In this final episode of The Amendment, host Errin Haines reflects on the recent presidential election and its implications for gender, race, and democracy. She talks with historian Martha S. Jones about the stark racial divides in voting patterns and the importance of coalition building in the fight for equality in the face of setbacks.
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On today’s episode
Our host
Errin Haines is The 19th’s editor-at-large and writer of The Amendment newsletter. An award-winning journalist with nearly two decades of experience, Errin was previously a national writer on race for the Associated Press. She’s also worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
Follow Errin on Instagram @emarvelous and X @errinhaines.
Today’s guest
(The 19th/Wonder Media Network)
Martha S. Jones is a Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose research explores how Black people have shaped the story of American democracy and today extends to work on memorial landscapes, family memoir. She directs the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project which, since 2020, has examined the role of slavery and racism at the Johns Hopkins university and hospital.
She has written several books including, “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All” (2020), which received the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. Her 2018 book, “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America” (2018), was recognized with awards from the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the American Society for Legal History, and the Baltimore City Historical Society Scholars. She was also author of “All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900” (2007) and a coeditor of “Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women” (2015), together with many articles, reviews, and essays.
Follow Martha S. Jones on X, @marthasjones_, and on Instagram marthasjones
Episode transcript
The Amendment podcast transcripts are automatically generated by a third-party website and may contain typos or other errors. Please consider the official record for The Amendment podcast to be the audio publicly available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Martha S. Jones:
I urge everyone to look up, to look around. Your purpose is right in front of you. We need each other, and there are going to be urgencies in so many quarters. I’m confident that we can take the kind of commitment that we discovered in ourselves, many of us in this election cycle, and put it to meaningful use.
Errin Haines:
Hey y’all, welcome to The Amendment, a weekly conversation about gender, politics and power from The 19th News and Wonder Media Network. I’m your host and Errin Haines. On Wednesday afternoon, November 6, 2024, vice President Kamala Harris conceded the presidential election in a speech delivered from her alma mater, Howard University. Harris promised a peaceful transfer of power and a call for her supporters to not give up the fight. Now, as of this recording, which is taking place on Tuesday morning, Donald Trump has received 312 electoral college votes to secure his presidency, and Republicans are holding a razor thin majority in the house. So, as we sit with and are still processing the results of the exit polls, we’re seeing a clear divide between race and gender.
Errin:
I have to say that as we said at The 19th, this election was definitely about gender. But I think on the other side of this, I’m thinking about the ways in which it’s not about gender and the ways that we thought it would be. White women, the largest voting block in the country, voted in the majority for Trump, and that was an open question headed into this election. It was the first presidential election since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision ended federal protections for abortion. But abortion was not the decisive voter priority that many, including those of us at The 19th, thought that it was going to be given voters behavior since that 2022 Supreme Court ruling. So, as we come to the other side of this very consequential, very existential election for so many of you, for so many of all of us, and as we’re thinking about this new incoming administration and what lies ahead for our democracy and our politics, an announcement from me, friends, this is also going to be our final episode of The Amendment. I know! Look, we started this journey at the beginning of the year with plans to run through the election, and now we’re here. I’m really, really thankful for all of you who have listened and who have learned with me week after week. So with that, I wanna reflect on what I wrote about on the eve of the election and the namesake of this podcast, which has really been my honor to host.
Errin:
The 19th Amendment remains unfinished business making its promise real remains our work beyond any one election, any one president, and yes, even any one podcast. So to do that, I’m joined by somebody who is intimately familiar with the past and present fight for suffrage in America, and who really helps me think about the ways in which that fight continues: Historian Martha S. Jones.
Errin:
Why Martha? Well, because history matters in this moment, and because this election and our politics do not happen in a vacuum. So what lessons does history hold for us now to help us move forward? Martha S. Jones is a cultural professor at The Johns Hopkins University. Her research explores how Black people, specifically women, have built and shaped American democracy. Her book “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted On Equality for All” sheds light on the fight for the marginalized vote after the ratification of the 19th Amendment — and frankly, if I may say so, is essential reading as we consider how all of us will engage from here with The 19th. Martha, it is so great to have you on the final episode of The Amendment.
Martha:
Well, I’m honored to be here in any case, but I’m especially honored to be here to mark the final episode of this podcast series. I have told you offline that I have been a devoted listener. I think you have provided essential and, frankly, distinct insight into so much that we have confronted during this election cycle. So thank you so much to you, Errin, and to The 19th. It’s really a pleasure to be here.
Errin:
Absolutely. Well, I cannot think of a better way to end this than with a beginning of our work from here. So with that, let’s get started. We’re here a week after the race was called for Donald Trump. He is our president-elect. Now that we’ve had a little bit of room to breathe, I’m just wondering what’s on your mind right now and how are you?
Martha:
I have been cleaning my house and my office and any other space. Invite me over and I will reorganize your closets. I think that, like a lot of folks, I have been looking for places to put my energies, to absorb myself, but also to process and to be careful, as I think we know we must be in these times. When it comes to who I listen to and who I read, there’s a lot of noise out there. So in part I’ve been turning the noise down and really trying to be careful about who is helping me process the last months, if not the last year.
Errin:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, for everyone, taking care of ourselves in this moment. I mean, this election, people were so emotionally invested, and now, you know, on the other side of this, um, just taking a minute to kind of rest and recharge for people who worked so hard, for people who were just so locked in to what was gonna happen with this election. I personally was cooking up a storm over the weekend. And, you know, if anybody has any recipes, uh, feel free to send them along to me because I’m still cooking for myself and the people that I love. So before the election, you know, I had this idea to write about the idea that the election was built for the promise of the 19th Amendment, and you were the first person that I wanted to talk to you about that idea. Can you just give us a short history about that promise?
Martha:
Sure. You know, it’s hard for me to do a short history. I’m not gonna lie, but…
Errin:
I’m asking a historian to summarize.
Martha:
Exactly. But let me try, because it’s important. I think we could start the story in the decades before the Civil War, the nation is rethinking who is a citizen, what is equality. Um, and that has extraordinary implications, of course, for enslaved people and Black Americans. But it is also a question that American women take up, including Black women. And we move to the post-Civil War era. And finally, um, a woman’s movement takes traction, gets traction, um, a woman’s suffrage movement gets traction, but it is one that is shaped by the legacies of slavery and racism. So by the time we get to the 19 teens, um, individual states are beginning to extend the vote to women, but the federal amendment is still controversial. And to get there and I think we’ll talk more about this, but to get there, suffragists — White suffragists — make a bargain.
Martha:
And the bargain is that there will be a 19th Amendment. It will prohibit states from using sex as a criteria when it comes to voting rights. And at the same time, nothing in that amendment will prohibit the states from using their own local laws to keep, for example, Black women from the polls. So we end the fall of 1920 with a very uneven landscape. Millions of American women have been, for the first time, empowered. They come to the polls, they cast their ballots. But for Black women, when they look out across the national landscape, what they see is a patchwork and too many places where violence, intimidation, poll taxes and more have kept Black women as they have kept Black men from exercising their voting rights.
Errin:
I’d say that was a pretty succinct and efficient history. So thank you for that, Martha. But yeah, I mean, just I remember from our conversation just really thinking about the idea that, you know, because for so long I had said, women are the deciders of elections. And it’s more than that, right? Like it is that we are the shapers of our democracy, and suffrage was about women helping to perfect the union and, and for us taking our rightful place as equal framers of the direction of the United States. And so that is the call that I think is still out there, frankly, for us to answer.
Martha:
And that’s really, in a sense ,the question, rather than the answer — that we might associate with the 19th Amendment. We oftentimes regard it as this landmark sea change, but in fact, there’s a big question mark, or as you all put it, the asterisk next to The 19th. And that is a reminder to us that the question of what does it mean for women to be fully empowered citizens? What do women do with their political power? Well, those are questions. And in 1920, Americans have very divergent ideas about what women will do. Some say women are merely citizens who will vote like their husbands and their fathers and their brothers and others worry that women might actually have independent ideas. Might women might have their own ideas about law, about policy, about culture, and they might use the vote to press those ideas. So here we sit in 2024, and I think we can recognize that those questions from a hundred years ago, in a sense, are still questions today.
Errin:
Yeah, I think that’s such a good point. So much of the argument around suffrage was about the fear of what American women would do with the ballot, right? And the unrealized power of women as half the population and half the electorate. Like what would they do if they were actually given an equal say, right? That reflects their equal status as citizens in this country. I also love what you’re saying about the asterisk. I doubt there’s a listener of this podcast that doesn’t know what the asterisk is about, but for those of you who may be new here, the asterisk in our logo at The 19th is for the Black women who were thrown under the bus by those White suffragists as the 19th Amendment is ratified in 1920, and who had to fight twice as hard for nearly another more than half a century to get their access to the franchise with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Errin:
But thinking about the asterisk, as we do at The 19th, as a reminder of the unfinished business of the 19th Amendment, it’s just a really good reminder that the asterisk does kind of point to that unfinished business — that open question that clearly we are still very much reckoning with, um, you know, more than a century after the passage of the 19th Amendment. And speaking of which, I mean, what stands out in the exit poll data is not only the gender divide between men and women, but like the stark racial divide as well. Right? We see 53% of White women voting for Trump compared to 91% of Black women who voted for Harris. And to me, this feels like the story of what the fight looked like headed into the passage of the 19th Amendment. But I wonder what you think.
Martha:
I see it too. And what I see is a legacy of the period immediately following the 19th Amendment. You know, there are Black women who can vote in 1920, and when they do, they vote strategically, very much like Black women do today. They understand that their numbers are modest, but if they come to the polls as a block, they can actually move the needle on election day. This is especially true in local and state contests, but it also has consequences by the end of the 1920s for electing members of Congress. In Chicago, Black women are very organized. They’ve been voting for more than a decade by the time we get to 1928, and they use their vote concertedly and as a block to send Oscar De Priest to Congress. Now, De Priest might no longer be a household name in some parts of the country, but Oscar De Priest is worth remembering because he’s the first Black man to be elected to Congress since the advent of Jim Crow, right. Since the advent of widespread voter disenfranchisement that visits on Black Americans. So it’s a landmark moment, and Black women are responsible for it, an important part because as they did just last week, they used their vote concertedly as a block to move the needle.
Errin:
Yeah. But I think we also saw White women, you know, as the largest voting block in the country, using their strength in numbers to move the needle and, and, and, and ultimately impact the result of the election. I just wonder, I mean, do you feel like given the very fraught history around, you know, the fight for suffrage, the ongoing fight for suffrage, should we have ever expected that White women were going to support Harris, especially seeing White women support for the Republican party and for Donald Trump in recent cycles?
Martha:
I’m thinking carefully here. I think that we had something new on the table in 2024 and that was Dobbs, that was the future of American women’s access to abortion. And this gave us, I think, good reason to, if not ask, even to expect that American women might come to the polls as women in defense of their reproductive freedom. Now I’m reading the data as it’s coming up and we’re all working our way through it, but as I understand it, right, there are American women for whom a vote for abortion rights was not inconsistent with a vote for Donald Trump. And that, I think, is worth sitting with because it is, as any of us who have been in the voting booth know, to split the ballot is to make a very deliberate choice about how one uses their political power. And we watched women vote for their interests in reproductive rights and also vote for Donald Trump.
Errin:
Yeah. Which they also saw as voting for their interests. Just to go back for a second, the point that you made about, for the Black women who were able to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment that they immediately were strategic about that vote. They immediately were aware that strength in numbers was the way that they were going to have an impact into wield political power. Like that is also the history of Black women and voting. And that feels very important to mark. Like, that is not a new phenomenon, that is not a recent phenomenon, like recognizing very early on that like that the votes that they cast are not just for themselves, but for their household, for their community, for the country.
Martha:
You know, I think historically we understand that Black women are thinking generationally. Many of the women who are active in the early 20th century, frankly, don’t live to see a Voting Rights Act. Don’t live to see Shirley Chisholm run a campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. We’ve always had to think about the long game in American politics, to invest in generational knowledge, generational capacity. And so, here we are in a sense seeing a reflection of that, but also knowing that the work is not done. I think that the Vice President as a candidate showed us that, right when she brought young people to the fore, when she went back to Howard University to make her last speech as a candidate, she was reminding us, I saw those faces in that crowd. And those were young people, and that’s an investment. Young people, many of them teary-eyed and more, but young people in whom she has invested, I think, for the struggles that are in front of us.
Errin:
In thinking about that long game, I mean, do you see a future where women are voting in coalition with each other across racial lines? I know it’s not as if that is not happening at all, but you know, for women to really choose their gender or prioritize their gender even over their race, is that possible? What would it take?
Martha:
Well, I think maybe one of the lessons from this cycle is that, um, to the degree that American women are going to vote as a bloc is they have done to an important degree in this cycle around reproductive rights. I would say that’s going to be issue by issue, right? And it’s not going to be an abstract women’s vote. So American women can vote concertedly when it comes to, in this cycle, reproductive justice. What will the issues be in 2026 and 2028 that might give us the opportunity to at least around specific questions come together as American women? I don’t think I know what those are. Maybe you do though, Errin.
Errin:
Well, you know, it’s interesting, listening to you, what it makes me think about is voter priorities rarely really shift. I mean, the economy remains the top issue for voters writ large. And so I wonder what it means to have a gendered conversation around the economy. Well, I know what it means because we literally have a newsroom that does that every day, but like, especially in election years, when people say that the economy is not working for them, or when they say that the country is headed in the wrong direction, in terms of gender, what does that mean? Right? Like, how do we really unpack that and listen to voters to try to understand how that translates to how they behave politically? We certainly had seen abortion on the ballot in the two years since Dobbs went into this year thinking, you know, abortion was gonna be a huge issue and this huge unifying issue. Why do you think it wasn’t?
Martha:
Well, in part, and I would say this is something I learned from the history of Black women’s voting is that Black women are never single issue voters, right? That they are thinking across a very complex landscape. We’ve mentioned economic questions, we’ve mentioned reproductive rights, but we could add to that some of the other hot button issues from this cycle, like immigration. And we can appreciate that it’s a complex, complex calculus, isn’t it? To distill those things and then to build a coalition that permits folks to come on board across those questions. It’s one of the things that I really admire about historically black suffragists, um, is that yes, they were thinking about what we would call women’s rights and their own political power, but they were also concerned with, for example, winning anti-lynching legislation.
Martha:
Yes. They were as committed to that as they were to their own voting rights. They were deeply committed to questions around educational equity, um, and the establishment and the expansion of public education for Black Americans. They were interested in what they would’ve thought of as criminal justice reform. But the carceral system and the ways in which even at the early 20th century, Black Americans are disproportionately caught up in that system. They are interested in health care and health inequities, issues that still sit with us today. And so, when I tell their stories, it seems important to remember that what we’re seeing is not the byproduct of a single question at all. What we are seeing is a byproduct of a very complex stew of questions that all Americans have to face, but Black women manage to work through them in ways that permit them to at the same time honor that value, which is how do we make our vote count on election day?
Errin:
Gender was definitely on the ballot, but not in all the ways that we necessarily anticipated. And we saw two very contrasting versions of gender being played out on the campaign trail. That was even before Vice President Harris got on the ticket, right? I mean, president Biden and former now-President-elect Trump display two very different brands of masculinity, right? And the brand of masculinity that Donald Trump ran on was something that did resonate with a lot of his voters, particularly men, who across racial lines fell away from Harris. So White men were leading the way on that, breaking at about 60% for Trump. And he really catered to men, particularly young men, right? On these podcasts, on the stump he was appealing to this very kind of macho and frankly misogynistic version of masculinity. And it clearly resonated. So I just wonder what that signals to you too, about where the country is headed as it relates to gender dynamics and norms.
Martha:
One of my questions after the 2020 election settled, now Kamala Harris was Vice President of the United States. I wasn’t alone in wondering right, when she would run, and in fact here we found ourselves with her at the top of the ticket in 2024. But my question back then had been whether this nation was prepared to permit someone like Kamala Harris to lead, right? To be at the top. And I think we learned that that prospect really not only opened a door, it fueled a kind of resort to a kind of crude masculinist vision of who should lead and by what terms what a president looks like. So the answer is for many Americans, many American men know that women cannot lead this nation. We don’t have to be very sophisticated students of world politics, particularly in the West and in the Americas, to recognize that now the U.S. is truly an outlier in this regard.
Martha:
You don’t have to be an admirer of Margaret Thatcher to recognize that she was able to lead Britain. You don’t have to admire Angela Merkel to recognize that she very effectively led Germany, et cetera. And so we see ourselves now, I think, in stark relief as a nation that is still beholden and held back, at least in my view, by some very crude masculinist thinking that makes the prospect of a President Harris impossible.
Errin:
Or Madam President possible at all, right?
Errin:
That was kind of where I was on the other side of the election. I mean, my column after that was, what is it gonna take for a woman to be president? We have a woman at the top of the ticket for the second time in eight years. And I said going into last week that this election was gonna be about who we are as much as it was about who both of the candidates running for president are. So, you know, so who are we? I mean, we are the democracy that still has not put a woman in the White House. And so, I do still wonder, what that is going to take? And I do think part of that is the continued expansion of this country’s political imagination about what leadership gets to look like, who can and should lead, right?
Errin:
The qualities that we assign to a president. Also being able to assign those qualities to a woman being strong, being powerful, being commanding, right? Like, these are not necessarily traits that we assign to women. And also our leadership as being singular and not always necessarily in community. Like we’re, it’s fine if we are leading and helping. It is not fine if we are running the whole thing. And that is true across a lot of our society, and it’s definitely true in our politics. That’s kind of where I am. But again, with so many women also not voting for the woman at the top of the ticket again, men are not the only ones who kind of need to come to terms with the idea of a woman president. And also it’s a reminder that we have to continue to normalize women’s leadership in this country, which can help people, I think hope to get there.
Errin:
One day, maybe even in my lifetime. I wanna just think though about, again, in terms of normalizing women’s leadership, because the presidential election really kind of overshadowed a lot of the signs of progress that we did see in this election cycle. Like in your home state of Maryland, electing Angela Alsobrooks to the U.S. Senate and then Delaware sent Lisa Blunt Rochester to the Senate. So you will now have two Black women serving in the Senate for the first time. Sarah McBride becomes the first openly trans person elected in the House. I feel like these wins matter, and I wanna ask you how you put them into context in this kind of broader historical moment.
Martha:
I think that you’re spot on. When you characterize our political culture is overly preoccupied with the top of the ticket in a presidential cycle. And we are now well into an era during which American women, including Black American women, are running for public office in record numbers and they are winning public office. We could talk about Senator Alsobrooks from here in Maryland. But I urge everyone to look around, ask who’s on your city council, who’s on your library board, who’s in your state senate? Because this is where we see what, for me, is the force of American women in politics. And it truly is a force. These are not women who are breaking glass ceilings any longer. They really represent the beginning of a profound sea change. And so let’s not sleep on them as a fact.
Martha:
But let’s stay tuned in to now the work that they are challenged to do, particularly in a historical moment when the President-elect and the folks around the President-elect appear to be poised to openly engage in misogyny and more as a political tactic. These are some courageous folks who are going to be doing the frontline work of democracy for all of us, and I think we need to stay tuned in to them. And the kinds of issues that they are putting on the table, the kind of support they need to do that work. We have work to do still, even as many of us are disappointed about the result of the presidential contest.
Errin:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, it is time to make that shift now from the idea of gender being on the ballot to how gender is showing up in governing as these folks are getting ready to take office and will continue to lead. Showing what that looks like, showing what that means for the people who elected them and the people that they represent, whether they elected them or not, going to be very important. You talked about, though, that kind of collective grief among Harris voters, you know, the faces that we saw on the campus of Howard University. She came out and gave that concession speech, but said again, that she was not conceding the fight. The unfinished work must continue. And so you hear a lot about continuing the fight, but what does that actually look like?
Martha:
I think that many of us learned a lot about ourselves and who we are in relationship to this democracy through this campaign. There are many of us who need time to grieve, to cook, to clean, to practice our yoga like Rosa Parks did. You know, we need time to adapt to what’s in front of us, but we need not forget that we learned a lot about who we are and what we are capable of as active members of this democracy. I teach young people, and I’ve asked them, what did you learn? You know, did you learn that you’re the kind of person who can knock on doors and talk to strangers and pitch a candidate? And that’s an extraordinary skill. Did you learn that you don’t mind texting just strangers, and being rebuffed or calling strangers and nobody picks up.
Martha:
But somehow when you get that one person who answers the phone and you get into that dialogue, you understand better who you are in a democracy. Are you somebody who works better from the margins and is part of an activist community that is putting pressure on the engine of the state, that is putting pressure on the political parties. These and more are the things that I think we learned about ourselves in this election cycle. And now it’s time to take stock and to know that we’re going to use them again in the next cycle and the next. It’s not a moment to abandon what we’ve learned, even in the face of profound disappointment, even in the face of folks who will discourage us from coming back to the table in a next election cycle. Instead I think it’s time to learn how we take what we know, take what we’ve experienced, take our wisdom and use it when we come, whether it’s to your local contest at the school board, that’s probably coming up for folks in not too much time, or it is in the midterms 2026. This is the time to harness the things that we’ve learned and to continue the good fight, I’m sure of that.
Errin:
I wonder from a historian perspective, I think about vanguard, I go back to vanguard historically. We’ve done this work before, right? I mean, what does that look like? Is there an example that comes to mind for you of how people persevered in what felt like the face of defeat?
Martha:
The person who comes to mind when I think about what it means to persevere is Mary McLeod Bethune. And some folks may remember her name because then Senator Harris had invoked Mrs. Bethune back in 2020 when she accepted the Dems’ nomination, and she was gonna run for Vice President. Bethune was one of the women who Kamala Harris told us she was standing on Bethune’s shoulders. But Mrs. Bethune is born in 1875. Why is that important? We’re after the Civil War, she is born free in the United States, not enslaved in South Carolina. She’s born just as the great experiment in interracial democracy that we call reconstruction is coming to an end, is being undone by white supremacy. What to do? Mrs. Bethune is educated, goes to college, and by 1905 — she’s still a young woman — she is starting up her own school in Daytona, Florida.
Martha:
And this is that intergenerational vision, right? That it’s not enough for her to be educated. She knows that she has to invest in the next generation of girls, and she does. Today, Bethune Cookman University bears her name and is her legacy. By the time we are working toward the 19th Amendment now, it’s the 19 teens. Mrs. Bethune is a voting rights organizer, what we would call a voting rights organizer. She’s a suffragist working for the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, preparing Black women for the likelihood that they are going to have the opportunity to register and to vote in 1920. And she meets with unspeakable violence, as do all Black voting rights advocates in Florida in those seasons. The klan literally marches onto the grounds of her school on the eve of election day in 1920 in an attempt to intimidate her, intimidate her faculty, intimidate Black women in Daytona. They vote anyway, but the violence persists.
Martha:
And this is where Mrs. Bethune’s vision for us really comes through. She can’t get to the ballot box in Florida. So she comes to Washington and Franklin Roosevelt is rolling out the New Deal, and Roosevelt needs Black advisors, folks who will work with him behind the scenes to really see through the deep challenges of the Depression for Black Americans. And Mrs. Bethune joins Roosevelt’s kitchen cabinet, his Black cabinet. She’s not elected to anything. She can’t even vote at home. But still she can behind the scenes as she does become a very, very effective operative in Washington, bring scores of Black women to Washington into those federal agencies where they are making policy, and they are distributing monies that help to bring Black folks out of the depression. So Mrs. Bethune is nimble, right? And understands when this way is blocked, we pivot.
Martha:
By the 1940s, she really has developed an internationalist vision. She understands as many Americans are beginning to understand the ways in which racism at home is linked to racism across the globe. And she lobbies her way, unwelcome by the men in the American delegation to the founding of the United Nations. She elbows her way onto that delegation where she meets women again from across the globe, from India, from South Africa, women of color who have come to the UN to make sure that women and women’s issues will have an indelible place within that body. Mrs. Bethune, for me, is a queen and she’s a hero. But her lesson to us is that yes, not only must we persevere, but that we have to be nimble, and we have to recognize that when this way is blocked and many of us feel blocked by what happened last week at the ballot box, when that way is blocked, we have to pivot.
Martha:
So what does that mean for us? Does it mean we run for office ourselves? And we begin to do the work locally. Does it mean we support those candidates who have been elected to office and who are going to look to further our agenda? On and on. But her message to us is that now we pivot and we find a way forward. And I think that’s really the call to the many of us who are despairing in this moment is now let’s pivot and find the next cause that we are going to use our skills to see through.
Errin:
When the way is blocked, we pivot. Like that is the message, that was so much of the story of the 19th. It was so much of the story of the Black suffragists on the other side of the passage of the 19th. We have pivoted, we have had to figure it out and we have had to, in many cases, create a way forward when it looked like there was not one. So I’m thank you for that. Speaking of things to look forward to, to look ahead to, uh, you have a new book coming out in the spring. It’s called ”The Trouble of Color” and I wonder if you can just share a little bit about this American family memoir that you have written.
Martha:
These recent years, I think have been a time for reflection. And this book was a chance for me to turn my historian’s lens on myself and my own family. I think I wanted to understand how we got to this moment in history, how I got to this extraordinary moment in history. And the answer is, for me, a story about family. It’s an American story, and what does that mean? It means that it’s not an easy story in the sense that it begins with slavery and sexual violence. It begins with anti-miscegenation laws. It continues into Jim Crow passing and colorism. But my question really was about the color line and what it means in the lives of our families, what it meant in the life of my family and I hope that it’s a story that lets us all turn inward and take stock of how we got here. I think we need that as a source of strength in challenging times. And while these aren’t easy stories for many, many of us, I think they are stories that ultimately strengthen our resolve and strengthen our capacity to do the hard work that’s in front of us.
Errin:
I mean, you are a historian that follows the plight and the triumph of Black women voters. How are you honoring hope as a Black woman in this era?
Martha:
I’m somebody who, I think, has always worked by the belief that the work is right in front of us. It’s right in front of me. You asked me what I did after Tuesday, but one of the things I did was show up on my campus, open my office door, put on a pot of coffee, and invite young people to come and sit to begin to understand what had happened, but to talk about who we are, where we are, what is next for us. I think my hope comes very much by showing up and knowing in ways that are challenging, in ways that are angering, in ways that are unjust, that there will be work in front of us. You may know that in 2018 I wrote a book about birthright citizenship, and here we are. And so my purpose comes from digging into what I know and trying to put it to good use as it appears we are once again going to face down an administration that looks to undo birthright citizenship. That’s a story for another day, another podcast. But I urge everyone to look up, to look around, and your purpose is right in front of you. We need each other. And there are going to be urgencies in so many quarters. I’m confident that we can take the kind of commitment that we discovered in ourselves, many of us in this election cycle and put it to meaningful use in the days and the weeks and the months and more to come.
Errin:
Well, Martha, as we pivot away from this iteration of The Amendment, I’m just so grateful that I get to think about and think through the way forward with you. That is what I know for sure will continue. Thank you so much for stopping by The Amendment and for helping me think about the unfinished business of the 19th amendment.
Martha:
Thanks for having me, and we all look forward to following you wherever we find you next.
Errin:
Well, thank you Martha, and thank you all so much for listening. That is a wrap on election season as well as The Amendment.
Okay so as I’ve said, the end of election season means the end of the Amendment season, which has really just been such a joy and an honor to host, to be in conversation with all of you and so many of the people who helped me to sound smarter and to think more broadly about what our democracy can and should be. That is work that continues. That is the work of all of us. And I just want to stress that to everybody.
Errin:
Working at a newsroom named for The 19th Amendment, the unfinished business of the 19th Amendment is absolutely what I’m focused on as we head into this new administration and uncharted territory and all of that. But I just encourage each one of you to also think about how you are seeing the unfinished business of the 19th Amendment and your role in continuing to help shape our democracy.
Errin:
That does not just happen during election season, on election day, that is the constant work of us all as citizens. And so I look forward to being in that work with you, but thank you so, so much for supporting The Amendment and I will talk to y’all soon.
This is goodbye for now, but not forever. We’re thinking about what we’re doing next, and I want to hear from you! So please do me a favor and visit 19thnews.org and take the survey that you see there. That really does inform the work that we do and how we do it.
The Amendment is a co-production of the 19th News and Wonder Media Network. Our executive producers are Jenny Kaplan, Terri Rupar, Faith Smith and Emily Rudder. The show is edited by Grace Lynch and Julia B. Chan, produced by Brittany Martinez, Grace Lynch, Alyia Yates Grau, and Luci Jones. And Post-production support from Julie Bogen, Lance Dixon, and Wynton Wong, artwork by Aria Goodman. And our theme music is composed by Jlin.
