Suffrage and Black Women's Leadership with Martha Jones

[00:00:00] Lindsay Chervinsky: What can we learn about leadership from Black Women's Fight for equality?

Welcome to Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. I'm Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, director of the library. In this podcast series, we talk with experts about leadership and history, how studying these stories helps us understand our current moment, and how we can apply lessons from leaders in the past to our own lives.

Today I'm joined by Dr. Martha S. Jones, a writer, historian, legal scholar, and public intellectual whose work is devoted to understanding the politics, culture, and poetics of Black America. She's a professor at Johns Hopkins University in the History department and the SNF Agora Institute. She's the author of several books, including her most recent, the Trouble of Color, which is an exploration of her family's history and her efforts to uncover it. I hosted Dr. Jones at the George Washington Presidential Library in March to discuss that book. But while she was here, I wanted to talk with her about her previous publication Vanguard, which covers Black women's efforts to secure the vote. Here's my conversation with Martha Jones.

Well, thank you so much for being here. I'm so thrilled to have this conversation and 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 community will really get a lot from it.

But you've written so many books, I couldn't miss the opportunity to talk about your previous work, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.

So I'm wondering if we could, from a starting place, kind of just explain, what's that story about and why you wanted to tell it?

[00:01:41] Martha Jones: First of all, thanks for having me.

You know, Vanguard was a very 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, the so-called women's suffrage amendment. I knew that there would be, in a way, a very unique, maybe unprecedented opportunity to talk about women's history, to talk about women and voting rights.

[00:02:06] Lindsay Chervinsky: This work felt particularly important to highlight on the podcast for a couple of reasons. First, leadership exists in lots of different 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 by moments of hope and achievement, often followed by retrenchment.

Dr. Jones has a rare ability to share this history in unflinching detail while weaving in a thread of hope and optimism.

[00:02:35] Martha Jones: I worried that African American women might be sidelined or given short shrift in that discussion. So could I write a book that would tell 200 years of Black women's political activism, including their struggles for voting rights, that I could put in the hands of journalists and museum curators, students, and more?

Folks who were looking for the one book. Maybe they'd then dig into the footnotes and read the syllabus. But I really wanted there to be one book that I could put on the table and say "this too is part of the story."

The other origin point is that I am a student of some of the historians who really break the mold on the history of women's suffrage. In particular, the late Rosalyn Terborg- Penn, whose dissertation turned book had really opened up the field in a dramatic way. I work in her tradition and under her tutelage in this book, looking to dig deeply into the distinct and the unique stories of Black women in voting, rights. And it's not giving too much away, I don't think, to say I originally thought it was a book that would conventionally end in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and only as I myself went deeper did I realize that I was gonna have to tell a story that came forward all the way to 1965, because that in fact was the defining year for Black women in voting rights. 1920 had been a disappointment.

[00:04:07] Lindsay Chervinsky: Well, I think it's amazing that you set this goal for this particular year and then actually achieved it. Because I think so often we have these ideas about anniversaries and how they might be opportunities for us to share work, but actually doing it is another thing and is quite impressive.

And as you were referring to the end of that story about why you had to push it forward, I do think that's such an important part of the story because in some ways, you know, of course the 19th Amendment was this crowning moment of achievement, but it was very much a bittersweet moment. And before we dig into some of the figures that you talk about, could you share why it was a bittersweet achievement and why it wasn't the end of the story and why it took another four decades to actually come to fruition?

[00:04:46] Martha Jones: Sure. As we look into the congressional debates and then the ratification debates that surround that moment, when the 19th Amendment becomes part of the Constitution in August of 1920, it is apparent that nearly everyone connected with the 19th Amendment understands that nothing in the amendment will prevent individual states from using the same laws and the same tactics that had long been disenfranchising African-American men, would now be used to disenfranchise African-American women.

Now, there are two qualifiers here. One is that of course there are places in the US where women, including Black women, are voting even before 1920. California, Illinois, New York. So this is a very uneven terrain when it comes to women's voting rights and Black women's voting rights in particular. And it is also true that in 1920 there are Black women who organize, who register, who cast ballots, some of them under harrowing conditions, but they do vote.

But by the fall, the late fall of 1920, when Black women look around, what they see is a patchwork, a political patchwork, 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 that gives teeth to the 15th Amendment. We have to remember, 1870, the 15th Amendment, which prohibits the states from using race as a voting rights criteria, and the 19th Amendment, which prohibits the states from using sex.

And so it turns out this major chapter in the history of women and the vote really is inaugurated in 1920. And we follow Black women through the campaigns that cHallienge the Constitution itself through campaigns at the grassroots that organize the modern Civil Rights movement. And Black women who continue where they can and as they can to use the ballot to move the needle on election 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. Oh, it takes 45 years.

[00:06:59] Lindsay Chervinsky: 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 collective action, there are people who are dictating strategy or are out front or are encouraging in a lot of different ways. And I was looking back at some of the reviews of the book, and I loved that the New York Times described Vanguard as a rebuke of our obsession with firsts.

[00:07:21] Martha Jones: Hmm.

[00:07:21] Lindsay Chervinsky: I thought that was so interesting. I think what they were saying is that your work is encouraging us to reject maybe the people that we've heard of first and instead to dig deeper and to look at whose shoulders they were standing on. So one of the names that really jumped out at me, and I'm hoping I pronounce her name correctly, and please tell me if I'm not, is Jarena Lee.

And so I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about her and some of the very unique cHallienges she faced as a woman trying to assume a leadership role.

[00:07:48] Martha Jones: Mm. I'm so glad you asked about Jarena Lee because her presence at really at the beginning of the story I tell in Vanguard surprises many readers because she's not a woman of politics, she's a woman of faith.

[00:08:02] Lindsay Chervinsky: Jones emphasized that many Black women, like Jarena Lee, came to political leadership through the church. In a world where women were discouraged from taking public roles, establishing religious authority helped them to claim a source of power beyond the everyday secular realm. And it didn't hurt that Black women formed the majority of many congregations and already filled crucial organizational and fundraising roles in these communities.

[00:08:28] Martha Jones: And yet part of the way I came to understand the route that black women take to a concern like voting rights is indeed through church, is indeed through struggles within their faith communities around power and who holds office and who can vote, and who controls the keys to the sanctuary, who decides what music is played during worship and more.

And Jarena Lee really embodies that. Because she is, as she tells it in her own memoir, compelled by a call from God to preach. She understands, and if she didn't understand, she is told unapologetically that that is a role that a woman should not occupy, and her spiritual journey is one that I think in some sense shares qualities with all kinds of spiritual narratives: her confrontation with the devil, her doubts, and more.

But there is another layer, and the layer 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 that she's a great preacher, which is to say she can command a crowd, she can mesmerize a sanctuary, she can bring converts, right, to baptism, and more.

And so it is a cHallienge for the men in her denomination to reject her. And so there is a awkward accord arrived at, and what that means is that she becomes visible to so many other women in the A ME church. She becomes someone who inspires generations, now, of women, and they take in part from her the courage to be faith leaders themselves.

But they also take the lessons of those struggles within church into the realm of politics, and they now want to be seated in political conventions. They now want to be regarded as members of the body politic. They want to lead. And that is a companion struggle across the 19th century for Black women, struggles within the church and struggles within the secular realm that are really fueling and informing one another.

And Jarena Lee really sets that off. And then she does that wonderful thing that we as historians really appreciate. She puts it to paper and we can, and we can read that. We can read that and understand from her vantage point what those struggles were about.

[00:10:57] Lindsay Chervinsky: I love when they actually tell us what they're thinking.

[00:10:59] Martha Jones: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:59] Lindsay Chervinsky: It's so nice when we don't have to actually read between the lines and it's right there for us.

[00:11:03] Martha Jones: Absolutely.

[00:11:03] Lindsay Chervinsky: In one place. There's so many threads I wanna pull on in that answer. As I was reading about this, one of the rebukes that I think she faced was this criticism that women who stepped to positions of power, including in the church, were akin to drunkards because they were leaving their responsibilities at home.

And I don't know that I had ever seen it put so bluntly before.

[00:11:24] Martha Jones: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:25] Lindsay Chervinsky: So what I'm wondering about, because this intersection between faith and politics, I think is so fascinating and it's one that perhaps people are familiar with male figures like Martin Luther King Jr, and the importance of the church, and I would say even the importance of the church today.

We have the, what is it, the pews to the polls movement to get out the vote in in particular communities. Was there an argument that if women were gonna be in public life, church was a safe place to do it because they were demonstrating either their faith or their holiness? Was there something about church that provided them an opportunity that other public spaces were more closed in first?

[00:12:00] Martha Jones: Mm. Well, to go back to Jarena Lee on this point, Jarena Lee says, I'm not here by way of some manmade impulse. I'm here because God called me to be here. That's pretty powerful stuff.

[00:12:12] Lindsay Chervinsky: It's also probably hard to argue.

[00:12:13] Martha Jones: Yeah. Well, you know, people do argue with it and that people doubt her calling, but she believes herself called.

And so there's a way in which I think what we might call authenticity in the church realm and authority in the church realm comes not from men, right? It comes from God. And Lee tells anyone who will listen that her calling is from God. I think the other explanation for how it is that Black women center so much of their early political work in the church is that they outnumber men in the pews.

They are the fundraisers. They have a kind of leverage because it is not possible in early Black Baptist or Methodist congregations to imagine a successful faith community, if the church women aren't with you, behind you, raising the money, building the church edifice, serving the meal, all of the things.

And so women have a kind of leverage that they have earned. And later in the century, the inheritors of Jarena Lee's work will say as much, which is we earned this. We are not only talented, we are not only 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 relationship between 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 churches are frequently the largest sanctuary, the most independent and well financed— they're hardly very well financed, but they have a foundation, and politics is very much a part of black religious life, even in the early 19th century. So no one is surprised that there is this crossing of boundaries, 'cause maybe those boundaries were always very porous.

[00:14:04] Lindsay Chervinsky: 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 church member, and then also places of power.

[00:14:19] Martha Jones: Yeah. And I think to be transparent, I think part of the misunderstanding about the relationship between church and politics is the result of the way historians drew lines that that really weren't, did not reflect, right, lived experience or lived practice.

And so even when I'm doing some of the earliest work reflected in Vanguard now, back in the 1990s, the work I was doing around someone like Jarena Lee was called church History, and that was a separate field from, say, political history, and we have to work very deliberately to wed those things and to restore, for the record, the ways in which those things were intertwined. Because previous generations of historians had pulled them apart and called them different fields and written about them in separate books and journals.

So sometimes what we're wrestling with are questions about how to understand the past, and sometimes we're trying to wrestle with the way in which historians before us have told the story.

[00:15:20] Lindsay Chervinsky: That's such an interesting point, and I think that categorization applies to so many different types of history because we often think of social history as a separate category from political history, and we know that our social lives are never separate from politics or, even in my own work, in my first book, I argued that we tend to treat Washington— 'cause we are here at Mount Vernon— Washington the general as a separate person than Washington the president, as though the experiences in the first bucket didn't inform the experiences and the second bucket.

I'm constantly pushing back on that notion, arguing that humans are 3D spherical characters, and we can't separate one portion of their lives from another.

[00:16:00] Martha Jones: The other thing that your work brings to mind, of course, is the way in which women's history and women were 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 accomplishes is restoring that more holistic vision of what's happening for Black women activists in the 19th century, and we're able to see, in fact, part of what makes them effective leaders is their ability to move between the so-called sacred realm and the secular realm.

You know, they are educators, they are religious leaders, they are political figures and individuals, and even organized individuals defy those kinds of categorizations that are sort of pseudo sociological. And they deprive us, right, of seeing the way women come to politics and the way women are so important to the history of politics and leadership.

[00:17:01] Lindsay Chervinsky: It's so true, and as you were describing their activities, that the skills that they refined in the church setting, and then demonstrated their value, you called them leverage, but things like fundraising and organizing, and the ability to bring people together, understanding the essentialness of the social element of the community, so around a meal, bringing new people in. Those skills translate really well to politics, but they also translate really well to leadership more broadly.

[00:17:28] Martha Jones: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:28] Lindsay Chervinsky: 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 someone develop skills, we think about previous leadership positions as opposed to the other things they've done in their lives that maybe shaped them for those future things.

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[00:18:40] Lindsay Chervinsky: Jones pointed to the importance of Black women's organizing during the Civil War and 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 and had goals that went far beyond just voting rights, including activism around Black women's access to safe forms of travel.

[00:19:05] Martha Jones: Now, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit, if it's okay,

[00:19:08] Lindsay Chervinsky: Please do.

[00:19:09] Martha Jones: To the middle of the century. But to really understand, I think, for example, how black women ultimately do organize themselves around what we remember as women's suffrage as a distinct movement, you have to know that during the Civil War, Black women are activated through benevolent work, the support of soldiers, the support of refugees. They build regional networks that literally moves goods and money from New England, for example, to this part of the country, where we have tens of thousands of refugees in Virginia and in the District of Columbia.

Well. Those same networks don't disappear, even after the exigencies of the war have dissipated. They become reactivated and become the same networks that Black women use to organize around voting rights in what we remember today as the Black Women's club movement.

And so your point is so essential, which is to say the kinds of ways of organizing, fundraising, communicating and more that Black women learn through the war effort, they repurpose, if you will, into the building of a club movement that does many things, including become the home for their work on voting rights.

[00:20:25] Lindsay Chervinsky: One of the other things you talk about in the book is some of the other goals in addition to voting rights that they are exploring. And one of the names that I thought was so interesting, and I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about her is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

[00:20:37] Martha Jones: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:37] Lindsay Chervinsky: And there was this quote that you have that I think is so powerful and it says, you white women speak of rights, I speak of wrongs. And she was, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, that quote was in reference to transportation and movement. So how did these women leaders using the club movement, using these connections, how did they define their goals? How did they pick the things that they wanted to focus on? Which is, you know, such an essential part of leadership. It's defining a vision and getting people to rally behind that vision.

[00:21:07] Martha Jones: Yeah. Thank you for naming Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, because I think if I have one figure— actually my first book was titled after a speech she gave, All Bound Up Together. We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, she says in 1866.

Harper has been a poet, she has been an anti-slavery lecturer, and by the 1860s the post-war years, she's now part of an old coalition that is reconstituting itself, abolitionists and early women's rights advocates. And she comes to the 1866 meeting of what becomes the American Equal Rights Association. She's one of the very few Black women present, I think the only Black woman on the record. And yes, you speak of rights, I speak of wrongs, because Harper is there to say there are no voting rights, there is no dignity, there are no voting rights, if I cannot travel across town or across the state or across the nation without being molested.

And she is speaking for Black women who have been, and will continue even certainly well after 1866, to highlight and focus women's rights questions on a space called the ladies' car. Right? So the question is, are black women ladies, such that they can travel in safety, they can travel in comfort, they can travel alongside white women, and Harper knows the answer is no. I would say nearly every woman in Vanguard in the 19th and into the early 20th century, everyone has a story about being molested, ejected, harassed, while traveling.

And more pointedly what Harper is saying to women like Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and you watch that happen, right?

[00:22:58] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:59] Martha Jones: White women witness what happens to us. They say nothing. They do not intervene. They do not come to us as sisters to defend our right to occupy the ladies' car. White women are complicit in the indignities and the practices that we come to call Jim Crow.

Harper does not carry the day, let's put it that way, in these early years. But she resets the terms and they are terms that I think really haunt the women's suffrage movement from that point forward.

[00:23:30] Lindsay Chervinsky: Such incredible political bravery, such incredible personal bravery to be able to say those things, which must have been incredibly uncomfortable. We know it's harder to say hard things to people's face, and to be able to say that just takes such incredible political courage.

[00:23:44] Martha Jones: 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 burgeoning free Black community in Baltimore, an orphan who's raised by an uncle who is an educator, a minister, and an abolitionist, and she leaves Baltimore ultimately because she can't find work as a teacher. And so she heads to Ohio where she is able to work.

But part of what's going on for Frances Harper is that she's taking the gift, the talent, the skill that she's developed as a poet, and brought it to the political stage. So how is she able to say the difficult things? I think this is part of our theme today.

[00:24:27] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:27] Martha Jones: Maybe, right?

[00:24:27] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:28] Martha Jones: Is that she takes those capacities, her capacity with language, to say very difficult things in ways I don't think that are easy, but are eloquent.

[00:24:38] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:39] Martha Jones: Uh uh, on a very high scale. And in that way it almost is poetry when you read those speeches. And you do have to wonder what it's like if you are Frederick Douglass or you know, Wendell Phillips, or Susan Anthony and 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 a little, you know, "ah!" At the same time.

[00:25:05] Lindsay Chervinsky: I wanted to hear more from Jones about one of the most remarkable individuals to emerge as a leader from the Black Women's club movement, the journalist and activist Ida B. Wells. Jones emphasized her tremendous ability to pivot and remain flexible in the face of difficult conditions— a leadership skill, she suggests, still characterizes many Black female leaders today.

It's such an incredible skill to be able to avoid the angry trope, which all women have to be aware of, but especially Black women have to be aware of.

[00:25:35] Martha Jones: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:35] Lindsay Chervinsky: And so to be able to deliver that message in a way that does inspire awe, or at least reflection is such an incredible artistic talent.

[00:25:44] Martha Jones: Yeah.

[00:25:44] Lindsay Chervinsky: So you talked about the schisms within the women's suffrage movement, and I think this is a part of the American story, both between different groups of women and then also between 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 very poor white men to go along with them. And it's where do we draw our loyalties? Where do we draw our communities and find those that we align with?

And one of the people that you talk about who does such a remarkably colorful job of driving a wedge through that is Ida B. Wells.

[00:26:19] Martha Jones: Hmm.

[00:26:20] Lindsay Chervinsky: Can you tell us a little bit about her?

[00:26:21] Martha Jones: Sure.

Ida B. Wells, southern born woman into a family facing poverty, the death of parents. A young educator who really cuts her teeth politically 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, she's already fighting the fight that Frances Harper has foregrounded.

Wells becomes a journalist. She is the nation's foremost anti-lynching crusader in the latter part of the 19th century, and she is an unapologetic suffragist. She's born in Tennessee but settles in Chicago and there Wells is one of the 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—

[00:27:13] Lindsay Chervinsky: That's okay. We believe in acknowledging when we don't remember dates.

[00:27:16] Martha Jones: Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

[00:27:17] Lindsay Chervinsky: Historians are not Wikipedia. We are not the internet.

[00:27:21] Martha Jones: Thank you very much. So with that, I'll say—

[00:27:23] Lindsay Chervinsky: She votes early. We'll say it that way.

[00:27:24] Martha Jones: She votes early, before 1920, and she's part of a community of women in Chicago who after 1920 become staunch Republican party members, operatives. They raise money, they influence the selection of candidates.

Now we're in the height of Jim Crow. No Black man has gone to Congress since 1901, but Wells and her organized club women in Chicago are able to do the thing that Black women voters do until today, which is to use their vote as a block to move the needle. And in 1928, they will send Oscar De Priest to Congress from Chicago, the first Black man to sit in Congress since 1901, since the real landing of Jim Crow.

So Wells is a, a remarkable figure. Who, well, we can't see her on the podcast, but Google her 'cause you'll appreciate, she just has an extraordinary presence. She's brilliant. She's sharp tongue. Her pen is sharper still. She has a great appetite for fashion. She raises a family and she faces her own share of disappointments because there are men in her circles who do not think that a woman should be wholly out front, should be wholly— she's disappointed by W.E.B. Du Bois around the founding of the NAACP for example.

So she faces disappointments, but I think even today, Wells is well remembered and well celebrated as one of the great mothers of journalism. Her anti- lynching bill, which met with defeat and was ignored during her lifetime, was finally seen through very, very recently by Kamala Harris, while Harris was still in the Senate.

So we live with the legacies of Ida Wells. When we study or explain the history of lynching, we still use Ida Wells's statistics because she was also a kind of social scientist who, that kind of journalist, who understood in order to make the case against lynching, she was also going to have to 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.

[00:29:43] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yeah. Or even like all of the different ways that one might know her, we— maybe you learn about her reporting if 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.

[00:29:55] Martha Jones: And that's, I think one of the things that characterizes the leadership that grows up in and around the Black Women's club movement, is this versatility. Wells knows how to move from one register of leadership to another register of leadership, to yet another, and she needs that, in order to be effective, there are doors that are gonna be closed to her. There are gonna be avenues that she just cannot go down. And so this capacity to pivot is essential for women of her generation. And I still think it's a leadership characteristic that we see among Black women today, even.

[00:30:32] Lindsay Chervinsky: You used the word pivot, which I think is a great one. There's a certain flexibility, almost like a, a realism to the approach of, if this path won't work, I'll try another one. Rather than being so ideologically bent on, it must be this way. The goal is more important than actually which route you take to get there.

[00:30:50] Martha Jones: Yeah. There are two consequences of that. You know, on the one hand it runs very counter, I think, to 21st century ideas about professionalization, right?

[00:30:58] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:58] Martha Jones: That you have to sort of choose a path and invest in that path and build your reputation in that path, and you have to follow it to its logical or illogical end.

This is not a time where Black women are saying, 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 do I get at the questions? How do I get at the concerns I have? And that may require me to work in a a range of ways over the course of an active lifetime. This has made it, I think, difficult to see Black women leaders as leaders because they are not defined by singular vocations or by singular interests.

This certainly has confounded the history of Black women and the suffrage. Which is to say, Dr. Rosalyn Terborg- Penn goes back and she literally has to recover individual by individual, by individual, because Black women club movement organizers didn't have an organization that said suffrage in its title.

[00:31:55] Lindsay Chervinsky: Wow.

[00:31:55] Martha Jones: 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 only discover there's a suffrage department within the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, but that many of the women like Ida Wells are very much in line with the interests of women's suffrage, even as they're not a part of the suffrage organizations that are labeled as such.

So that kind of overlooking women leaders because they don't wear, I don't know, the lapel pin.

[00:32:27] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:27] Martha Jones: That says "I am a suffragist."

[00:32:29] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:29] Martha Jones: Because Wells was a suffragist and a great deal more.

[00:32:32] Lindsay Chervinsky: 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 example you just gave, you can't necessarily find these people in their impact if you're not asking the right questions, which is why I don't think of, you know, new generations of history as being revisionist so much as they are bringing new questions to the table. And that might get at stories that we wouldn't have necessarily seen before.

Jones emphasized the importance of how asking new questions and persistent research in the face of initial discouragement helps us uncover stories about Black women's leadership in places we might not expect it. Because the Black women's suffrage movement was ultimately not successful in 1920, it might be easy for us to dismiss, but Jones' work shows how moments of disappointment can reveal new stories about leadership and resilience.

[00:33:30] Martha Jones: And this is absolutely true in Vanguard. We started with Jarena Lee, who would go looking for the origins of a story about Black women's politics and political leadership in church? But I think that years ago, uh, there's a line from the historian Mary Ryan, and Ryan urged us to seek out women in unexpected places. 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, either by the histories or by the archives that say there's nothing here for you.

And it was certainly true in my early work that I visited church archives and was told there's nothing here for you. I went to the records of Black political conventions and the received wisdom was, there's nothing here for you. So what is it about us? That there are moments in which we are persistent and we are dogged, and we don't defer to the received wisdom. I think over the last generations, we've taught so many, of course, students and readers, but we've also taught generations of 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 nothing here for me, but I, I'm gonna spend a couple of days here.

And then you're able to show the richness, the complexity, the nuances of a collection that perhaps hadn't been labeled as women's history. And that opens the doors for your own work, but it also opens the doors for work that comes behind you. And it's incredibly exciting.

[00:35:13] Lindsay Chervinsky: It is. Two of the themes we often talk about with leadership are both learning from history, and the importance of learning from what has become before us, and learning from failure, or learning from defeat.

And I'd love for you to talk about how some of these figures, you know, you intentionally style this a 200 year story, and for most of the 200 years, I'm sure that a lot of people felt like a whole lot of progress was not being made, or maybe one step forward, two steps back.

[00:35:39] Martha Jones: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:39] Lindsay Chervinsky: How did generations of Black women leaders learn from the defeats that they saw in their past, and how did they bring that to their next generation of efforts?

[00:35:49] Martha Jones: Yeah, well. For this, I think we should go back to 1920 because I think by any measure, 1920 is a disappointment and maybe a defeat for Black women. And what to do.

Well, we have the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. Its leader is a woman from Ohio, Hallie Quinn Brown. And Hallie Quinn Brown had begun her life as an educator. She taught at Wilberforce College in Ohio, 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 now with charting a way forward.

Her first idea, and it's one that's shared by other members of the club Women community, is that perhaps now that the 19th Amendment is done some of the leading lights of the suffrage movement like Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul might link arms with Black women to drive toward federal legislation that would really give teeth to the 19th Amendment. The club women go so far as to send delegation in the winter of 1921 to the meeting of Alice Paul's National Woman's Party, and they're there basically to lobby Paul, because Paul is a troubled kind of figure in the history of Black women in the vote, but she's, you know, she's a darn good organizer. She's a force.

And again, they are disappointed. Paul, we don't know exactly what Paul says, but we know she begins to fold up the National Woman's Party and she moves on to the Equal Rights Amendment, even as she knows Black women are still being disenfranchised. Disappointment.

And so, I think it's a stunning moment, right? But one in which Hallie Quinn Brown and the women around her believe that they know enough and believe that they have the savvy and the 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.

[00:37:57] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:58] Martha Jones: 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 club women's pivot, right, to another kind of movement for voting rights. One that is from its inception intended to speak both to the interests of men and women.

I don't know if that's, you know, lemonade out of lemons. I don't wanna trivialize it, but it's to say that, you know I think that the women in the Vanguard story are not only effective and skilled in all the ways that we've touched on, they have for a very long time believed that they were right. You know that there really is no democracy, right? If large swaths of our body politic, or potential members of our body— body politic are excluded, they are really champions of vision for democracy that is quite a distance from where American democracy had begun.

They are the standard bearers for the view that politics should neither countenance racism nor sexism. Well, today maybe that, I hope that still sounds like a a, a rather, um. You know, obvious point, but they remind us that for most of our history, that was hardly a given. That was hardly an obvious creed, and they are the people who really land on that view very early and never put it down.

[00:39:32] Lindsay Chervinsky: There's such a resilience in this story that seems to come from just a righteous belief in their rightness, as you said. And I'm wondering if that's— one of the goals that we're always trying to do with this podcast is say, okay, there are these famous people in history, some that you might know better than others, but there are elements from their story that we can bring to our lives that we can inspire to make better choices ourselves or to inspire others.

Is that persistence, is that righteousness something that you try and bring to your own day-to-day life? What do you learn from them, and what can people learn from them and bring to their own challenges and their own moments where perhaps a resilience is needed?

[00:40:11] Martha Jones: When we talk about righteousness or a firm and strongly held belief or values, I think it's important to say these are commitments that are hard won, right?

These are not, I woke up this morning and thought this would be a good way to run the world, right? That partly I think that resoluteness comes by having been tested again and again, in my story, frankly, across generations. And that means these are time tested. They are tested literally in successive generations, and at enough moments in time, they get a, I don't know if traction is the right word, but there's affirmation, right?

There are moments in which the women in Vanguard are affirmed from folks beyond their own community, beyond their own circles. And so, I think that's, isn't that part of leadership, right? Is recognizing fellow travelers when you encounter them. Learning how to build coalitions when you can, learning how to bring people on board.

That is one of the signature capacities of the modern Civil Rights generation, is that ability to bring folks on board who may not have always seen their interests as wedded to the interests of Black 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 many sorts of things on many kinds of days.

[00:41:42] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:41:42] Martha Jones: They're inherited, right?

[00:41:43] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yeah.

[00:41:43] Martha Jones: They're inherited.

[00:41:44] Lindsay Chervinsky: So our penultimate question is, you know, we have a great audience of listeners and they 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, that might prove inspirational to others?

[00:42:01] Martha Jones: 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.

[00:42:09] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm.

[00:42:09] Martha Jones: And you know, I mention that book in part because I think Mrs. Obama offers us a model of leadership that is less conventional, more nimble and versatile than many that we know. And Becoming is a memoir. It is a very personal story about a woman's journey to leadership. Reluctant.

[00:42:35] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:36] Martha Jones: I might add, journey to leadership. And I think we need those stories because most of us come to leadership challenges as you know, the human beings that we are. And I think her book allowed me to hold on to my humanness in all its complexity and still to understand that 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 for being human and then seeing the capacity that we have as flawed human beings to become leaders in our own ways and in our own worlds, is a powerful message. And so Michelle Obama's Becoming is my book today.

[00:43:30] Lindsay Chervinsky: I love that because you know, so often we think of leadership and we think of the Napoleonic conviction that 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 is that you can be very reluctant, you can want nothing to do with it, and yet you can still inspire others. And that is a powerfully human message, for sure.

So our last question, and I suspect you'll give an answer that's different than most other people as well, which I love, which is, you know, we are here at Mount Vernon and of course we're the George Washington Presidential Library. So when you think of George Washington in leadership, what do you think of?

[00:44:08] Martha Jones: When I think of George Washington in leadership, I think that Washington's example, not only as a general and not only as a president, but as a man, invites us, insists that we trouble, right, the idealized requirement, the requirement that leaders must be idealized, that leaders must be unassailed and unassailable.

I arrived here earlier today, and not by design, the first thing that caught my eye as I was coming in in the car, was the marker for Ona Judge.

And I thought to myself, wow. That's the first thing I saw at Mount Vernon. So that's a reflection on this place and the journey of this place, but I think it's a call to us to hold those things together, right? That we have to hold George Washington and Ona Judge together, and they are part of the same world and the same story, our story. I'm somebody who believes we are capable of that. I know we live in a time where there is a fear of history, a fear that difficult history will compromise us or undermine us, and I just don't believe that. I believe that we have a capacity to hold those two people, those two stories and the complexity and the difficulty and more that that embodies as one American story.

[00:45:26] Lindsay Chervinsky: 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.

[00:45:32] Martha Jones: Mm.

[00:45:32] Lindsay Chervinsky: Thank you so much for this conversation. This was so thoughtful and I always learn so much from your work and I'm really looking forward to our conversation tonight.

[00:45:40] Martha Jones: Thank you so much.

[00:45:44] Lindsay Chervinsky: Thank you for joining us this week on Leadership and Legacy, and thank you so much again to our guest, Dr. Martha Jones. You can find her books wherever you like to support local bookstores or online.

I'm your host, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky.

Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library is the production of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and Primary Source Media.

In the spirit of George Washington's leadership, we feature the perspectives of leaders from across industries and fields. As such, the thoughts expressed in this podcast are solely the views of our guests and do not reflect the opinions of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Wes and Stacey Smith.

To learn more about Washington's leadership example, or to find out how you can bring your team to the George Washington Presidential Library, visit GW leadership institute.org. Or, to find more great podcasts from Mount Vernon, visit George Washington podcast.com. You can also explore the work of Primary Source Media at primarysourcemedia.com.

Join us in two weeks for our next great conversation.