Black Women and the Suffrage Movement | 100 Years After Women's Suffrage

Good afternoon! I'm Deborah Adam Simmons, Executive Editor for History and Culture at National Geographic. I am thrilled that we will have a conversation this afternoon with historian Martha Jones and writer Michelle Duster about the role of African-American women in the suffrage movement. While we know that August 2020 is the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage, we also know that suffrage wasn't guaranteed for all women, even after the vote happened. So, we will hear today from Martha and Michelle about the work that they've been doing to chronicle the experiences of black women.

So, Martha, you are a professor at Johns Hopkins University. Feel free to tell the audience more about what you do, but I'd also like you to set the stage for us of the environment for women, black and white women, both before the Civil War and afterwards, as it relates to suffrage.

Well, thank you so much, Deborah, and thanks to National Geographic. Thanks also to the Women of Impact group for hosting me. It's an honor to be here, especially with Michelle Duster. So, thank you so much. You've asked a huge question! As you know, I've just finished a book called Vanguard that looks at 200 years of African-American women's politics, with a focus on the quest for voting rights. It's a story that for American women certainly has one beginning in the early decades of the 19th century, as women across the United States, the relatively new United States, are beginning to ask questions about their status, their standing, their vexed positions in American politics.

The early 19th century is an era where American political leaders don't apologize for using both what today we call racism and what today we'd call sexism as arbiters of political rights. So, the first part of the story really is about the raising of American women's consciousness. Some do that within anti-slavery societies, others do that within church organizations, still others in literary societies. But there is a kind of political awakening for American women that will, if you will, really take hold in the years after the American Civil War, when the U.S. Constitution is being revised and when millions of former slaves are being incorporated into the nation as citizens.

It is a revolution that we call Reconstruction, and American women are very much a part of that, now very pointedly asking what kinds of new rights they should enjoy. In that period, it is also a vexed time, where old allies out of the anti-slavery movement in particular have different ideas about who should be next when it comes to voting rights. African-American men, educated—which is sort of code for white women—or should there be universal suffrage is the question of the 1860s. This will lead to a sort of splintering of American women and their allies that will take us into the 20th century, the founding of two women suffrage associations, and by the end of the century, the founding of the National Association of Colored Women, which for me is the equivalent of African-American women's suffrage associations. A body that is organized around anti-lynching but also around women's suffrage and many other civil rights concerns that African Americans bring to the table.

Thank you so much for that. We know that Frances Ellen Watkins Harper said that we're all bound up together, and that for black women, their rights as African Americans and their rights as women could not be disentangled. Michelle Duster, you are the great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells, and she really was the epitome of fighting for both those causes. Can you talk about her work?

Oh wow! Well, as Martha said, thank you so much for having me. This is really an honor to participate on the National Geographic and Women of Impact, and obviously to have a conversation with Martha Jones. Like, that's also kind of a big question. My great-grandmother was really focused on, overall, I think she was focused on civil rights and equality. So, gaining the right to vote fit into what her overarching goal was. She is most well-known for the journalism work that she did regarding exposing the actual horrors and reality of lynching. But I think just basically based on her own life experiences, she realized that laws had to be changed and policies had to be implemented in order for African Americans in general, and African American women in specific, to actually have a greater chance of equality.

So, she looked at voting as a tool to have influence over the people who have input and influence into who created the laws. Martha, can you talk about the tension between black women and white women at this time, and really how that has played out historically? In particular, can you talk about the sort of splinter and why it occurred? You addressed some of that in the intro that you gave us, but I think there’s a limited understanding of just how complicated those relationships were.

African-American women organize by way of a political philosophy, as I suggested, that decries both racism and sexism. But along the road to the 19th Amendment, they encounter suffragists—white suffragists, frankly—too many of whom continue to condone, used strategically and otherwise, are complicit with anti-black racism within the various facets of the suffrage movement. This means that the suffrage associations that we most frequently associate with the road to the 19th Amendment are never really hospitable or comfortable places for African-American women to organize.

It's important to say black women don’t spend all their time trying to, if you will, ingratiate themselves into those associations and instead build their own political movement by way of organizations like the NAACP, like the National Association of Colored Women, and more. When we talk about the suffrage movement, we really, in my view, have to talk about the suffrage movements because African-American women over time will create their own.

Michelle, can you talk to us a little bit about the 1913 march? Either of you, really—the 1913 march and why the suffrage march was significant.

I mean, I can give my perspective, and I'm sure Martha can add more details. But, as a great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells, who participated in the march in 1913, the state of Illinois—which is where my great-grandmother was living—gave women partial suffrage, which was they had the right to vote in presidential elections and municipal elections. For whatever reason, they weren't able to vote in statewide elections. And so, around that same time, my great-grandmother writes in her book about how she had been involved in suffrage organizations in the state of Illinois, which led up to that 1913 partial suffrage.

But the organizations that she was affiliated with were predominantly white. So after the partial suffrage was passed in Illinois, she decided to form an all-black suffrage organization. She talks about how black women were sort of not super involved in the suffrage efforts and I guess were a little bit cynical about the idea of how this could actually lead to empowerment. So, she went to the march in Washington, the suffrage march, as the first thing that she did as representing the Alpha Suffrage Club because it was about a month or so from the time she formed it until the march happened.

As far as I know, she was the only African-American woman who went with the Illinois delegation, which was all white, but she was considered a peer in Illinois, and they had planned to march together. But then the black women were asked—not just her, but all black women were asked—to march in the back of the parade, and she had a real problem with that. Since she had been working with white women all along in Illinois, she ultimately refused and then managed to march with the Illinois delegation anyway. That's just such an important metaphor for what that schism was like.

Martha, can you talk to us a little bit about the protest movement of the suffrage era? You know, there were the parades, and also where the Silent Sentinels—who were abused during their protest work—talk about that for members of this Women of Impact group who may not know that much about them.

Sure! We're focused here largely on the work led by Alice Paul, who goes on to lead the National Women's Party in the road to the 19th Amendment. But Paul had been—if you will—had come of age in Britain among suffrage activists there. She was, she was a traitor in a confrontational and even radical style of politics that included the kind of political theater of the 1913 march—5,000 plus women upstaging the president's inaugural parade, which is scheduled for the next day. It’s really remarkable.

And then, as you allude to, Deborah, in 1917 and ’18, Alice Paul will, with her comrades, picket the White House, looking to pressure, shame, and embarrass Woodrow Wilson and his administration into supporting a federal amendment for women's suffrage. That will lead to civil disobedience, as we sometimes say, that will lead to white women suffragists being arrested and detained as political prisoners, albeit briefly. So, Alice Paul works up front, while other white suffragists, like Carrie Chapman Catt, are working behind the scenes, working the back rooms of Washington, working the dinner parties of Washington, looking also to change the president's mind on this question, and they are, as we know, ultimately successful. This two-pronged approach will lead to Wilson's endorsement of a federal amendment and, finally, what becomes the 19th Amendment coming out of Congress.

Now, can you talk about some of the pressure that Wilson was under? It's my understanding that even some of his own family members—the women in his own family—sort of pushed him to reconsider some earlier positions.

I mean, the pressures are tremendous by this period, and they are only exacerbated by the entry of the United States into the First World War. The war effort, you would think, would lead to a kind of consolidation or unification of the nation around politics, but Alice Paul is not only intent on continuing to keep the pressure on the president while other suffragists are prepared to stand back during the war, she is prepared, if you will, to go ahead and even liken Wilson and his refusal to support the vote for women to fascism abroad and really upped the political stakes for the president.

If I could say one more thing, because I want to keep African-American women in this conversation, it's important to note that yes, there are black women who ally themselves with Alice Paul at least episodically. We've heard the important example of Ida B. Wells, also Mary Church Terrell, who, as best we know, is the only African-American woman to participate in those pickets in Washington in front of the White House. There are some black women who join with Paul, but many more black women are facing far too many burdens politically in this moment. Anti-lynching is still a critical question.

How on earth will they get to the polls ever if they continue to be ground down by the scourge of intimidation and by lynchings, violence? So, black women are continuing the work of anti-lynching. By the time we get to the 1910s, there's an effort afoot in Congress to repeal the 15th Amendment, which in 1870 had been the constitutional amendment that prohibited states from using race. Well, that becomes part of the political game that surrounds the 19th Amendment. So, African-American women, yes, are concerned about this campaign, and many of them supported it, but are also having to confront a panoply of political issues, all of which go to the heart and soul of them, their own lives and of their communities.

We know that many of those issues persist today because we're going to, in a few moments, shift to talking about where we are now. I just want the participants in the conversation, if you have questions, please put them forward, and the organizers of the panel will see that they get to us, and we can pose those questions to our panelists.

So much of what has happened historically is now bubbling up as we are, on the one hand, on the heels of waiting to see who a vice presidential running mate might be. You know, might it be a woman who—this would really paint a very different picture than that picture in the U.S. a hundred years ago, particularly if it's a black woman? But the country is also living through a pandemic, and it's important for this conversation. Significant rollbacks to the Voting Rights Act of 1965—so we know that 1920 didn't really guarantee anyone rights. 1965 shored up those rights, and then in 2013, some of those rights were taken away.

Martha, can you give us a sense of what happened in 2013 and why we're feeling the impact of that today?

In 2013, in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Shelby versus Holder, critical provisions—what are called the pre-clearance provisions—of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were declared unconstitutional. These were requirements that led those states who had historically disenfranchised voters to pre-clear, to get federal approval before imposing restrictions or restraints or rules on voting rights. That requirement was gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court, and so today, we see a resurgence, I would say, of state-level laws and policies not unlike those that were in place in 1920 that kept black women from the polls a hundred years ago.

Today, we have state-level laws, voter ID requirements, purging of voter rolls, the shuttering of polling places, which have returned us to a new era of voter suppression. You're right to point out, of course, that this is further exacerbated not only for black women but for all Americans when our state leaders appear to be fumbling on the question of how to get us safely and securely to the polls in November.

And so, Michelle, you have been referred to as a generational activist. I don't know if you would necessarily describe yourself in that way, but can you talk about some of the work that you're doing to draw attention to voting issues and others?

Well, I mean, what I'm focusing on mostly, because there are so many issues to focus on, and I think just for sanity's sake, it's kind of good to focus on a few. So, what I've really been working on is creating public history projects that recognize the contributions of—my goal is to recognize the contributions of African-American women overall. But since I can’t do everything at one time, I’ve decided to start with my great-grandmother, you know, not just because I’m related to her, but because she was a really pivotal figure in our country’s history.

This started with there was a housing community in Chicago that was named after her called the I.B. Wells Homes, which were a very significant housing community located on the south side of Chicago—not far from where she actually lived. It stood in Chicago for over 60 years, so it was a very well-known location, and it kept her name in the public space, and it started to be torn down in 2002. So, I felt strongly that she was a woman, not a building, and so even if the buildings are gone, she, the woman, still needs to be recognized.

So, I’ve been working on getting a monument created on the land where the homes once stood. I was involved in getting a major street renamed in Chicago after her, called I.W. Wells Drive. I've gotten a couple of historical markers, and now I'm working with some women to get some recognition for Illinois suffragists, of which she was one of them. But on their first project that we’re working on is to have a mural created that will recognize many of the suffrage leaders from our state.

And I ultimately would love to have a monument created for Illinois suffragists. So, my focus has been to create a little more equity in public spaces because the representation of African-American women in monumental and statue form, as well as all other, you know, street names, building names, school names, all the other ways you can honor people, we are greatly underrepresented. Only probably less than three percent are focused on African-American women—almost some, almost one percent when it comes to national monuments. African Americans make up 13 percent of our population; black women make up six percent. So at the very least, we could have five percent.

So just to give a really short example, in Chicago, there are about 50 statues of real people, and the first one to a black woman was created in 2018, to Gwendolyn Brooks. And so, I’m creating a monument, which is not a statue, and it'll be the first in Chicago to honor a black woman. Then, in New York City, for example, there are 200 statues, and only five represent women, period. And I think that—well, there’s an effort to create a couple. I think it’s called She Built NYC, an effort to create, I think, three statues to black women.

So, here we are in 2020, and we’re still at the first. I think it matters; representation matters.

I was going to ask a whole series of questions about monuments and about learning, particularly since there were so few examples for you to draw from. Where did you get your inspiration, and what was the process like, both getting a street named as well as a monument approved and installed?

Well, the monument is going to be installed this fall if everything goes right. We started—we, meaning I'm on a committee—we started working together in 2008, so this has been much more of a marathon than I ever anticipated. I literally never imagined it would take 12 years. So, the process has been—this project, I think, is unique because it is going to be on the land where something else was, and there was a displacement that took place of an entire community.

That’s different than I think some other projects that might just be in a park or something, but you’re dealing with the annihilation of an entire community that was vibrant. Some people want to think about it in whatever way they want to, but the bottom line is people lost their homes and their community. So, we had to work with the community. There were a lot of emotions that are probably unique to some other situations.

This process has been working with a group of people who are involved in sort of quote revitalizing the community or redeveloping it, but also some community leaders as well as politicians. So, there are a lot of players involved in this process.

Do you think it could be a model for replacement of so many of these other monuments that are coming down around the country?

I think there just needs to be stronger conversation about who and what we celebrate in our country. I personally think that eliminating everything that we might find offensive could potentially lead to amnesia of what our country has been. I think we need to recognize that our country has for the past hundred and something years celebrated mass murderers, racists, slaveholders, slave traders. I mean, if we erase all of that, then there could be, you know, I’ll just say 100 years from now, a denial that this ever happened.

So, I think we need to be reminded of that, but I think that we need to have equal or more representation of people who fought for equality and justice. So, I don’t think erasing the bad history gets rid of it, right? We need to acknowledge this happened too.

Okay, we have a question from our Facebook group for, I guess for both of you. Black suffragists consider voting an obligation, in my view. Black suffragists consider voting first and foremost a sign of full citizenship. There's no question that there's a symbolic value to voting, and on the other hand, there's the very practical sense that voting is a tactic, right? It's one tactic by which black Americans, men and women, might be able to win political power and resources, and both things are true, right? The symbolic value of the vote, but also the very pragmatic insight, which is that the way in which political power in the United States is meted out in part is every year on election day.

Okay, another question: Did Mary Church Terrell or W.E.B. Du Bois or others compare the National Women's Party's own hypocrisy about voting rights to the hypocrisy of which they accuse President Wilson? So, the questioner is essentially saying, were the white women's organizations guilty of the same thing they accuse Wilson of?

I can try, Michelle. I don't know.

Well, yeah! I mean, because you know, Ida Wells and Mary Church Terrell are interesting figures in this story because they do not abandon their relationships with white suffragists wholly, even as they are strained, even as they are tried by racism. And so, in this way, yes, there are moments when outright denunciation of policies and views that are part of the suffrage movement are in order. But what's remarkable, I think, about some of this black suffragists is that racism is the order of the day; they know that. And their question is how to use every strategy available to them to get to the goal, which includes the goal of the full enfranchisement of black women and men.

And some days that means showing up at a parade where you're not welcome. It means attending a suffrage association meeting where many people don’t welcome you. I think both Ida Wells and Mary Church Terrell really characterize that kind of nuanced leadership, and nothing less is demanded of black women in the era of Jim Crow, nothing less.

And can both of you speak to the importance of black women's organizations in creating a support system and a network to do the work that they were engaged in?

Well, I mean, I think, yes! Black women had been involved in club movements for several decades, and I mean the bottom line is that they did not have the right to vote. And so their sense of empowerment, or the power that they did have, came from collective organizing within these clubs. And a lot of the clubs were organized—and I mean, I think this is true even today—we're sort of organized within the church structure.

And still today in 2020, that’s where a lot of black women have a sense of empowerment. So if you’re working as a collective group, you know, and then as a group you go to some power structure, some power figure, and say, you know, we as a community, we as an organized group, are making this demand, a request. There’s a sense of empowerment, even if you don’t have the vote.

I mean, we can see that today even with, say, some of the young people who are too young to vote right now, but they’re still making their voices heard, and they’re still making some kind of an impact because they have a collective voice. One of the things I wanted to add to what Martha said about black women dealing with white suffragists is that I say my great-grandmother—and I’m sure other women did—not to look at all white women as one thing. I mean, they were just as diverse as we are.

And I mean, you know, as I mentioned, my great-grandmother worked with white women in Illinois in suffrage organizations, so there were white allies as well as there were white women who were opposed to or believed in segregation. And so it wasn’t that cut and dry, a very rigid color line, and I think that’s important, you know, in all fairness to recognize as well.

Okay, Martha, can you talk about the book that you have just written?

Thank you for that! Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All looks at 200 years of African-American women's political thought and political activism, the road to the 19th Amendment and then beyond that to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and comes right up to our own time.

I wrote the book in part because I wanted people to understand where figures like Kamala Harris, Val Demings, Stacey Abrams, and others—the political tradition out of which black women come in the United States—these are not women who landed from someplace else in 2020 at all. In fact, they themselves will tell you that they reach back to a Shirley Chisholm or a Barbara Jordan in the 1970s or an Ida Wells or a Mary Church Terrell at the beginning of the 20th century or back even to the 19th century, a Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman.

So I wanted to write a history that helped us appreciate the long tradition of black women's politics, the long struggle for black women for not only voting rights but for political power, so that we could better read the political landscape in our own time. So, thank you! It'll be out on September 8th, but you can pre-order, so please do.

I'll point out that you did write a story that published on National Geographic last week, and there is a link to the book in that story, so we encourage people to read the story and click on the link. I'd also like to mention the story that we did in the August issue of National Geographic magazine. Michelle Duster is featured in the story, and Martha Jones is quoted in the story.

Before we get off this call, I might actually be able to call that up, but I don't want to do anything that will destabilize an already shaky Wi-Fi connection, so we will keep going. You mentioned the names of several black women who appear to be contenders to be the vice presidential running mate of Joe Biden. What do you think the significance is of this moment where you have, you know, several women of color being in a conversation—several black women in particular being in a conversation about being the vice president of the United States?

You know, do you think that’s a sign of progress or, given the environment that we’re in, is it political theater? What do you make of this moment?

You know, if it was one black woman, I might say it was window dressing or political theater, but there are at least six formidable, distinct black women—all of whom in their own right are not only viable but forceful contenders for the vice presidential slot in the Democratic Party. That is not everything we’ve talked about; voter suppression and the ways in which black women are going to be kept from the polls this year.

But it is also true, at least in my view, that what we are seeing is the fruits of the struggles that black women have waged for political power particularly since 1965 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. But even beyond that, we’re seeing the fruits of that: black women who are ready to go and to lead this country, right, if they have the opportunity.

For me, my sense is that there’s no turning back from that, even as there are many other struggles to be waged before we say that black women have reached some sort of political parity in the United States. That just isn't yet true.

I would like to add to that because I think that what Martha said kind of addresses the candidates who are being considered—who are definitely well deserving and qualified, probably over-qualified compared to some people. But I think, this is my opinion, I think in addition to the women who are being considered, and rightfully they should be, I think there’s a recognition that black women in this country are a political force when it comes to voting as well. I mean, it’s been well documented that Doug Jones in Alabama won because of black women being so entrenched and engaged in the political system that I think there’s a recognition that black women are voters that need to be satisfied to some extent.

They need to address our concerns, because we vote! We do vote! Now people want to blame us for everything when stuff doesn't go the way they want it to, but statistically, we vote more and then we vote in certain ways. So I think the Democratic Party is being strategic in not only recognizing and considering certain particular individuals who are qualified, but I think they’re being strategic when it comes to engaging with the black community knowing that we have certain concerns that we want to have addressed, and we will vote for the people who will address those concerns.

Thank you so much for that. Martha, can you speak to some of the issues that may keep people from the polls this year or the efforts that are underway to perhaps keep people from the polls? I mean, we have the whole situation with the post office. We have voting rolls being reviewed and names falling off. There are like a whole series of things that are happening. Do you think that’s strategic, and what needs to be done to address it?

The lessons of the 19th Amendment are that indeed lawmakers will use rules written on their face neutrally, right? Nobody says I’m disenfranchising black people in the letter of the law. Nobody says I’m disenfranchising women, but they’ll use their discretion to apply those laws in a way that disproportionately keeps, in our own time, people of color, women, away from the polls.

So, here we are in an era of voter suppression, exacerbated by a pandemic. It is so reminiscent to me of the poll taxes, the literacy tests, the understanding tests, and the grandfather clauses that characterize the 19th Amendment era—the lynching, the violence. Today, I think, is mirrored in a coronavirus that has disproportionately visited and caused the illness and the death of both black Americans and Latino Americans.

Now, people have to take their lives in their hands once again in 2020 to get to the polls. The parallels are not only eerie; they should stop us in our tracks. The last thing I’ll say is because we have no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote in this country, while the 15th and the 19th Amendment and other amendments went to an important degree limiting the kinds of things that states could do, the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee any of us the right to vote.

The burden remains on us to insist, to be vigilant, to overcome the hurdles, oftentimes at great risk. That was true 100 years ago, and it looks like that will also be true in November.

I’m someone who has written about the need for a constitutional amendment that finally guarantees to every American the right to vote, but we don’t live yet in that kind of political regime. And so we fight at so many turns, don’t we, in order simply to cast ballots.

Another question from the Women of Impact group: How do you think the tone of the Biden campaign might shift once he announces his running mate? Put another way, what does a campaign need from a VP pick? And I would add, if that pick is a black woman in this sort of climate that we’re living in, how do we think that impacts the campaign?

I just wanted to add one thing to the last point before I get into this, which is I think the other issue with when it comes to voting and potential voting suppression is just this still dynamic that everything is still run by the states. You consider there being a national approach because there’s too much variation among states in the type of voting machines that people use, then the hours that voting places are open. Just all of those types of things.

There’s such a variety and disparity between states that it’s just not consistent, and I think that puts certain states at more of a disadvantage than others.

When it comes to a potential vice presidential pick and how that might impact the campaign, you know, like I said, I think that there has to be—I mean, we’re in the middle of a health crisis, we’re in the middle of a financial crisis, and we’re in the middle of a civic engagement, civil unrest crisis. I mean, there are so many crises that are going on right now, and all of them disproportionately affect people of color.

So, whoever ends up being the vice presidential pick—and Joe Biden himself—has to address these issues in order to have any kind of resonance with real people’s real concerns and real life, really called kitchen table kind of issues. You know, otherwise, it will be considered more of the same, and I don't think that our country will do well with more of the same.

Martha, did you want to add anything to that before we pivot?

Sure! I guess I would add that I think one thing I’m sure Vice President Biden will get if he nominates an African-American woman is someone who comes out of, works through, and is committed to a real humanitarian perspective on the future of this country.

Black women have, for 200 years, spoken again and again through the perspective of humanity. It was one of the words I was really surprised to discover again and again in my research for Vanguard. And so it would be a mistake to expect that black women coming to public office, including high office like the vice presidency, would somehow speak to other black women alone.

That the political tradition out of which these candidates come is one that really looks to, yes, speak through the experience of black women (it's not one experience in the United States) to speak through those experiences and then to speak to the interests of all of humanity.

I can't imagine a more timely, necessary, vital perspective to bring to American politics than one that really opens arms to all of us, takes the measure of this country, as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper put it, a very long time ago, right? The weakest and the feeblest. And that is the measure of this country. And black women have been working through that ethical and political view for a long time.

I think it can only be an asset—not only to the Democratic Party but an asset to the nation as a whole.

We have a kind of a related question from someone who asks, what, if anything, in our current moment gives you hope? How can we continue inspiring the kind of active participation that will push us forward?

I can tell you—maybe Martha feels the same way—because I teach, my students give me hope because they're right out of high school. Some of them are voting for the first time ever, and the level of engagement that I see and the amount of knowledge that they have about the different issues, they are way more politically savvy than I think people give the young folks credit for.

And so, I see another generation and a next generation becoming engaged and involved, and so that gives me a sense of hope that, you know, that the work isn't going to stop just because we have one generation that is leaving us.

And I know it’s very sad, obviously, to have some of the pioneers and some of the towering figures of our country who have fought for justice and equality to be leaving us. But I do feel that there is another generation that will be equally impactful in different ways, and they give me hope.

Fantastic! Martha?

Yes! I’ll say that it has been my ballast in these months—these unprecedented months and all of the challenges—has been my students, shout out to them! I see them on Zoom and not much else these days, but there they are, and that has been really important. I’ll add that I do think that part of the way I would tell the story of African-American women's political power is about the story of generations. You noted Michelle Duster as a generational activist.

I think—I don't know how Michelle feels about that moniker—but I do think there's something right to the ways in which generations bequeath, they lead, they model, and they inspire us. And I am excited to hang around long enough to see the generation of black girls and young black women who are watching six African-American women vie for the vice presidential nomination.

How our sense of possibility, our sense of who we are, where we belong, what we can do, what we must do—I really believe that we are—whoever the nominee is—the names of these women, their faces, their work are inspiring next generations to do things that perhaps we can't even quite yet imagine, and that gives me a great deal of hope.

Because what I know is that while there is tremendous adversity in front of us, there’s never been a generation of African-American women certainly who have sat down or turned around or given up. That we have nurtured one another through hardship and across generations.

I'm so excited for my granddaughters and my great-granddaughters, as I’m sure Ida Wells was for you, Michelle, in her own way—understanding that that is the sort of work that we do, and that is the timeline, the tough timeline of the work that we do—that it continues out across generations. But I think there’s something on the horizon that is really exciting.

And speaking of passing the torch, Michelle, I just have to ask this question because the Women of Impact group is a group of women of different backgrounds. Talk about the joy and the responsibility—or perhaps even the burden—of being the great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells. Like, how have you navigated that?

I think there are pros and cons to everything. One of the challenges for me is that most people wonder, I mean rightfully so, focus on the pros because I get a lot of, “Oh wow, that’s so cool! You get—you know, your great-grandmother was one of my heroes,” and that must be so—and so it’s just a sort of adulation for my grandmother, which I appreciate, and I’m happy that people are so enthusiastic about her and they know about a lot about her and they appreciate the work that she did.

And so the challenge becomes for me feeling—there are moments when I feel invisible because I feel that so much is about her that I’m—I mean people—yeah. So that’s one of the challenges, and it’s something that I do—I’m purposeful about—within myself of being clear within my own head of who I am, because it does kind of get lost in the mix sometimes.

And so, I have challenged myself to sort of define myself for myself, even if other people don’t see it. And I have, even more recently, been very purposeful about engaging in activities that just are for my own self-fulfillment—to make myself happy—that have nothing to do with being a great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells. Because that’s just me.

I mean, it’s just maybe—it’s just me, but I just feel a need to be able to have my own definition of myself. So those are sort of the struggles. I mean, of course, I’m honored and feel very fortunate that I am related to somebody who was so amazing and does still inspire people so much, because, you know, my brothers and I tease each other like we could be related to, you know, a mass murderer or something. Like we’d have that as a legacy, and we’d have to overcome. So, if given a choice, you know, you want to have a positive.

But it carving out my own identity, I would say, is the biggest challenge. Particularly since so much of your work is about carrying on the legacy, so do you feel like they often get blurred externally even as you’re working within yourself to try to create those lines?

I feel that I have had to be purposeful about making sure that people say my actual name and recognize my Michelle actual credentials because my title is not great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells. I mean, I am a professor; I am a writer. I have done a lot of other things, and so, you know, just within a professional space, I have to ask for that.

And so, that just kind of makes me realize that it’s not top of mind for other people, but I have to advocate for myself. And so, it may be just a little more of a hurdle than it is for some other people who automatically are called professor or automatically are called historian or whatever, and I’m called great-granddaughter. I’m like, but that’s my relation to her; that’s not my title, right? So, it’s just kind of an interesting dynamic.

And then, Martha, I think we have time for this question for you. So much has happened during the past year, but your book was already underway. So, if you were adding another chapter—and I don’t know, maybe you have a lot of what we've been living through included in the book—but if you had another chapter that included 2020, particularly these past six months, what would you write?

Well, the first thing I want to confess, if I could, is what an inspiration Michelle Duster is to me. And if you wonder whether that’s true, I hope you’ll read the introduction to Vanguard, where for the very first time, I try and write about my own grandmother and great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother and their struggles for voting rights.

For me, this was important for me to try and find the right voice, the right tone, the right place from which to write out of family, and then write a bigger history. But one of the things I think I would have underscored, frankly, is that if I’d known so many of us were going to be home all bound up together with loved ones for long periods of time—in many of us, in very small spaces—I would have urged more directly more of us, frankly, to think about family history as a beginning place for thinking about the history of women’s politics and women’s voting rights.

That I was shy to do that. Michelle has been bold, but I do think that I discovered that I knew too little about the women in my family. And I think today I would suggest everybody’s spurring project, summer project, fall project, winter project should be to interview the elders in your midst.

Because it turns out that in many, many, many American families, if not all American families, women have stories about their voting rights, about their first votes, and they are meaningful and ones that we should collect and hold on to and preserve. Because we’re not done, as this pandemic has demonstrated, with the struggles over voting rights in the United States, as Shelby versus Holder has made plain.

And I think capturing our family stories is something that I’ve just dabbled in a bit at the beginning of the book, but it’s something I’m coming back to more and more because I realize that that is part of what fuels and informs who we are as women in politics today.

So, if you don’t know your mother’s story, your grandmother’s story, your great-grandmother’s story, I think it’s time to find out.

Okay, so that is our call to action for today. I just want to thank you both for giving us an hour of your time. This has been a really inspiring and insightful conversation, and I am looking forward to the book. I’m also looking forward to exploring more of the work that you’re doing, Michelle, and seeing how I can be helpful. Thank you so much! Have a good afternoon! Thank you!