Dr. Martha Jones on Vanguard, Archives, and Community-Building within Black Women’s Studies

In recognition of the centennial of the 19th amendment, the BWSA blog is publishing a series on Black women’s relationship to voting from the nineteenth century to the present. The first segment in this series is a conversation between Dr. Martha Jones, who is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, and Dr. Nneka D. Dennie, the BWSA President and Co-founder. Buy your copy of Vanguard here! This interview has been edited for clarity.

Nneka D. Dennie: I’m really excited to speak with you on behalf of BWSA. I focus on 19th-century Black women’s history in my own research, and so selfishly, I volunteered to do this interview.

Martha Jones: Thank you so much, because I’m 19th century at heart, and one of the things about this book is I was terrified to go in the 20th century and really didn’t know if I had the chops. [laughter] It’s very different.

NDD: Right, absolutely. I would love to be able to speak to you a little bit more about your work. I think that it’s wonderful timing [to release the book] with the election being right around the corner. Why was it important to you to be able to recover Black women’s history of voting rights activism at this particular social and political moment?

MJ: I began this book when I began to tune in to the upcoming centennial of the 19th amendment. Going back a few years now, already there were plans in the works for what would be new monuments and memorials that would be unveiled in 2020 to mark the centennial anniversary. And in some of those projects, Black women were absent, not considered. A kind of warning light went off, which said, “boy, we have work to do,” to ensure that Black women are centered in this centennial celebration. We’ve done the work, which is to say, three generations of Black women’s historians have done the work to discover and document and make a record of Black women’s voting rights, and still, it appeared that there were folks who were going to avoid them in the memorials and in the celebration.

So I knew that the book would come out amidst this anniversary celebration, but I didn’t know that it would coincide with a new and vital resurgence of the Movement for Black Lives; I certainly didn’t anticipate what the vexed nature of the 2020 election with all its particularities would be; I certainly didn’t anticipate a coronavirus pandemic. The timing may seem more apt than it was ever, and could ever, have been intended to be. But I will say that that has led some people to conclude that it’s just coincidence, and I don’t think it’s “just coincidence.” In other words, I think that as Black women’s historians, we are frequently writing about issues, about questions, that are not yet resolved—that are still animating our debate, in some cases, hundreds of years later—so that the deep ambivalences that surround the question of Black women and the vote 100 years ago still plague the prospect of Black women and the vote in 2020 as the record of voter suppression in our own time evidences. I think Black historians often write about old questions that are very contemporary, and that is because we’re in a nation—we write in a nation—that has in no way resolved, or expunged, or settled the question of who Black Americans are, who they should be, who they can be. We live and we write in a nation where racism and white supremacy still animate too much of our collective lives, and so I think our work is timely because our questions are, in this country, nearly timeless.

NDD: Black feminists have long asserted that the personal is political, and this becomes particularly clear in the introduction to Vanguard. Can you describe how your ancestors and your family history offered inspiration for undertaking this project?

MJ: I’m somebody who writes at home in an office – I’m sitting there now as we’re talking, here in my office – and on the wall here are portraits of my grandmother, my great-great-great grandmother, and more. So, they’ve always got an eye on me while I’m working—I’m always accountable to them. But while I was finishing Vanguard I became very self-conscious that I didn’t know their stories. So I took a kind of detour in the research—something your editor hates, but something I knew I needed to do. I needed to fit them in and listen to what they might teach me about the book that I was writing. I focus in part on my grandmother, Susie Jones, who I have a very hard time finding in the archives in the 1920s. I’m trying to situate her in that moment of the nineteenth amendment and...and nothing. I find her mother—her mother is a suffragist and an organizer in St. Louis, MO—but I can’t find her. Or I can’t find anything about her political life in those years. And I had nearly given up when I came to an interview that she gave many years later in 1978, and she talked about voting rights and the struggles for Black voting rights, but she didn’t talk about 1920. She talked about the 1950s and 60s. That was the affirmation that I really needed for the choice to write a book that came all the way to 1965. It didn’t end with the 19th amendment because my grandmother, like so many Black women, when they recount the history of voting rights, [they] hold up the modern Civil Rights Era as critical for Black women and their access to the polls, especially in the American South. So it turns out that in some ways I started looking at my family out of a sense of obligation to them, but as is often the case, they had a couple of lessons for me that actually turned up in the book.

NDD: I think it’s really fascinating how you were able to weave together that archival information about your family, as well as the photos you have hanging up on your walls, with this really expansive archive. Can you speak a little bit about whether and how Black feminism influenced your approach to the archives in your research for Vanguard?

MJ: Someone whose work very much influenced me—there are many—but I’ll mention Brittney Cooper, whose forceful insistence on Black women as thinkers, as intellectuals, reinforced my leaning toward wanting to discover ideas as well as activism. I hope that this is a book that is as much about ideas as it is about activism, and organizing, and the practice of politics. Black women need ideas—they are people of ideas—and those ideas animate what they do, and I hope that the book does a service to that sort of principle. I’m very indebted to Toni Morrison and many of the scholars who have taught us the full and fleshed out meaning of Morrison’s work. I really tried to write a book that was not preoccupied by the white gaze on Black women, but remained resolutely centered in their perspectives, their points of view, their concerns. That means sometimes I veer very far from the stock story of women’s suffrage, but I do that quite intentionally because this aspires to be a book and a story told from Black women’s point of view. There’s one more important touchstone and that’s Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” which of course is such a rich and multifaceted work that each time I read it, I discover something new. But in my recent readings, I have been very affected by Spillers’s insistence on the flesh, as opposed to the body, as a social construction. And this question about what happens when we center the flesh. So [there’s] a great deal more in this book about violence, about the necessity of Black women’s bodies on the frontlines of their quest for political rights. About the risks, the vagaries, and more of what it means to be a Black woman who is visible, who is political. I don’t think I understood completely the throughline of violence and the consequence of the body as “flesh,” but Spillers helped me to recognize that in the archive and work that piece throughout the book.

NDD: Are there one or two figures in Vanguard who you were particularly excited to write about? I’m also curious about what might stand out from some of these women’s contributions to the ongoing fight for Black women’s political rights.

MJ: Well on the one hand, Mary McLeod Bethune was somebody who, when I was a girl, was a bigger than life figure. She was someone talked about in my family, and profoundly admired. She’s someone whose work has been increasingly documented in edited collections, but we don’t yet have a scholarly biography of Bethune’s life. I hope one is in the works, even as I’m saying this! Her archives are extensive but tough to work with because she was very self-conscious about crafting her own image and controlling her own image in the stories told about her. So I was able to return to someone who was larger than life for me, and as a scholar, as a historian, there was a lot of material to work with and it was really hard material to work with [laughter] which is to say, it’s a really good challenge. Bethune was the person, as I was writing, I wrote to strangers—you  know, just cold emails to people who had written about her to say, [laughter] “you know, I’m trying to figure this piece out, what do you think?” She was really tough, and I admired that about her, because I knew that was her hand reaching into the future and making it difficult for me to know the distance between, if you will, fact and myth in stories about her. So I really loved writing about Bethune.

And I guess, the other person I’ll mention is someone that, I think, very few readers will have encountered at all. Frances Harriet Williams is somebody to whom I’m related, but more importantly, someone whom I have encountered in passing in an important number of histories over the last decade or so. And maybe even going back 20 years. She’s someone who makes an appearance in a lot of histories but has never gotten more than a page or two, if you will. And so, once again, I find her in the NAACP papers, her letters, she has an oral history at the Schlesinger Library. So I really loved discovering her for myself and [having] a chance to introduce her. She’s a companion to Mary McLeod Bethune with a very different origin and a very distinct way of working. But I think together they tell us a lot about the alternatives to voting politics that Black women developed in the years of disfranchisement, and the ways in which Black women use organizing, and patronage, and the politics of Washington to see great effect, even as they hail from places where they cannot vote.

NDD: That’s really fascinating that you were able to find some many of your family members in the archive. Personally, my family’s from the Caribbean – we’re from a very small country called St. Vincent and the Grenadines – and the courthouse that would have a lot of the types of records that we might turn to as historians ended up burning down ages ago, so a lot of that information has simply been lost. So that’s something that is really intriguing to me, to be able to trace your family history in this way and to find them in the broader archive as well. Even if it’s not a story that has been passed down from one generation to the next—how you’re still able to see some of your ancestors reappearing. That’s really exciting to see.

MJ: It’s important to say, you know, I had disappointments. I came as a historian thinking, “you know, I can find what I’m looking for. I’m good at the archive. I know how to do that.” But, in the case of my grandmother, I got to the North Carolina State Archives and nobody had preserved the records of women’s votes in the 1920s in North Carolina, and certainly not the records of Black women’s votes, and that was, for a moment, pretty devastating to me that, like you say, circumstances were such [that] those records don’t survive. And there were also things in that story—you know how we are as historians—we tell the story as we can, ultimately, right? And sometimes we have to abandon the stories we like to tell because the evidence just isn’t there. So I’m not finished with these women, and maybe there’s more to discover, but I also share that sense of disappointment and grief, even, about what it means when archives have not been preserved and we come to tell stories and we cannot.

NDD: My last two questions for you are about Black Women’s Studies as a field. As you know, BWSA is a very young organization, and one of the benefits of us being so new is that we can tap into a brand-new audience. I’ve noticed that we have a lot of graduate students who are members, and we also have a lot of assistant professors, or postdocs, or contingent faculty, or independent scholars who are members as well, which is something that I’m very proud of. So given our audience, I’m curious about what advice you might offer to junior scholars working in the field of Black Women’s Studies.

MJ: So, first, I hope it’s okay to say thank you to those of you who are the stewards of our field and are doing the important work of convening us so that we see one another [and] we’re knit together more powerfully as a community. I’m very, very grateful. I’m someone who’s been a member for a long time now of the Association of Black Women Historians, and this is an organization that I can’t say enough about when it comes to its influence on my own work, so thank you.

You know, I’m just old enough to be someone who, when she came to graduate school in the mid-90s and said she wanted to write a dissertation about Black women and the question of women’s rights…I’m old enough to have been told by a very serious scholar that there was nothing there. “There was no story there, there was nothing to tell.” While there’s too much evidence to the contrary for a self-respecting scholar to say there’s nothing there, I suspect that many of us on our particular questions, on our areas of specialization, and our own specific research questions still encounter professors, and archivists, and curators, and more who tell us there’s nothing there. There’s no “there” there in our field. So I think that’s the first thing to say, that there is a “there” there, and our work is to insist that it is there, even as others would emphatically tell us otherwise and send us home. One of the things that characterizes our field without a doubt is the tenacity, right? And the finesse, you know? And the art of saying “please could you look again, please could I see those materials even though you tell me there’s nothing in them for me?”—that we develop very early on that sort of insistence.

I think the second piece is about community; [it’s] resisting the suggestion or the trap or the urging that we work in a solitary, isolated, even romanticized version of who a scholar is, who an intellectual is. My work has always only been possible because I have sometimes benefited from and at other times endeavored to build a community of scholars, of thinkers, of fellow travelers who are essential to my best ideas, but are also essential on my worst of days. And so making community, whether it’s across your campus, or across the internets, is essential, I think, to our work, and ultimately our work is only richer and stronger for having been part of a beloved community of colleagues. There are plenty of critics out there. We shouldn’t worry about that. They will show up, and they will press on our work, and challenge it, but we also can work through a community that is framed by love and mutuality and more, and we sometimes have to do the work to create that as we can where we can, whether it’s in secret Facebook groups or it’s through organizations like this one.

NDD: Thank you so much. I really agree with you about the importance of community for doing this work. BWSA began because my partner in crime, Jacinta Saffold, and I were at UMass together in the Afro-American Studies program and our program really impressed on us the importance of not competing with each other in the ways that tend to infiltrate graduate education in any field. From there, the two of us collaborated with each other a lot on any number of things and one of the things we discovered was that we were a lot more successful when we had eyes on our materials. But we also were grappling with some of the problems of decipherability as interdisciplinary scholars and how we might be read. That being said, we thought that it would be important for interdisciplinary scholars and multidisciplinary scholars to have a space to be able to come together, because we’re doing wonderful things within the field of Black women’s history; I’m sure there are wonderful things happening among Black women sociologists or people studying Black women in sociology, but these disciplines aren’t always talking to each other. We wanted to offer a community for Black Women’s Studies scholars—no matter if they were coming from public health, or English, or political science. We wanted a space that is modeled after all of these wonderful organizations that we also take part of, but have typically, at least from my point of view, been a lot of historians going to these associations. We just wanted an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary community, and that is how BWSA was born.

MJ: Yeah, so I’m preaching to the converted [laughter]. You all know. But I do think there still persists this myth that somehow, we work in silos, that we’re experts and specialists, that we work alone, that that’s part of the integrity of our ideas. I honestly became an academic because I wanted to talk to other interesting, smart people doing fascinating and unique work. So to me, the idea that I was destined to be alone is tough. The other thing is that I’m increasingly convinced that the origins of Black women’s history is not in history at all. It is very much, for example, I think in literature. Working with graduate students, they keep coming to their prelim list with all these primary texts and I say, “why are you putting Zora Neale Hurston on the historiography list? You know, why is Anna Julia Cooper on the historiography [list]?” And then we talk it through and I realize, “oh, because Black women’s history is not some corrective to Black men’s history. Black women’s history has its own origin story.” I guess I always knew that, but I never really knew it precisely that way. That, to me, says, we need to claim and immerse ourselves in that very interdisciplinary, and even transdisciplinary, and adisciplinary set of intellectual origins. That’s the only way you can understand Black women’s history. You know, Carter Woodson isn’t going to do it for us, and neither is Du Bois, frankly. I’m fascinated for more conversations about how, as you put it, Black women sociologists think about the origins of their [field]. I suspect Hurston is an origin figure in a lot of fields for Black women scholars. Anthropologists, sociologists, for example, as well as historians and people in literature. Y’all are creating a space for more appreciation and exploration of that, and I’m really here for that, because it’s just a new way of thinking for me, honestly.

NDD: Thank you, we’re really glad to have your support! I think that this sort of interdisciplinarity [allows us] to stretch and push each other, and encourage each other to look at different types of questions [that are] really instrumental in not just helping us develop our own thinking for our research, but also in thinking about what it means to do Black Studies research and to do work that is centrally concerned with Black women. There’s been a lot of really wonderful work that has taken place over the past 50 years, and so we are indebted to people who have already trailblazed in the field of Black Women’s Studies. The question that we are thinking about now, and that we would like to have not simply among ourselves but also with other scholars working in the field, is where would you like to see Black Women’s Studies go in the future?

MJ: I really would like us to continue an old part of our intellectual tradition, which is the building of transnational networks in Black Women’s Studies. I’m somebody who works sometimes in Europe and Black Studies is present, but Black Women’s Studies, less so. And yet, that isn’t about calling that work into being—I think it exists. But I think that you all are not the African American Women’s Studies Association, you’re the Black Women’s Studies Association. And I imagine that was intentional as you thought about how to call our organization. So for me, our relationships to scholars working in Europe and Africa of course, but in many places in the globe might be a direction to go in. Certainly some of our work has taken that turn, and internationalism is a question for the archive. But there is another dimension to that—internationalism in our own lives and in our own practice.

NDD: Thank you so much. This has been a really wonderful conversation. I’m so pleased that we were able to speak with you about Vanguard.