes we often talk about withleadership are both learning from history,
and the importance of learning fromwhat has become before us, and learning
from failure, or learning from defeat.
And I'd love for you to talk about howsome of these figures, you know, you
intentionally style this a 200 year story,and for most of the 200 years, I'm sure
(35:33):
that a lot of people felt like a wholelot of progress was not being made, or
maybe one step forward, two steps back.
Martha Jones (35:39):
Mm-hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (35:39):
How did generations of Black women leaders learn from
the defeats that they saw in theirpast, and how did they bring that
to their next generation of efforts?
Martha Jones (35:49):
Yeah, well.
For this, I think we should goback to 1920 because I think by any
measure, 1920 is a disappointmentand maybe a defeat for Black women.
And what to do.
Well, we have the NationalAssociation of Colored Women's Clubs.
Its leader is a woman fromOhio, Hallie Quinn Brown.
And Hallie Quinn Brown hadbegun her life as an educator.
(36:12):
She taught at Wilberforce College inOhio, but by 1920 she is the president of
this association of Black women's clubs,and she's charged with taking stock of
what has not happened for Black women.
And she's also charged nowwith charting a way forward.
Her first idea, and it's one that'sshared by other members of the club
(36:35):
Women community, is that perhaps now thatthe 19th Amendment is done some of the
leading lights of the suffrage movementlike Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul
might link arms with Black women to drivetoward federal legislation that would
really give teeth to the 19th Amendment.
The club women go so far as to senddelegation in the winter of 1921 to the
(37:00):
meeting of Alice Paul's National Woman'sParty, and they're there basically to
lobby Paul, because Paul is a troubledkind of figure in the history of Black
women in the vote, but she's, youknow, she's a darn good organizer.
She's a force.
And again, they are disappointed.
Paul, we don't know exactly whatPaul says, but we know she begins to
(37:21):
fold up the National Woman's Partyand she moves on to the Equal Rights
Amendment, even as she knows Blackwomen are still being disenfranchised.
Disappointment.
And so, I think it's astunning moment, right?
But one in which Hallie Quinn Brownand the women around her believe
that they know enough and believethat they have the savvy and the
(37:43):
scale to build a next chapter.
And interestingly, their allies,perhaps more so than any other
moment in the history of this story,their allies become men because
Black men are also disenfranchised.
Lindsay Chervinsky (37:57):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (37:58):
And we know that the modern Civil Rights movement, which is run
through with its own gender dynamics,is a movement in which Black women are
everything from leaders, architects,strategists, to foot soldiers, and more.
And that is a reflection of the clubwomen's pivot, right, to another
(38:19):
kind of movement for voting rights.
One that is from its inceptionintended to speak both to the
interests of men and women.
I don't know if that's, youknow, lemonade out of lemons.
I don't wanna trivialize it, but it'sto say that, you know I think that the
women in the Vanguard story are not onlyeffective and skilled in all the ways that
(38:41):
we've touched on, they have for a verylong time believed that they were right.
You know that there reallyis no democracy, right?
If large swaths of our body politic,or potential members of our body—
body politic are excluded, theyare really champions of vision for
democracy that is quite a distance fromwhere American democracy had begun.
(39:04):
They are the standard bearers forthe view that politics should neither
countenance racism nor sexism.
Well, today maybe that, I hope thatstill sounds like a a, a rather, um.
You know, obvious point, but theyremind us that for most of our
history, that was hardly a given.
That was hardly an obvious creed, and theyare the people who really land on that
(39:28):
view very early and never put it down.
Lindsay Chervinsky (39:32):
There's such a resilience in this story that seems
to come from just a righteous beliefin their rightness, as you said.
And I'm wondering if that's— one of thegoals that we're always trying to do
with this podcast is say, okay, thereare these famous people in history,
some that you might know better thanothers, but there are elements from
their story that we can bring to ourlives that we can inspire to make better
(39:53):
choices ourselves or to inspire others.
Is that persistence, is thatrighteousness something that you try
and bring to your own day-to-day life?
What do you learn from them, and whatcan people learn from them and bring to
their own challenges and their own momentswhere perhaps a resilience is needed?
Martha Jones (40:11):
When we talk about righteousness or a firm and strongly
held belief or values, I thinkit's important to say these are
commitments that are hard won, right?
These are not, I woke up thismorning and thought this would be
a good way to run the world, right?
That partly I think that resolutenesscomes by having been tested
(40:35):
again and again, in my story,frankly, across generations.
And that means these are time tested.
They are tested literally in successivegenerations, and at enough moments
in time, they get a, I don't knowif traction is the right word,
but there's affirmation, right?
There are moments in which thewomen in Vanguard are affirmed
(40:58):
from folks beyond their owncommunity, beyond their own circles.
And so, I think that's, isn'tthat part of leadership, right?
Is recognizing fellow travelerswhen you encounter them.
Learning how to build coalitionswhen you can, learning how
to bring people on board.
That is one of the signature capacitiesof the modern Civil Rights generation,
(41:21):
is that ability to bring folks on boardwho may not have always seen their
interests as wedded to the interests ofBlack Americans, but that is hard won.
That is a hard won set of values,time tested values, which might be
different than how we think about manysorts of things on many kinds of days.
Lindsay Chervinsky (41:42):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (41:42):
They're inherited, right?
Lindsay Chervinsky (41:43):
Yeah.
Martha Jones (41:43):
They're inherited.
Lindsay Chervinsky (41:44):
So our penultimate question is, you know, we have a
great audience of listeners andthey like to find inspiration
in lots of different places.
What is a book that can be on leadership,or can be about someone who inspired you
in a way that they were a leader, thatmight prove inspirational to others?
Martha Jones (42:01):
So I'm gonna mention a book, it might surprise you,
because it's not a work of history.
It's Michelle Obama's Becoming.
Lindsay Chervinsky (42:09):
Mm.
Martha Jones (42:09):
And you know, I mention that book in part because I think Mrs.
Obama offers us a model of leadershipthat is less conventional, more nimble
and versatile than many that we know.
And Becoming is a memoir.
It is a very personal story abouta woman's journey to leadership.
(42:34):
Reluctant.
Lindsay Chervinsky (42:35):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (42:36):
I might add, journey to leadership.
And I think we need those stories becausemost of us come to leadership challenges
as you know, the human beings that we are.
And I think her book allowed me tohold on to my humanness in all its
(42:56):
complexity and still to understandthat I had a role to play in, you
know, my community and my university.
And I think in our moment where,if I could say, we are, so much
of the world feels unforgiving.
I think that forgiving ourselves forbeing human and then seeing the capacity
(43:19):
that we have as flawed human beings tobecome leaders in our own ways and in
our own worlds, is a powerful message.
And so Michelle Obama'sBecoming is my book today.
Lindsay Chervinsky (43:30):
I love that because you know, so often we think of leadership
and we think of the Napoleonic convictionthat you are supposed to be a great man
and you're born with that conviction,and if you don't have that conviction,
then you are not destined to be a leader.
What I love about that example isthat you can be very reluctant, you
can want nothing to do with it, andyet you can still inspire others.
(43:51):
And that is a powerfullyhuman message, for sure.
So our last question, and I suspectyou'll give an answer that's different
than most other people as well, whichI love, which is, you know, we are here
at Mount Vernon and of course we're theGeorge Washington Presidential Library.
So when you think of George Washingtonin leadership, what do you think of?
Martha Jones (44:08):
When I think of George Washington in leadership, I think that
Washington's example, not only as ageneral and not only as a president,
but as a man, invites us, insiststhat we trouble, right, the idealized
requirement, the requirement thatleaders must be idealized, that leaders
(44:28):
must be unassailed and unassailable.
I arrived here earlier today, andnot by design, the first thing that
caught my eye as I was coming in inthe car, was the marker for Ona Judge.
And I thought to myself, wow.
That's the first thingI saw at Mount Vernon.
So that's a reflection on thisplace and the journey of this place,
(44:49):
but I think it's a call to us tohold those things together, right?
That we have to hold GeorgeWashington and Ona Judge together,
and they are part of the same worldand the same story, our story.
I'm somebody who believeswe are capable of that.
I know we live in a time where there isa fear of history, a fear that difficult
(45:10):
history will compromise us or undermineus, and I just don't believe that.
I believe that we have a capacity to holdthose two people, those two stories and
the complexity and the difficulty and morethat that embodies as one American story.
Lindsay Chervinsky (45:26):
I also think it makes us better.
It makes us stronger.
It doesn't make us weaker.
That is the hill I will die on today.
Martha Jones (45:32):
Mm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (45:32):
Thank you so much for this conversation.
This was so thoughtful and Ialways learn so much from your
work and I'm really looking forwardto our conversation tonight.
Martha Jones (45:40):
Thank you so much.
Lindsay Chervinsky (45:44):
Thank you for joining us this week on Leadership
and Legacy, and thank you so muchagain to our guest, Dr. Martha Jones.
You can find her books wherever you liketo support local bookstores or online.
I'm your host, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky.
Leadership and Legacy (45:58):
Conversations at the George Washington Presidential
Library is the production of theMount Vernon Ladies' Association
and Primary Source Media.
In the spirit of George Washington'sleadership, we feature the perspectives of
leaders from across industries and fields.
As such, the thoughts expressed in thispodcast are solely the views of our
guests and do not reflect the opinionsof the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.
(46:21):
This podcast is made possible with thegenerous support of Wes and Stacey Smith.
To learn more about Washington'sleadership example, or to find out
how you can bring your team to theGeorge Washington Presidential Library,
visit GW leadership institute.org.
Or, to find more great podcastsfrom Mount Vernon, visit
George Washington podcast.com.
(46:42):
You can also explore the work of PrimarySource Media at primarysourcemedia.com.
Join us in two weeks forour next great conversation.
What can we learn about leadership from
Black Women's Fight for equality?
Welcome to Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington (00:06):
undefined
Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.
I'm Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky,director of the library.
In this podcast series, we talk withexperts about leadership and history,
how studying these stories helpsus understand our current moment,
and how we can apply lessons fromleaders in the past to our own lives.
(00:29):
Today I'm joined by Dr. Martha S. Jones,a writer, historian, legal scholar,
and public intellectual whose work isdevoted to understanding the politics,
culture, and poetics of Black America.
She's a professor at Johns HopkinsUniversity in the History department
and the SNF Agora Institute.
She's the author of several books,including her most recent, the
(00:49):
Trouble of Color, which is anexploration of her family's history
and her efforts to uncover it.
I hosted Dr. Jones at the GeorgeWashington Presidential Library
in March to discuss that book.
But while she was here, I wantedto talk with her about her previous
publication Vanguard, which covers Blackwomen's efforts to secure the vote.
Here's my conversation with Martha Jones.
(01:10):
Well, thank you so much for being here.
I'm so thrilled to have this conversationand really looking forward to talking with
you tonight about your new excellent book,Trouble of Color in front of our audience.
I think the Mount Vernon communitywill really get a lot from it.
But you've written so many books, Icouldn't miss the opportunity to talk
about your previous work, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the (01:27):
undefined
Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.
So I'm wondering if we could, froma starting place, kind of just
explain, what's that story aboutand why you wanted to tell it?
Martha Jones (01:41):
First of all, thanks for having me.
You know, Vanguard was avery intentional book for me.
I knew as a lot of us did that in 2020,we'd be marking 100 years since the
ratification of the 19th Amendment, theso-called women's suffrage amendment.
I knew that there would be, in a way,a very unique, maybe unprecedented
(02:01):
opportunity to talk about women's history,to talk about women and voting rights.
Lindsay Chervinsky (02:06):
This work felt particularly important to highlight on
the podcast for a couple of reasons.
First, leadership exists in lots ofdifferent places and forms, and I
think we can learn from all of them.
Second, over the course of history,Black women endured generations
of disappointments, punctured bymoments of hope and achievement,
often followed by retrenchment.
(02:27):
Dr. Jones has a rare ability to sharethis history in unflinching detail while
weaving in a thread of hope and optimism.
Martha Jones (02:35):
I worried that African American women might be sidelined or
given short shrift in that discussion.
So could I write a book that would tell200 years of Black women's political
activism, including their strugglesfor voting rights, that I could
put in the hands of journalists andmuseum curators, students, and more?
(03:00):
Folks who were looking for the one book.
Maybe they'd then dig into thefootnotes and read the syllabus.
But I really wanted there to be onebook that I could put on the table and
say "this too is part of the story."
The other origin point is that I ama student of some of the historians
who really break the mold onthe history of women's suffrage.
(03:21):
In particular, the late RosalynTerborg- Penn, whose dissertation
turned book had really openedup the field in a dramatic way.
I work in her tradition and under hertutelage in this book, looking to dig
deeply into the distinct and the uniquestories of Black women in voting, rights.
(03:42):
And it's not giving too much away, Idon't think, to say I originally thought
it was a book that would conventionallyend in 1920 with the ratification
of the 19th Amendment, and only as Imyself went deeper did I realize that
I was gonna have to tell a story thatcame forward all the way to 1965,
because that in fact was the definingyear for Black women in voting rights.
(04:05):
1920 had been a disappointment.
Lindsay Chervinsky (04:07):
Well, I think it's amazing that you set this
goal for this particular yearand then actually achieved it.
Because I think so often we have theseideas about anniversaries and how
they might be opportunities for us toshare work, but actually doing it is
another thing and is quite impressive.
And as you were referring to the endof that story about why you had to
push it forward, I do think that'ssuch an important part of the story
(04:28):
because in some ways, you know, ofcourse the 19th Amendment was this
crowning moment of achievement, butit was very much a bittersweet moment.
And before we dig into some of thefigures that you talk about, could
you share why it was a bittersweetachievement and why it wasn't the end of
the story and why it took another fourdecades to actually come to fruition?
Martha Jones (04:46):
Sure.
As we look into the congressionaldebates and then the ratification
debates that surround that moment, whenthe 19th Amendment becomes part of the
Constitution in August of 1920, it isapparent that nearly everyone connected
with the 19th Amendment understandsthat nothing in the amendment will
(05:08):
prevent individual states from usingthe same laws and the same tactics
that had long been disenfranchisingAfrican-American men, would now be used
to disenfranchise African-American women.
Now, there are two qualifiers here.
One is that of course there are placesin the US where women, including Black
women, are voting even before 1920.
(05:29):
California, Illinois, New York.
So this is a very uneven terrain when itcomes to women's voting rights and Black
women's voting rights in particular.
And it is also true that in 1920 there areBlack women who organize, who register,
who cast ballots, some of them underharrowing conditions, but they do vote.
(05:50):
But by the fall, the late fall of 1920,when Black women look around, what
they see is a patchwork, a politicalpatchwork, where in too many places
they have been unable to cast ballots.
And this means that in essence,they need to build a new movement
for voting rights, a movement thatgives teeth to the 15th Amendment.
(06:12):
We have to remember, 1870, the 15thAmendment, which prohibits the states
from using race as a voting rightscriteria, and the 19th Amendment, which
prohibits the states from using sex.
And so it turns out this major chapterin the history of women and the
vote really is inaugurated in 1920.
And we follow Black women throughthe campaigns that cHallienge the
(06:36):
Constitution itself through campaignsat the grassroots that organize
the modern Civil Rights movement.
And Black women who continue wherethey can and as they can to use
the ballot to move the needle onelection day, that is a story that
takes another five, six decades.
My math is terrible today,but it takes a very long time.
Till 1965.
(06:57):
Oh, it takes 45 years.
Lindsay Chervinsky (06:59):
So I'd love to talk about some of the actual individuals that
were spearheading— I mean, I really do—I always think of this as very much a
collective action, but in any collectiveaction, there are people who are
dictating strategy or are out front or areencouraging in a lot of different ways.
And I was looking back at some of thereviews of the book, and I loved that
the New York Times described Vanguard asa rebuke of our obsession with firsts.
Martha Jones (07:21):
Hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (07:21):
I thought that was so interesting.
I think what they were saying is thatyour work is encouraging us to reject
maybe the people that we've heard of firstand instead to dig deeper and to look at
whose shoulders they were standing on.
So one of the names that really jumpedout at me, and I'm hoping I pronounce
her name correctly, and pleasetell me if I'm not, is Jarena Lee.
And so I'm wondering if you could tellus a little bit about her and some of the
(07:42):
very unique cHallienges she faced as awoman trying to assume a leadership role.
Martha Jones (07:48):
Mm. I'm so glad you asked about Jarena Lee because her
presence at really at the beginning ofthe story I tell in Vanguard surprises
many readers because she's not a womanof politics, she's a woman of faith.
Lindsay Chervinsky (08:02):
Jones emphasized that many Black women, like Jarena Lee, came to
political leadership through the church.
In a world where women werediscouraged from taking public roles,
establishing religious authorityhelped them to claim a source of power
beyond the everyday secular realm.
And it didn't hurt that Black women formedthe majority of many congregations and
already filled crucial organizational andfundraising roles in these communities.
Martha Jones (08:28):
And yet part of the way I came to understand the route
that black women take to a concernlike voting rights is indeed through
church, is indeed through struggleswithin their faith communities around
power and who holds office and whocan vote, and who controls the keys to
the sanctuary, who decides what musicis played during worship and more.
(08:52):
And Jarena Lee really embodies that.
Because she is, as she tellsit in her own memoir, compelled
by a call from God to preach.
She understands, and if she didn'tunderstand, she is told unapologetically
that that is a role that a woman shouldnot occupy, and her spiritual journey
(09:13):
is one that I think in some senseshares qualities with all kinds of
spiritual narratives (09:18):
her confrontation with the devil, her doubts, and more.
But there is another layer, and thelayer is the men in the A ME church,
the African Methodist Episcopal Church,who don't see a place for her and see
her preaching as nearly heretical.
The thing about Jarena Lee is thatshe's a great preacher, which is to
(09:40):
say she can command a crowd, she canmesmerize a sanctuary, she can bring
converts, right, to baptism, and more.
And so it is a cHallienge for the menin her denomination to reject her.
And so there is a awkward accordarrived at, and what that means is
(10:01):
that she becomes visible to so manyother women in the A ME church.
She becomes someone who inspiresgenerations, now, of women, and they
take in part from her the courageto be faith leaders themselves.
But they also take the lessons ofthose struggles within church into the
realm of politics, and they now wantto be seated in political conventions.
(10:25):
They now want to be regardedas members of the body politic.
They want to lead.
And that is a companion struggle acrossthe 19th century for Black women,
struggles within the church and struggleswithin the secular realm that are really
fueling and informing one another.
And Jarena Lee really sets that off.
And then she does that wonderful thingthat we as historians really appreciate.
(10:48):
She puts it to paper and wecan, and we can read that.
We can read that and understandfrom her vantage point what
those struggles were about.
Lindsay Chervinsky (10:57):
I love when they actually tell us what they're thinking.
Martha Jones (10:59):
Mm-hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (10:59):
It's so nice when we don't have to actually read between
the lines and it's right there for us.
Martha Jones (11:03):
Absolutely.
Lindsay Chervinsky (11:03):
In one place.
There's so many threads Iwanna pull on in that answer.
As I was reading about this, oneof the rebukes that I think she
faced was this criticism that womenwho stepped to positions of power,
including in the church, were akin todrunkards because they were leaving
their responsibilities at home.
And I don't know that I had everseen it put so bluntly before.
Martha Jones (11:24):
Mm-hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (11:25):
So what I'm wondering about, because this intersection between
faith and politics, I think is sofascinating and it's one that perhaps
people are familiar with male figureslike Martin Luther King Jr, and the
importance of the church, and I would sayeven the importance of the church today.
We have the, what is it, the pewsto the polls movement to get out the
vote in in particular communities.
Was there an argument that if womenwere gonna be in public life, church
(11:48):
was a safe place to do it becausethey were demonstrating either
their faith or their holiness?
Was there something about church thatprovided them an opportunity that other
public spaces were more closed in first?
Martha Jones (12:00):
Mm. Well, to go back to Jarena Lee on this point,
Jarena Lee says, I'm not hereby way of some manmade impulse.
I'm here because God called me to be here.
That's pretty powerful stuff.
Lindsay Chervinsky (12:12):
It's also probably hard to argue.
Martha Jones (12:13):
Yeah.
Well, you know, people do argue withit and that people doubt her calling,
but she believes herself called.
And so there's a way in which I thinkwhat we might call authenticity in
the church realm and authority in thechurch realm comes not from men, right?
It comes from God.
And Lee tells anyone who willlisten that her calling is from God.
(12:33):
I think the other explanation for howit is that Black women center so much of
their early political work in the churchis that they outnumber men in the pews.
They are the fundraisers.
They have a kind of leverage because itis not possible in early Black Baptist
or Methodist congregations to imagine asuccessful faith community, if the church
(12:58):
women aren't with you, behind you, raisingthe money, building the church edifice,
serving the meal, all of the things.
And so women have a kind ofleverage that they have earned.
And later in the century, theinheritors of Jarena Lee's work will
say as much, which is we earned this.
(13:19):
We are not only talented, we are notonly called by— but we have earned this.
And then the last thing I'll say is,and it connects to your point about
the way we understand the relationshipbetween church and politics in
the modern Civil Rights movement.
And, it's true in the 19th century,that the Black church, and that's
hardly a monolith, but Black churchesare frequently the largest sanctuary,
(13:43):
the most independent and well financed—they're hardly very well financed, but
they have a foundation, and politicsis very much a part of black religious
life, even in the early 19th century.
So no one is surprised that there isthis crossing of boundaries, 'cause maybe
those boundaries were always very porous.
Lindsay Chervinsky (14:04):
Well, to be sure, I think, you know, if we look at other
political figures and other churches,from, you know, the very beginning
of white settlement in North America,there's always that overlap between
who is a citizen and who is a churchmember, and then also places of power.
Martha Jones (14:19):
Yeah.
And I think to be transparent, I thinkpart of the misunderstanding about
the relationship between church andpolitics is the result of the way
historians drew lines that that reallyweren't, did not reflect, right,
lived experience or lived practice.
And so even when I'm doing some of theearliest work reflected in Vanguard
(14:40):
now, back in the 1990s, the work I wasdoing around someone like Jarena Lee
was called church History, and that wasa separate field from, say, political
history, and we have to work verydeliberately to wed those things and
to restore, for the record, the waysin which those things were intertwined.
(15:01):
Because previous generations of historianshad pulled them apart and called them
different fields and written aboutthem in separate books and journals.
So sometimes what we're wrestling withare questions about how to understand
the past, and sometimes we're tryingto wrestle with the way in which
historians before us have told the story.
Lindsay Chervinsky (15:20):
That's such an interesting point, and I think that
categorization applies to so manydifferent types of history because
we often think of social history asa separate category from political
history, and we know that our sociallives are never separate from politics
or, even in my own work, in my firstbook, I argued that we tend to treat
Washington— 'cause we are here at MountVernon— Washington the general as a
(15:42):
separate person than Washington thepresident, as though the experiences
in the first bucket didn't inform theexperiences and the second bucket.
I'm constantly pushing back onthat notion, arguing that humans
are 3D spherical characters, andwe can't separate one portion
of their lives from another.
Martha Jones (16:00):
The other thing that your work brings to mind, of course, is the
way in which women's history and womenwere for so long bracketed out as somehow
distinct from political history outside—and even outside of church history in
really now we would say curious ways.
And so I hope, what Vanguard accomplishesis restoring that more holistic vision
(16:23):
of what's happening for Black womenactivists in the 19th century, and
we're able to see, in fact, part of whatmakes them effective leaders is their
ability to move between the so-calledsacred realm and the secular realm.
You know, they are educators, theyare religious leaders, they are
political figures and individuals,and even organized individuals defy
(16:47):
those kinds of categorizations thatare sort of pseudo sociological.
And they deprive us, right, of seeingthe way women come to politics and
the way women are so important to thehistory of politics and leadership.
Lindsay Chervinsky (17:01):
It's so true, and as you were describing their activities,
that the skills that they refined in thechurch setting, and then demonstrated
their value, you called them leverage, butthings like fundraising and organizing,
and the ability to bring people together,understanding the essentialness of the
social element of the community, soaround a meal, bringing new people in.
(17:21):
Those skills translate really wellto politics, but they also translate
really well to leadership more broadly.
Martha Jones (17:28):
Mm-hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (17:28):
And I love that you describe them in that way and describe
them as leverage, because we so rarely,when we think of leadership, we so rarely
think of leverage in that particular way.
Or when we think of how did someonedevelop skills, we think about
previous leadership positions asopposed to the other things they've
done in their lives that maybeshaped them for those future things.
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Lindsay Chervinsky (18:40):
Jones pointed to the importance of Black women's
organizing during the Civil Warand the emergence of the Black
Women's club movement in the 1890s.
These organizational networks, she notes,created avenues for Black women to gain
leadership positions in their communities.
They preceeded the suffrage movement andhad goals that went far beyond just voting
rights, including activism around Blackwomen's access to safe forms of travel.
Martha Jones (19:05):
Now, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit, if it's okay,
Lindsay Chervinsky (19:08):
Please do.
Martha Jones (19:09):
To the middle of the century.
But to really understand, I think, forexample, how black women ultimately
do organize themselves around what weremember as women's suffrage as a distinct
movement, you have to know that duringthe Civil War, Black women are activated
through benevolent work, the supportof soldiers, the support of refugees.
(19:31):
They build regional networks thatliterally moves goods and money from
New England, for example, to this partof the country, where we have tens
of thousands of refugees in Virginiaand in the District of Columbia.
Well.
Those same networks don'tdisappear, even after the exigencies
(19:51):
of the war have dissipated.
They become reactivated and becomethe same networks that Black women
use to organize around votingrights in what we remember today
as the Black Women's club movement.
And so your point is so essential, whichis to say the kinds of ways of organizing,
fundraising, communicating and morethat Black women learn through the war
(20:14):
effort, they repurpose, if you will,into the building of a club movement that
does many things, including become thehome for their work on voting rights.
Lindsay Chervinsky (20:25):
One of the other things you talk about in the book is
some of the other goals in addition tovoting rights that they are exploring.
And one of the names that I thoughtwas so interesting, and I'd love for
you to tell us a little bit abouther is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
Martha Jones (20:37):
Mm-hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (20:37):
And there was this quote that you have that I think is so
powerful and it says, you white womenspeak of rights, I speak of wrongs.
And she was, I believe, if I'm rememberingcorrectly, that quote was in reference
to transportation and movement.
So how did these women leaders using theclub movement, using these connections,
how did they define their goals?
(20:58):
How did they pick the thingsthat they wanted to focus on?
Which is, you know, such anessential part of leadership.
It's defining a vision and gettingpeople to rally behind that vision.
Martha Jones (21:07):
Yeah.
Thank you for naming Frances EllenWatkins Harper, because I think
if I have one figure— actually myfirst book was titled after a speech
she gave, All Bound Up Together.
We are all bound up together in one greatbundle of humanity, she says in 1866.
Harper has been a poet, she has beenan anti-slavery lecturer, and by
(21:29):
the 1860s the post-war years, she'snow part of an old coalition that is
reconstituting itself, abolitionistsand early women's rights advocates.
And she comes to the 1866 meetingof what becomes the American
Equal Rights Association.
She's one of the very few Blackwomen present, I think the
(21:49):
only Black woman on the record.
And yes, you speak of rights, I speakof wrongs, because Harper is there to
say there are no voting rights, thereis no dignity, there are no voting
rights, if I cannot travel acrosstown or across the state or across
the nation without being molested.
(22:10):
And she is speaking for Black womenwho have been, and will continue even
certainly well after 1866, to highlightand focus women's rights questions
on a space called the ladies' car.
Right?
So the question is, are black womenladies, such that they can travel in
(22:30):
safety, they can travel in comfort,they can travel alongside white women,
and Harper knows the answer is no.
I would say nearly every womanin Vanguard in the 19th and into
the early 20th century, everyonehas a story about being molested,
ejected, harassed, while traveling.
And more pointedly what Harper issaying to women like Susan Anthony
(22:55):
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, andyou watch that happen, right?
Lindsay Chervinsky (22:58):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (22:59):
White women witness what happens to us.
They say nothing.
They do not intervene.
They do not come to us assisters to defend our right
to occupy the ladies' car.
White women are complicit in theindignities and the practices
that we come to call Jim Crow.
Harper does not carry the day, let'sput it that way, in these early years.
(23:22):
But she resets the terms andthey are terms that I think
really haunt the women's suffragemovement from that point forward.
Lindsay Chervinsky (23:30):
Such incredible political bravery, such incredible
personal bravery to be able tosay those things, which must have
been incredibly uncomfortable.
We know it's harder to say hardthings to people's face, and to
be able to say that just takessuch incredible political courage.
Martha Jones (23:44):
You know, one of the things about Harper is that
she's born in Baltimore in 1825.
We're in her anniversary year.
She's born free and part of a burgeoningfree Black community in Baltimore, an
orphan who's raised by an uncle who is aneducator, a minister, and an abolitionist,
and she leaves Baltimore ultimatelybecause she can't find work as a teacher.
(24:06):
And so she heads to Ohiowhere she is able to work.
But part of what's going on forFrances Harper is that she's taking
the gift, the talent, the skillthat she's developed as a poet, and
brought it to the political stage.
So how is she able tosay the difficult things?
I think this is part of our theme today.
Lindsay Chervinsky (24:27):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (24:27):
Maybe, right?
Lindsay Chervinsky (24:27):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (24:28):
Is that she takes those capacities, her capacity with language, to
say very difficult things in ways I don'tthink that are easy, but are eloquent.
Lindsay Chervinsky (24:38):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (24:39):
Uh uh, on a very high scale.
And in that way it almost is poetrywhen you read those speeches.
And you do have to wonder what it's likeif you are Frederick Douglass or you
know, Wendell Phillips, or Susan Anthonyand you're listening to Harper and
she's delivering a very tough message,but she's doing it with such, such
grace and such art that maybe you're alittle, you know, "ah!" At the same time.
Lindsay Chervinsky (25:05):
I wanted to hear more from Jones about one of
the most remarkable individualsto emerge as a leader from the
Black Women's club movement, thejournalist and activist Ida B. Wells.
Jones emphasized her tremendous abilityto pivot and remain flexible in the face
of difficult conditions— a leadershipskill, she suggests, still characterizes
many Black female leaders today.
(25:28):
It's such an incredible skill to beable to avoid the angry trope, which all
women have to be aware of, but especiallyBlack women have to be aware of.
Martha Jones (25:35):
Mm-hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (25:35):
And so to be able to deliver that message in a way that
does inspire awe, or at least reflectionis such an incredible artistic talent.
Martha Jones (25:44):
Yeah.
Lindsay Chervinsky (25:44):
So you talked about the schisms within the women's suffrage
movement, and I think this is a partof the American story, both between
different groups of women and then alsobetween different groups of men— this
is a big part of the Southern story,of how did the very elite plantation
white men in the South convince verypoor white men to go along with them.
(26:05):
And it's where do we draw our loyalties?
Where do we draw our communitiesand find those that we align with?
And one of the people that you talkabout who does such a remarkably
colorful job of driving a wedgethrough that is Ida B. Wells.
Martha Jones (26:19):
Hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (26:20):
Can you tell us a little bit about her?
Martha Jones (26:21):
Sure.
Ida B. Wells, southern bornwoman into a family facing
poverty, the death of parents.
A young educator who really cuts her teethpolitically when she is ejected from a
train for sitting in the ladies' car.
Long before she is a political figure,long before she is known publicly,
(26:42):
she's already fighting the fightthat Frances Harper has foregrounded.
Wells becomes a journalist.
She is the nation's foremostanti-lynching crusader in the latter
part of the 19th century, and sheis an unapologetic suffragist.
She's born in Tennessee but settles inChicago and there Wells is one of the
(27:05):
women who is going to be able to vote,I think in Illinois, maybe 19— I don't
wanna get it wrong, but before 19—
Lindsay Chervinsky (27:13):
That's okay.
We believe in acknowledgingwhen we don't remember dates.
Martha Jones (27:16):
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Lindsay Chervinsky: Historians are not Wikipedia. (27:17):
undefined
We are not the internet.
Martha Jones (27:21):
Thank you very much.
So with that, I'll say—
Lindsay Chervinsky (27:23):
She votes early.
We'll say it that way.
Martha Jones (27:24):
She votes early, before 1920, and she's part of
a community of women in Chicagowho after 1920 become staunch
Republican party members, operatives.
They raise money, they influencethe selection of candidates.
Now we're in the height of Jim Crow.
(27:44):
No Black man has gone to Congresssince 1901, but Wells and her organized
club women in Chicago are able to dothe thing that Black women voters do
until today, which is to use theirvote as a block to move the needle.
And in 1928, they will send Oscar DePriest to Congress from Chicago, the
(28:09):
first Black man to sit in Congress since1901, since the real landing of Jim Crow.
So Wells is a, a remarkable figure.
Who, well, we can't see heron the podcast, but Google her
'cause you'll appreciate, she justhas an extraordinary presence.
She's brilliant.
She's sharp tongue.
Her pen is sharper still.
(28:29):
She has a great appetite for fashion.
She raises a family and she faces herown share of disappointments because
there are men in her circles who donot think that a woman should be wholly
out front, should be wholly— she'sdisappointed by W.E.B. Du Bois around
the founding of the NAACP for example.
(28:50):
So she faces disappointments, butI think even today, Wells is well
remembered and well celebrated as oneof the great mothers of journalism.
Her anti- lynching bill, which metwith defeat and was ignored during
her lifetime, was finally seen throughvery, very recently by Kamala Harris,
(29:10):
while Harris was still in the Senate.
So we live with the legacies of Ida Wells.
When we study or explain the historyof lynching, we still use Ida Wells's
statistics because she was also akind of social scientist who, that
kind of journalist, who understoodin order to make the case against
(29:31):
lynching, she was also going to haveto document its fact, and she does,
and we use her numbers until today.
So she's someone worth knowing,'cause we know her, we just don't
realize that we know her, if you will.
Lindsay Chervinsky (29:43):
Yeah.
Or even like all of the differentways that one might know her, we—
maybe you learn about her reportingif you are taking a class and you
hear about her lynching reporting,but you don't necessarily see all the
different pieces that went into that.
Martha Jones (29:55):
And that's, I think one of the things that characterizes
the leadership that grows up inand around the Black Women's club
movement, is this versatility.
Wells knows how to move from one registerof leadership to another register of
leadership, to yet another, and she needsthat, in order to be effective, there are
doors that are gonna be closed to her.
(30:17):
There are gonna be avenuesthat she just cannot go down.
And so this capacity to pivot isessential for women of her generation.
And I still think it's a leadershipcharacteristic that we see
among Black women today, even.
Lindsay Chervinsky (30:32):
You used the word pivot, which I think is a great one.
There's a certain flexibility, almost likea, a realism to the approach of, if this
path won't work, I'll try another one.
Rather than being so ideologicallybent on, it must be this way.
The goal is more important than actuallywhich route you take to get there.
Martha Jones (30:50):
Yeah.
There are two consequences of that.
You know, on the one hand it runsvery counter, I think, to 21st century
ideas about professionalization, right?
Lindsay Chervinsky (30:58):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (30:58):
That you have to sort of choose a path and invest in that
path and build your reputation inthat path, and you have to follow
it to its logical or illogical end.
This is not a time where Black women aresaying, I am a this, or I am a that, or
I'm gonna be a this, I'm gonna be a that.
The question is, how doI get at the questions?
How do I get at the concerns I have?
(31:19):
And that may require me to workin a a range of ways over the
course of an active lifetime.
This has made it, I think, difficultto see Black women leaders as leaders
because they are not defined by singularvocations or by singular interests.
This certainly has confounded thehistory of Black women and the suffrage.
(31:42):
Which is to say, Dr. Rosalyn Terborg- Penngoes back and she literally has to recover
individual by individual, by individual,because Black women club movement
organizers didn't have an organizationthat said suffrage in its title.
Lindsay Chervinsky (31:55):
Wow.
Martha Jones (31:55):
Right.
You might overlook them all together.
But you have to dig deeper.
We know how to do that.
And when you dig deeper, you not onlydiscover there's a suffrage department
within the National Association of ColoredWomen's Clubs, but that many of the women
like Ida Wells are very much in line withthe interests of women's suffrage, even
(32:16):
as they're not a part of the suffrageorganizations that are labeled as such.
So that kind of overlooking womenleaders because they don't wear,
I don't know, the lapel pin.
Lindsay Chervinsky (32:27):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (32:27):
That says "I am a suffragist."
Lindsay Chervinsky (32:29):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (32:29):
Because Wells was a suffragist and a great deal more.
Lindsay Chervinsky (32:32):
One of my themes for the last year has been that we write
history based on the questions we ask,and we often ask questions based on our
own experiences and what we've seen.
And it strikes me that in that exampleyou just gave, you can't necessarily
find these people in their impact ifyou're not asking the right questions,
which is why I don't think of, youknow, new generations of history as
(32:55):
being revisionist so much as they arebringing new questions to the table.
And that might get at stories that wewouldn't have necessarily seen before.
Jones emphasized the importance of howasking new questions and persistent
research in the face of initialdiscouragement helps us uncover
stories about Black women's leadershipin places we might not expect it.
(33:16):
Because the Black women's suffragemovement was ultimately not successful
in 1920, it might be easy for us todismiss, but Jones' work shows how
moments of disappointment can reveal newstories about leadership and resilience.
Martha Jones (33:30):
And this is absolutely true in Vanguard.
We started with Jarena Lee, whowould go looking for the origins of
a story about Black women's politicsand political leadership in church?
But I think that years ago, uh,there's a line from the historian
Mary Ryan, and Ryan urged us toseek out women in unexpected places.
(33:54):
It was a view about women's history,which is that it was right in front
of us, but it wasn't marked as such.
And we shouldn't be misled, eitherby the histories or by the archives
that say there's nothing here for you.
And it was certainly true in my earlywork that I visited church archives and
(34:15):
was told there's nothing here for you.
I went to the records of Black politicalconventions and the received wisdom
was, there's nothing here for you.
So what is it about us?
That there are moments in which we arepersistent and we are dogged, and we
don't defer to the received wisdom.
I think over the last generations, we'vetaught so many, of course, students and
(34:39):
readers, but we've also taught generationsof archivists and librarians about what
they have because we hang around and say,you know, I'm gonna have a look anyway.
I know you said there was nothinghere for me, but I, I'm gonna
spend a couple of days here.
And then you're able to show therichness, the complexity, the nuances
of a collection that perhaps hadn'tbeen labeled as women's history.
(35:04):
And that opens the doors for yourown work, but it also opens the
doors for work that comes behind you.
And it's incredibly exciting.
Lindsay Chervinsky (35:13):
It is.
Two of the themes we often talk about withleadership are both learning from history,
and the importance of learning fromwhat has become before us, and learning
from failure, or learning from defeat.
And I'd love for you to talk about howsome of these figures, you know, you
intentionally style this a 200 year story,and for most of the 200 years, I'm sure
(35:33):
that a lot of people felt like a wholelot of progress was not being made, or
maybe one step forward, two steps back.
Martha Jones (35:39):
Mm-hmm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (35:39):
How did generations of Black women leaders learn from
the defeats that they saw in theirpast, and how did they bring that
to their next generation of efforts?
Martha Jones (35:49):
Yeah, well.
For this, I think we should goback to 1920 because I think by any
measure, 1920 is a disappointmentand maybe a defeat for Black women.
And what to do.
Well, we have the NationalAssociation of Colored Women's Clubs.
Its leader is a woman fromOhio, Hallie Quinn Brown.
And Hallie Quinn Brown hadbegun her life as an educator.
(36:12):
She taught at Wilberforce College inOhio, but by 1920 she is the president of
this association of Black women's clubs,and she's charged with taking stock of
what has not happened for Black women.
And she's also charged nowwith charting a way forward.
Her first idea, and it's one that'sshared by other members of the club
(36:35):
Women community, is that perhaps now thatthe 19th Amendment is done some of the
leading lights of the suffrage movementlike Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul
might link arms with Black women to drivetoward federal legislation that would
really give teeth to the 19th Amendment.
The club women go so far as to senddelegation in the winter of 1921 to the
(37:00):
meeting of Alice Paul's National Woman'sParty, and they're there basically to
lobby Paul, because Paul is a troubledkind of figure in the history of Black
women in the vote, but she's, youknow, she's a darn good organizer.
She's a force.
And again, they are disappointed.
Paul, we don't know exactly whatPaul says, but we know she begins to
(37:21):
fold up the National Woman's Partyand she moves on to the Equal Rights
Amendment, even as she knows Blackwomen are still being disenfranchised.
Disappointment.
And so, I think it's astunning moment, right?
But one in which Hallie Quinn Brownand the women around her believe
that they know enough and believethat they have the savvy and the
(37:43):
scale to build a next chapter.
And interestingly, their allies,perhaps more so than any other
moment in the history of this story,their allies become men because
Black men are also disenfranchised.
Lindsay Chervinsky (37:57):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (37:58):
And we know that the modern Civil Rights movement, which is run
through with its own gender dynamics,is a movement in which Black women are
everything from leaders, architects,strategists, to foot soldiers, and more.
And that is a reflection of the clubwomen's pivot, right, to another
(38:19):
kind of movement for voting rights.
One that is from its inceptionintended to speak both to the
interests of men and women.
I don't know if that's, youknow, lemonade out of lemons.
I don't wanna trivialize it, but it'sto say that, you know I think that the
women in the Vanguard story are not onlyeffective and skilled in all the ways that
(38:41):
we've touched on, they have for a verylong time believed that they were right.
You know that there reallyis no democracy, right?
If large swaths of our body politic,or potential members of our body—
body politic are excluded, theyare really champions of vision for
democracy that is quite a distance fromwhere American democracy had begun.
(39:04):
They are the standard bearers forthe view that politics should neither
countenance racism nor sexism.
Well, today maybe that, I hope thatstill sounds like a a, a rather, um.
You know, obvious point, but theyremind us that for most of our
history, that was hardly a given.
That was hardly an obvious creed, and theyare the people who really land on that
(39:28):
view very early and never put it down.
Lindsay Chervinsky (39:32):
There's such a resilience in this story that seems
to come from just a righteous beliefin their rightness, as you said.
And I'm wondering if that's— one of thegoals that we're always trying to do
with this podcast is say, okay, thereare these famous people in history,
some that you might know better thanothers, but there are elements from
their story that we can bring to ourlives that we can inspire to make better
(39:53):
choices ourselves or to inspire others.
Is that persistence, is thatrighteousness something that you try
and bring to your own day-to-day life?
What do you learn from them, and whatcan people learn from them and bring to
their own challenges and their own momentswhere perhaps a resilience is needed?
Martha Jones (40:11):
When we talk about righteousness or a firm and strongly
held belief or values, I thinkit's important to say these are
commitments that are hard won, right?
These are not, I woke up thismorning and thought this would be
a good way to run the world, right?
That partly I think that resolutenesscomes by having been tested
(40:35):
again and again, in my story,frankly, across generations.
And that means these are time tested.
They are tested literally in successivegenerations, and at enough moments
in time, they get a, I don't knowif traction is the right word,
but there's affirmation, right?
There are moments in which thewomen in Vanguard are affirmed
(40:58):
from folks beyond their owncommunity, beyond their own circles.
And so, I think that's, isn'tthat part of leadership, right?
Is recognizing fellow travelerswhen you encounter them.
Learning how to build coalitionswhen you can, learning how
to bring people on board.
That is one of the signature capacitiesof the modern Civil Rights generation,
(41:21):
is that ability to bring folks on boardwho may not have always seen their
interests as wedded to the interests ofBlack Americans, but that is hard won.
That is a hard won set of values,time tested values, which might be
different than how we think about manysorts of things on many kinds of days.
Lindsay Chervinsky (41:42):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (41:42):
They're inherited, right?
Lindsay Chervinsky (41:43):
Yeah.
Martha Jones (41:43):
They're inherited.
Lindsay Chervinsky (41:44):
So our penultimate question is, you know, we have a
great audience of listeners andthey like to find inspiration
in lots of different places.
What is a book that can be on leadership,or can be about someone who inspired you
in a way that they were a leader, thatmight prove inspirational to others?
Martha Jones (42:01):
So I'm gonna mention a book, it might surprise you,
because it's not a work of history.
It's Michelle Obama's Becoming.
Lindsay Chervinsky (42:09):
Mm.
Martha Jones (42:09):
And you know, I mention that book in part because I think Mrs.
Obama offers us a model of leadershipthat is less conventional, more nimble
and versatile than many that we know.
And Becoming is a memoir.
It is a very personal story abouta woman's journey to leadership.
(42:34):
Reluctant.
Lindsay Chervinsky (42:35):
Mm-hmm.
Martha Jones (42:36):
I might add, journey to leadership.
And I think we need those stories becausemost of us come to leadership challenges
as you know, the human beings that we are.
And I think her book allowed me tohold on to my humanness in all its
(42:56):
complexity and still to understandthat I had a role to play in, you
know, my community and my university.
And I think in our moment where,if I could say, we are, so much
of the world feels unforgiving.
I think that forgiving ourselves forbeing human and then seeing the capacity
(43:19):
that we have as flawed human beings tobecome leaders in our own ways and in
our own worlds, is a powerful message.
And so Michelle Obama'sBecoming is my book today.
Lindsay Chervinsky (43:30):
I love that because you know, so often we think of leadership
and we think of the Napoleonic convictionthat you are supposed to be a great man
and you're born with that conviction,and if you don't have that conviction,
then you are not destined to be a leader.
What I love about that example isthat you can be very reluctant, you
can want nothing to do with it, andyet you can still inspire others.
(43:51):
And that is a powerfullyhuman message, for sure.
So our last question, and I suspectyou'll give an answer that's different
than most other people as well, whichI love, which is, you know, we are here
at Mount Vernon and of course we're theGeorge Washington Presidential Library.
So when you think of George Washingtonin leadership, what do you think of?
Martha Jones (44:08):
When I think of George Washington in leadership, I think that
Washington's example, not only as ageneral and not only as a president,
but as a man, invites us, insiststhat we trouble, right, the idealized
requirement, the requirement thatleaders must be idealized, that leaders
(44:28):
must be unassailed and unassailable.
I arrived here earlier today, andnot by design, the first thing that
caught my eye as I was coming in inthe car, was the marker for Ona Judge.
And I thought to myself, wow.
That's the first thingI saw at Mount Vernon.
So that's a reflection on thisplace and the journey of this place,
(44:49):
but I think it's a call to us tohold those things together, right?
That we have to hold GeorgeWashington and Ona Judge together,
and they are part of the same worldand the same story, our story.
I'm somebody who believeswe are capable of that.
I know we live in a time where there isa fear of history, a fear that difficult
(45:10):
history will compromise us or undermineus, and I just don't believe that.
I believe that we have a capacity to holdthose two people, those two stories and
the complexity and the difficulty and morethat that embodies as one American story.
Lindsay Chervinsky (45:26):
I also think it makes us better.
It makes us stronger.
It doesn't make us weaker.
That is the hill I will die on today.
Martha Jones (45:32):
Mm.
Lindsay Chervinsky (45:32):
Thank you so much for this conversation.
This was so thoughtful and Ialways learn so much from your
work and I'm really looking forwardto our conversation tonight.
Martha Jones (45:40):
Thank you so much.
Lindsay Chervinsky (45:44):
Thank you for joining us this week on Leadership
and Legacy, and thank you so muchagain to our guest, Dr. Martha Jones.
You can find her books wherever you liketo support local bookstores or online.
I'm your host, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky.
Leadership and Legacy (45:58):
Conversations at the George Washington Presidential
Library is the production of theMount Vernon Ladies' Association
and Primary Source Media.
In the spirit of George Washington'sleadership, we feature the perspectives of
leaders from across industries and fields.
As such, the thoughts expressed in thispodcast are solely the views of our
guests and do not reflect the opinionsof the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.
(46:21):
This podcast is made possible with thegenerous support of Wes and Stacey Smith.
To learn more about Washington'sleadership example, or to find out
how you can bring your team to theGeorge Washington Presidential Library,
visit GW leadership institute.org.
Or, to find more great podcastsfrom Mount Vernon, visit
George Washington podcast.com.
(46:42):
You can also explore the work of PrimarySource Media at primarysourcemedia.com.
Join us in two weeks forour next great conversation.
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