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• The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir - 2025 Basic Books, New York, NY

• Martha S. Jones website - https://www.marthasjones.com/

  I am a writer, historian, legal scholar and public intellectual whose work aims to understanding the politics, culture, and poetics of Black America. You can find me at work in seminar rooms, at podiums, in front of microphones, and on the pages of books, newspapers, Substack, and social media. My happy place is the archives where I never tire of the adventure of discovery. When I’m looking for sustenance, you can find me in museum galleries where artists, by way of beauty and provocation, enrich my ideas and nourish my spirit.

  My creative practice is rooted in the personal essay. My latest book – The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (2025) – recounts my family’s encounters with race and color through the story of five generations. You’ll recognize signs of my historian’s research skills, but you will also discover how I have felt about inheriting the troubles of the jagged color line – from slavery and sexual violence through passing and colorism and on through civil rights and today’s “mixed-race” generation. I am grateful to venues from CNN to the Michigan Quarterly Review and Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute for nurturing the stories that have taken full form in The Trouble of Color.

  I am the author of prize-winning histories that survey the vast American past, from slavery and the founding, the Civil War and Reconstruction, women’s suffrage and Jim Crow, on through modern Civil Rights and present day race and identity. My 2020 book, Vanguard chronicled a long struggle for the ballot that extended from the first Black women preachers on through the candidacy of Kamala Harris. Birthright Citizens (2018) told a new history of citizenship in the U.S. as the product of Black American activism, legal claims-making, and persistence. My work is often grounded in women’s history, and my first two books – the co-edited Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015) and All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture: 1830 to 1900 (2007) – are that foundation.

  Expect to encounter my byline from time to time. For the New York Times I have written on culture and travel, including the widely-read “Enslaved to A Founding Father, She Sought Freedom in France” about Abigail, a woman held by the family of John Jay. My opinion columns have appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Politico, Talking Points Memo, and USA Today. You can also hear or see me via outlets such as NPR’s Here & Now and 1A, CNN’s Amanpour, and MSNBC’s the Rachel Maddow Show. Podcasts such as the Ezra Klein Show and the 19th*’s Amendment have given me opportunities for long-form conversation.

  My work has enjoyed generous recognition. Book prizes from the American Historical Association, the Organization for American History, the American Society for Legal History, and the Los Angeles Times have helped to bring my writing to even broader audiences. My research has been supported by the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advance Study,) the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Library of Congress Kluge Center, and the American Historical Association. I am an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Society of American Historians, and the American Society for Legal History which in 2024 named me an honorary fellow, the society’s highest distinction. In spring 2025 I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the writing of my next book, titled Hard Histories, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  Behind the scenes, my expertise supports media productions and cultural institutions. Check the credits and you’ll see that I’ve been an advisor and consultant to the Library of Congress, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Obama Foundation, the National Women’s History Museum, and the U.S. Capital Historical Society. I have joined television and film productions, in front of and behind the camera for Netflix, Arte (France), and PBS American Experience.

  At Johns Hopkins University, I teach for the Department of History and the SNF Agora Institute. I also direct the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project where my lab investigates the history of slavery and racism connected with Johns Hopkins University and Medicine. Teaching takes me farther afield, engaging with learners of many ages and stations thanks to organizations such as the National Constitution Center, the Pulitzer Center, the Zinn Education Project, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, and the Institute for Constitutional History at New York Historical. I am indebted to the educators in my own family, and my teachers. At the CUNY School of Law, I was trained by mentors such as Patricia Williams and Victor Goode, and at Columbia University I studied under Eric Foner, the late Manning Marable, and Alice Kessler-Harris.

  My parents, a full decade before Loving v. Virginia, married despite the threat of the color line. I was baptized in upper Manhattan’s Ascension Roman Catholic Church, took my first steps on the sidewalks of Harlem’s Riverton, and started school in the Long Island suburb of Port Washington. I eventually returned to New York City, a student at Hunter College and, after law school as a store-front poverty lawyer battling for people facing homelessness, mental illness, and HIV/AIDS. A year as a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York let me see how I might mix social justice and academic research. That has been my purpose ever since.

  Along with my husband, historian Jean Hébrard, I live in Baltimore, Maryland, and Greenport, New York. If you’re looking for the other Martha Jones, the Dr. Who character, you can find her here.

• Department of History, Johns Hopkins University website - https://history.jhu.edu/directory/martha-jones/

  Martha S. Jones (she/her/hers)
  Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, Professor at the SNF Agora Institute, and Director of Graduate Studies
  Contact Information
  msjonz@jhu.edu
  Curriculum Vitae
  Gilman 320
  Follow Me on Social Media
  Research Interests: Race and rights in the 19th century U.S. with an emphasis on slavery, law, gender, and visual culture

  Education: PhD, Columbia University

  History > People > Martha S. Jones
  Biography

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  I am a writer, historian, legal scholar and public intellectual whose work is devoted to understanding the politics, culture, and poetics of Black America. You can find me at work in seminar rooms, at podiums, in front of microphones, and on the pages of books, newspapers, Substack, and social media. My happy place is the archives where I never tire of the adventure of discovery. When I’m looking for sustenance, you can find me in museum galleries where artists, by way of beauty and provocation, challenge my ideas and nourish my spirit.

  My creative practice is rooted in the personal essay. My latest book – The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (2025) – recounts my personal journey with race and color through the story of my ancestors’ generations. You’ll recognize signs of my historian’s research skills, but you will also discover how I have felt about inheriting the troubles of the jagged color line – from slavery and sexual violence through passing and colorism. I am grateful to venues from CNN to the Michigan Quarterly Review and Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute for nurturing the stories that have taken full form in The Trouble of Color.

  I am the author of prize-winning histories that survey the vast American past, from slavery and the founding, Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s suffrage and Jim Crow, on through modern Civil Rights and present-day race and identity. My 2020 book, Vanguard chronicled a long struggle for the ballot from the first Black women preachers on through the candidacy of Kamala Harris. Birthright Citizens (2018) told a new history of citizenship in the U.S. as the product of Black American activism and persistence. My work is grounded by women’s history, and Black feminist theory and my first two books – the edited Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015) and All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture: 1830 to 1900 (2007) – are that foundation.

  My work has received far-ranging support and recognition including book prizes from the Los Angeles Times, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Society for Legal History. ASLH in fall 2024 named me an honorary fellow, the highest honor that the society bestows. Deeply meaningful are the distinctions extended to me by my alma maters. In 2019, the CUNY School of Law awarded me an honorary doctor of laws degree; in 2021 Columbia University granted me the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement, and in 2024 Hunter College inducted me into the school’s hall of fame. Fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study,) the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Humanities Center. I am an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, the Society of American Historians, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. In 2023, President Joe Biden appointed me a member of the Permanent Committee on the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise.

  Expect to encounter my by-line from time to time. For the New York Times I have written on culture and travel, including the widely read “Enslaved to A Founding Father, She Sought Freedom in France” about Abigail, an enslaved woman held by the family of John Jay. My opinion columns have appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Politico, Talking Points Memo, and USA Today. You can also hear or see me via outlets such as NPR’s Here & Now and 1A, CNN’s Amanpour, and MSNBC’s the Rachel Maddow Show. Podcasts such as the Ezra Klein Show and the 19th*’s Amendment have given me opportunities for long-form conversation.

  Behind the scenes, my expertise supports media productions and cultural institutions. Check the fine print and you’ll see that I’ve been an advisor and consultant to the Library of Congress, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Obama Foundation, the National Women’s History Museum, and the U.S. Capital Historical Society. I have joined television and film productions, in front of and behind the camera for Netflix, Arte (France), and PBS American Experience.

  At Johns Hopkins University, I teach for the department of history and the SNF Agora Institute. I also direct the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project where my lab investigates the history of slavery and racism connected with Johns Hopkins University and Medicine. Teaching takes me farther afield, reaching learners of many ages and stations thanks to organizations such as the National Constitution Center, the Pulitzer Center, the Zinn Education Project, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, and the Institute for Constitutional History at New York Historical. I am indebted to my own teachers. At the CUNY School of Law, I was trained by mentors like Patricia Williams and Victor Goode, and at Columbia University I studied with Eric Foner, Manning Marable, and Alice Kessler-Harris.

  My parents, a full decade before Loving v. Virginia, married despite the persistence of the color line. I was baptized in upper Manhattan’s Ascension Roman Catholic Church, took my first steps on the sidewalks of Harlem’s Riverton, and started school in the Long Island suburb of Port Washington. I eventually returned to New York City, a student at Hunter College and after law school as a store-front poverty lawyer battling for people facing homelessness, mental illness, and HIV/AIDS. A year as a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York let me see how I might mix social justice and academic research.

  I live in Baltimore, Maryland, and Greenport, New York, with my husband, historian Jean Hébrard.

• Wikipedia -

  Martha S. Jones

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Martha S. Jones

  Born New York, New York
  Nationality American
  Academic background
  Alma mater
  Hunter College
  CUNY School of Law
  Columbia University
  Doctoral advisor Eric Foner
  Academic work
  Discipline
  History
  Law
  Institutions
  Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
  University of Michigan
  Johns Hopkins University
  Website http://marthasjones.com/
  Martha S. Jones is an American historian and legal scholar. She is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She studies the legal and cultural history of the United States, with a particular focus on how Black Americans have shaped the history of American democracy. She has published books on the voting rights of African American women, the debates about women's rights among Black Americans in the early United States, and the development of birthright citizenship in the United States as promoted by African Americans in Baltimore before the Civil War.

  Early life and education
  Jones’s mother, Sue Jones, was born to German and Irish immigrants in Buffalo, New York. Jones’s father was born in Greensboro, North Carolina.[1] Her paternal grandfather, David Dallas Jones, was the president of the Bennett College, a historically black college and one of only two all-women HBCUs in the United States.[2] Jones attended Hunter College, where she graduated with a BA degree in 1984.[3] She then attended the CUNY School of Law, earning a JD in 1987.[3]

  Legal career
  From 1987 to 1994, Jones was a public interest lawyer with MFY Legal Services and the HIV Law Project.[3] In 1994, she was awarded a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University.[3]

  Academic career
  Jones then became a graduate student at Columbia University, and obtained an MA in history in 1997, an MPhil in history in 1998, and a PhD in history in 2001.[3] During her graduate studies, Jones was an adjunct lecturer at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School, and a visiting professor of history at Barnard College. In 2001, she joined the faculty of History and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, where she was an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor from 2013 to 2017, and a Presidential Bicentennial Professor from 2016 to 2017.[4] From 2004 to 2017 she was also affiliated with the University of Michigan Law School.

  In 2017, Jones joined the faculty at The Johns Hopkins University, becoming the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History.[3]

  Jones has held visiting positions, including at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, Library Company of Philadelphia, and the National Constitution Center.[3] She is a distinguished lecturer of the Organization of American Historians.[5]

  In 2018 Jones was elected a Fellow of the American Antiquarian Society.[3] In 2017, she became a co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians,[6] and serves on the board of governors for the William L. Clements Library.[7]

  Research
  In 2007, Jones published All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900. In it, she discusses the woman question in the debate over women's rights in African-American public culture during the early 1800s.[8] Jones presents evidence that contradicts the dominant narrative that the women's rights movement in America began with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, instead showing that African-American women successfully contested the right to speak before a mixed-gender audience as early as the 1830s.[9] Jones also discusses the backlash against these activists, and the trajectory of the following generations of activists up to 1900.[8] She shows that the American Civil War provided black women the opportunity to expand their involvement in public service activities, such as teaching and charity work, and that despite the constraints of the Reconstruction era and Jim Crow laws, many black women were able to further their positions in social and religious institutions and thereby accrue public authority.[10]

  Jones is also the author of the 2018 book Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America. Jones explains the development of Birthright citizenship in the United States using both legal and extra-legal claims by African Americans in the city of Baltimore.[11] She argues that the development of birthright citizenship for African Americans was not an automatic consequence of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution or intellectual activity and activism that followed the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, but was mainly developed through claims that arose from everyday activity.[11] Rather than focusing primarily on Congressional debates or judicial decisions, Jones traces how free black people in Baltimore gradually inhabited the role of citizens by engaging with the legal system to claim opportunities like travel permits, debt relief, gun licenses, control over property, lawsuits, and contract-making.[12] Jones uses evidence mainly from the 1790s through the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, and although she focuses primarily on Baltimore, she also incorporates evidence from throughout the United States during that period.[13] Jones also studies the activities of the Legal Rights Association, the politics of colonization and how state-level petitions and legislative activism by African Americans rendered the Dred Scott decision less effective over time.[14] In the same year that Birthright Citizens was published, Donald Trump suggested that he would end birthright citizenship in the United States by executive order, so the book was noted for studying a timely subject[15] with particular implications for the status of unauthorized immigrants to the United States.[11]

  In 2020, Jones published Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All.[16] On March 4, 2025, Jones's book The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir was released.[17]

  Jones also co-edited the 2015 volume Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women.[3]

  Honors
  2013–14: National Humanities Center William C. and Ida Friday Fellow
  2019: American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid Book Award
  2019: American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize for Birthright Citizens
  2019: Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for Birthright Citizens
  2020: Los Angeles Times History Book Prize for Vanguard[18]
  Creative work
  Jones has curated museum exhibitions, including "Reframing the Color Line" and "Proclaiming Emancipation" in conjunction with the William L. Clements Library.[19][20]

  Selected works
  "'Make us a Power': African-American Methodists Debate the Rights of Women, 1870–1900" in Women and Religion in the African Diaspora] (2006)
  "Leave of Court: African-American Legal Claims Making In the Era of Dred Scott v. Sandford" in Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History (2007)
  All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (2007)
  "Overthrowing the 'Monopoly of the Pulpit': Race and the Rights of Churchwomen in Nineteenth Century America" in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (2010)
  "Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York". Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (2011)
  "The Case of Jean Baptiste, un Créole de Saint-Domingue: Narrating Slavery, Freedom, and the Haitian Revolution in Baltimore City," in The American South and the Atlantic World (2013)
  "Emancipation's Encounters: Seeing the Proclamation Through Soldiers' Sketchbooks". Journal of the Civil War Era vol. 3, no. 4 (December 2013)
  "History and Commemoration: The Emancipation Proclamation at 150". Journal of the Civil War Era, 3, no. 4 (December 2013)
  Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015)
  "First the Streets, Then the Archives". American Journal of Legal History 56, no. 1 (March 2016)
  "Forgetting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the United States: How History Troubled Memory in 2008" in Distant Ripples of the British Abolitionist Wave: Africa, Asia, and the Americas (2017)
  Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018)
  "How the Daughters and Granddaughters of Former Slaves Secured Voting Rights for All". Smithsonian Magazine (March 8, 2019)
  Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020) [21][22]
  The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (2025) [23][24]

• BookPage - https://www.bookpage.com/interviews/martha-s-jones-interview-the-trouble-of-color/

  March 03, 2025
  Martha S. Jones on ‘The Trouble of Color’
  ‘It has allowed me to discover how it feels to know that past and also live its inheritance’
  Interview by Erica Ciccarone
  By excavating her ancestral history, historian and memoirist Martha S. Jones invites readers to reflect deeply on their own family stories.
  Share this Article:

  What do you love most about your memoir?

  With The Trouble of Color complete, my husband will no longer question my habit of saving family mementos. He’d been the one to pack and repack them each time we moved! I’m joking, of course, because he has always been supportive, coming along on my research adventures. It is more accurate to say that I love how this book created a home for the photos, reminiscences, letters and souvenirs I’d collected. It is a practice begun as a small child, when my grandmother began mailing me keepsakes. I love how the book has given these things a purpose by letting them tell a new story about an American family, about who we call kin and how that can change across generations.

  What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book?

  The Trouble of Color is for readers eager for a journey of discovery: of the self, of what it means to be family and how the color line has shaped us. If you have been misapprehended, mistaken or misunderstood for someone you are not, this book is for you. If the look of your very person confounds, confuses or provokes others, this book is for you. If you have been rebuffed, wounded or dismissed along the color line, this book is for you. If you’ve ever felt discomfort when checking a box, filling a blank or choosing a side, this book is for you. If you’ve heard that your family is too complicated, too out of bounds, confused or contradictory, this book is for you. For everyone, The Trouble of Color is an invitation to reflect deeply on their own family stories.

  At what point did you know this story was a book?

  I’ve collected family memories for a long time. But I only knew I might have enough for a book when I uncovered the story of my great-great-great grandmother, Nancy. She was born a slave in 1808 Danville, Kentucky, and no one in our family had spoken much about her. I stumbled onto the details of her life in the pages of some old, dusty account ledgers, and I could see how she was at the start of a book that stretched out across generations, all the way to me. I wrote The Trouble of Color with her portrait at my shoulder, hanging next to my desk, and always felt sure that Nancy would be pleased to know that I had put her and her descendants’ lives on the page.

  If you have been rebuffed, wounded or dismissed along the color line, this book is for you.

  What was the hardest memory to get on the page?

  I knew I would have to confront my father’s life, including his troubled times. As a girl, I had heard his stories. But as a memoirist, I had to confront raw details: As a young man, more than once he’d barely escaped a tragic end. I wrote and rewrote those passages many times, wanting to be both honest and compassionate. I rooted for him, held my breath when he faltered and discovered that I could understand and even love him, despite his shortcomings. But to get there, I first had to face things that our family rarely talked about.

  Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?

  I grew up thinking that my parents, who wed in 1957, were the first couple in our family to marry across the color line. They were not, I discovered. Long before couples like them tested their right to marry as part of the Civil Rights generation, men and women together defied so-called anti-miscegenation laws and legally wed. This was true 130 years earlier for my great-great grandparents, Elijah and Mary Jones. In 1827 they fooled a North Carolina county clerk long enough to get a license and say “I do,” even if the law barred him, a free man of color, from marrying her, a white woman. My parents were not outlaws—they were part of a family tradition.

  How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?

  I feel like I’ve stepped into a new world. For two decades, my reading and writing life had been dominated by history and related scholarship. I love that work and the discoveries it has led me to. But historical writing does not very often invite us to put our imaginations, our dreams, our fears and ourselves on the page. Reading memoir has taught me a new way of thinking about the past and of explaining it in very personal terms. Writing memoir has given me the freedom to share not only what happened in the past. It has allowed me to discover how it feels to know that past and also live its inheritance. I feel excited for readers to know me in this new way.

  How have you changed since you started writing it?

  I found a new sense of humor while writing The Trouble of Color. I haven’t always found moments in which people misread me and my skin color to be funny. Mostly those were painful scenes. But I learned about my great-grandmother Fannie and her “passing” in downtown St. Louis. She was oftentimes amused when her skin fooled the eyes of department store clerks or train conductors. She shopped and traveled like a white woman when she chose to and, like many a trickster, enjoyed every moment of the farce. Only today, knowing Fannie better, am I also bemused by the misunderstanding that my color invites: People assume I am who I am not. Like Fannie did, I can now see the absurdity in that and laugh, at least to myself.

  Read our starred review of ‘The Trouble of Color’ by Martha S. Jones.

  What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?

  To write about my parents’ lives as suburban activists, I had to go back there, literally. When my memories failed, I returned to my hometown public library where they keep the only run of our weekly newspaper, the Port Washington News. Talk about going back in time: There I was, doing research in the place where, as a girl, I checked out books and studied after school. I was greeted by my junior high social studies teacher, now retired and a library volunteer, and spent days reading issue after issue, gingerly turning the brittle pages. I unearthed tidbits about my parents’ lives and more. I sometimes think there are stories for a next book about my own growing up waiting for me there.

  Can you describe your book as an item on a menu?

  The Trouble of Color is like a side of greens. Mine are made from improvisation and with love. There’s the sweetness of onions. Heat of pepper flakes. Savor of a smoked ham hock. Bitterness of greens: collards, mustard, chard and beet. Next, laborious prep. Rinse and soak the leaves. Repeat. Tear the tender parts from the stems. Keep the stringy bits for flavor. Magic happens when the greens hit the brew of stock, vinegar and hot sauce: wilting down to a thick, rich stew. Greens are great that first day, but let them sit. The jelly collects. The pot liquor thickens. They taste better than the day before. My greens are like family: contrasting ingredients, labor in the making, transformation in the cooking and always changing with goodness that lasts.

• African American Intellectual History Society website - https://www.aaihs.org/the-trouble-of-color-an-interview-with-martha-s-jones/

  The Trouble of Color: An Interview with Martha S. Jones

  By Robert Greene II July 21, 2025 0

  Courtesy of Hachette Book Group
  In today’s post, Dr. Robert Greene II, AAIHS President and Associate Professor of History at Claflin University, interviews Dr. Martha S. Jones about her latest book, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (Basic Books, 2025). Dr. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, Professor at the SNF Agora Institute, and Director of Graduate Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She has written extensively on the intersection of race, gender, justice, and the law throughout the full spectrum of American history. Dr. Jones has shared her work in numerous public-facing publications, including CNN, The Racial Imaginary Institute, The Atlantic, The New York Times, National Geographic, and The Washington Post.

  Dr. Jones’ work has received praise from numerous circles, winning a variety of awards and changing how the public and academics alike think about the role of Black women in the American past. Her first book, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2007. She also published the award-winning Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, published in 2018, and Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted Upon Equality for All, published in 2020 and also the recipient of several awards. She also co-edited Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, with Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, and Barbara D. Savage. Dr. Jones’ newest book tackles the complicated history of racial identity and passing in American history, through the fascinating story of her own family.

  Robert Greene II: In the afterword of The Trouble of Color, you described your book as “a work of literature rather than history.” Why was it important to you to write a book that would not easily fit into categories such as history, and yet is so accessible to both historians and lay readers alike?

  Martha S. Jones: First, thank you for the chance to talk about The Trouble of Color with you and with the followers of AAIHS and Black Perspectives (of which I am one!) I decided to write The Trouble of Color as a memoir only after realizing that history would not let me tell the story I was called to tell. Initially, I set out to render my family stories historiographically significant; this is how I had been trained. But those early efforts fell flat, and I asked myself what was missing. The answer was, it turned out, a depth of feeling. Not only did I aim to recount the story of our family, I also wanted to explore what it has felt like to be us, to live in our skin. Memoir offered me the space to introduce my own feelings, and to speculate, to hope and to dream with my ancestors. I had in mind memoir as exemplified by writers such as Kiese Laymon and Natasha Tretheway whose works showed me that not all truths are historical truths. I wrote The Trouble of Color while searching not for intellectual truths but for truths of the heart and of the soul; memoir let me discover that.

  Greene: For historians of Black thought, the idea of passing—and what that means for individuals and families alike—has always been greatly intriguing. Why is the idea of passing so important to understanding the Black American experience, especially during the age of Jim Crow segregation?

  Jones: This is an important question, but I want to be careful. Preparing to write a memoir meant that I did a lot of reading, including into the literature on passing. And while I can tell you how passing was important in my family, my conclusions are not sociological. The Trouble of Color invites readers to sit with one family’s experiences and try them on, compare them, and arrive at their own ideas about why passing has been and even continues to be important to them.

  That said, I can share a few things that I learned after thinking about passing through a family lens. First, I came to appreciate that during Jim Crow a woman like my great-grandmother Fannie passed as a way to resist Jim Crow. Each time she sat in a white’s only theater seat or tried on a department store dress, she was getting one over on white supremacy. And in St. Louis, Missouri, where she lived, she was not alone. At the same time, within her own family, Fannie hurt those she loved. My own grandmother, Fannie’s oldest child, could not pass and until the end of her life bore the hurt that her mother’s downtown outings inflicted. On the days Fannie set out to pass, she left my grandmother at home; having her in tow would have given Fannie away. I came to know that these two sides of Fannie were both in their own way true: I both admire her militancy and resent her betrayal.

  Fannie’s story led me to think that the term passing isn’t capacious enough to capture what it has meant for some of us to cross the color line. Passing to me still invokes those who crossed over and never looked back. I wish I had another word for those who, like Fannie, moved back and forth as a matter of circumstance but never abandoned their Blackness.

  Today, my students say that someone who appears as I do is “white presenting,” and that this is different in degree from passing. If I am taken for a white person it is because, well, I can’t help that, is what I think they mean. I can’t say the phrase fits for me, but I appreciate that they are wrestling with language, trying to help us distinguish some forms of passing from others.

  Greene: The geography of the experience of your family is something that stands out in The Trouble of Color. In particular, the state of Kentucky holds significant prominence for your family history. When we think of the history of Black America, what do you think is the importance of a border state like Kentucky to that history?

  Jones: I enjoyed the challenge of persuading readers to care about places less fabled in our history, including central Kentucky and New York’s Long Island suburbs. By the time I take you to Greensboro, North Carolina, I am sure you have some inkling about the place, through mostly in the Civil Rights generation. Surprise! My story there is largely set in the 19th century. You asked about Kentucky, and that was the place I knew the least about going into the book. I traveled there for the first time while researching The Trouble of Color (and no one mistook me for a local). Your question referred to Kentucky as a border state, which is a nod to its political history: Slaveholding Kentucky remained part of the Union through the Civil War. But my story was not about the war. It was about a family.

  In Central Kentucky, I learned, making families across the color line was widely practiced and openly acknowledged. There were some who condemned this fact and especially challenged the exploitation of enslaved women that was at the root of such families. Others, and this I learned from legal historian Bernie Jones’s study of Kentucky’s courts, regarded those same families as legitimate enough that judges allowed white men to free and then pass property down to enslaved women and their children. This was not a benevolent regime; it was one that honored the wishes of elite white men even if that meant also siding with the interests of Black women and their so-called mixed-race children.

  This mattered in my family story. Our origins go back to unrecorded but wholly evident episodes in which enslaved women bore children by free white men. That past is written on our skin. What learning more about central Kentucky families helped me better understand is how the women in my family both remembered their exploitation and also regarded some white people as kin. The Trouble of Color not only permitted me to understand how, generations before, Black and white people in central Kentucky felt themselves to be relations. It also taught me how much has changed in our time: Even knowing more of the story, it has never occurred to me to think of those white slaveholding men and their descendants as kin. It is one of the lessons, for me, of family history: Each generation has had its own distinct story to tell about who family is and what that means.

  Greene: Bennett College holds an important place in your family history. Your grandfather, David Dallas Jones, was President of that college. How are schools such as Bennett important to Black history—and, in particular, Black intellectual history?

  Jones: My grandfather led Bennett from the 1920s through the 1950s and, while I was born only after he passed, I wasn’t but weeks old the first time I spent a summer on the campus. My grandmother lived the rest of her long life there and most years, when school ended, my parents sent me to be with her. I am indebted to the entire Bennett community for helping raise me up with a keen sense of Black history and why it matters. Writing The Trouble of Color gave me a chance to look further back to the years my grandfather led the school. Striking to me was how many towering black thinkers graced the campus, often during Sunday vespers, making students part of living Black history.

  Some Black Perspectives readers will know that Bennett, when Greensboro’s leaders faltered, hosted Martin Luther King, Jr., there in 1958. The credit for that goes to Dr. Willa Player who succeeded my grandfather as president. Dr. Player was continuing a tradition; Bennett hosted figures who may not have been welcome elsewhere in the city or the South. I was especially interested in E. Franklin Frazier’s visit in the fall of 1945; Frazier and my grandfather had known one another since the 1920s when they were just beginning their professional lives. Historian Jelani Favors has chronicled the years that followed, helping me to understand the significance of what these men did through their connections, HBCU and otherwise.

  By the time of that visit, Frazier and my grandfather were both targets of those in Washington who were hunting for “un-Americans” “subversives.” At Bennett, my grandfather held firm and continued to welcome Black thinkers. In the season of Frazier’s visit he also hosted Morehouse College’s Benjamin Mays, Max Yergen, head of the Council on African Affairs, and Howard Kester who led the Penn Normal and Industrial School in South Carolina. In that one semester alone, young women at Bennett, along with faculty and staff not only heard remarkable ideas. They learned what it took to build and sustain an intellectual community even in times of weighty oppression.

  Greene: Throughout the memoir, you take great pains to explain the process of researching in the archives. Why was it important to you to lay out how you did your research, and how it personally impacted you?

  Jones: One of the stories that runs through The Trouble of Color is that of me, a researcher and descendent. As a historian, I have largely left out the details of my research or relegated them to footnotes, a professional convention. Memoir permitted me to share my own research journey. Readers, I felt sure, were eager to see under the hood or behind the curtain to understand how we work.

  I was drawn to go a step further. I am a full character in The Trouble of Color, largely because at many turns people drew me into the story. Among them were librarians and archivists who blurred the distinction between past and present when they talked with me about family history. I could not stand outside or at the edges of the narrative, like a faithful chronicler. I let readers to know that I was deeply invested in the story, like perhaps only a descendant can be. I challenge readers to consider that as a writer I can be both deeply invested and sincerely trustworthy as a narrator. For me, all this was a radical and welcome departure from how demands of objectivity and neutrality still echo through our work as historians.

  Greene: Recently, Germany agreed to return the remains of 19 Black Americans used in race science research in the late 19th century. In The Trouble of Color, you recount interacting with the remains of members of your own family tree in archives. Why does the issue of human remains tucked away in archives seem to especially impact Black Americans and the understanding of their history?

  Jones: On the politics and ethics of human remains, my first lessons came from the work of Native American activists and scholars who have developed important legal and cultural approaches to those institutions that hold sacred human remains in their collections. While I was discovering locks of my grandmother’s hair in the collection of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, that same institution was grappling with its obligation to repatriate human remains and sacred artifacts to Native American communities and demands for the return of the so-called Agassiz daguerreotypes to the family of Tamara Lanier. I approached the Peabody thinking that there was a bright line — human remains belong with families and communities.

  My thinking expanded the more I learned about the circumstances under which my grandmother in the 1920s had provided samples of her own hair, and that of her oldest son, to a Harvard researcher. That researcher was also a Black woman and a friend to my grandmother, anthropologist Caroline Bond Day.

  Unlike other of the human remains still held at the Peabody, I cannot say that my grandmother was coerced or misled, exploited or misused when she joined Day’s study. She endorsed Day’s aims, which were to disprove the theory of mulatto degeneracy. Like Day, my grandmother rejected the view that her mixed ancestry made her inferior, in any sense, and she sent her friend hair samples to help prove that. Now, today Day’s methods are understood to be without merit. Still, I came away appreciating that she, my grandmother, and other of the study’s participants, including W.E.B. Dubois, at one time believed that their version of race science might save them.

  Greene: Your previous two books, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018) and Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020) both dealt with critical questions of racial identity and democracy in American life. The Trouble of Color also approaches these topics, albeit from a deeply personal level. Why are these themes so important to you as a historian of the Black experience?

  Jones: I wish I could tell you that my work has emanated from an early and abiding commitment to critical questions of racial identity and democracy in American life. What you say is evidently true, but I cannot say that has come about by design. One of the great gifts of this work for me has been how it affords me the latitude to follow my nose. Birthright Citizens was born out of my years as a lawyer in local courthouses, a place in which I believed epic stories were lived out each day. I tried to show how that was true even in the 19th century and even for a question as important as citizenship. Vanguard was written on the offense. I knew that in 2020 the US would mark 100 years since ratification of the 19th or so-called women’s suffrage amendment and I wanted to be sure that Black women were not overlooked during those celebrations. I was sometimes perceived as a wet blanket, someone who suppressed the upbeat spirit of the occasion by inserting the fact of anti-Black racism within the struggle for women’s votes. I tried to welcome that role.

  The Trouble of Color is the book I’d always hoped to write. I didn’t have the insight or the writing chops to attempt it earlier in my career. For me, it mattered that I was a seasoned historian of Black American and US history generally when it came time for me to finally frame my family by way of the past. And I had to be willing to learn to write — again! The Trouble of Color has no footnotes, I’m sure you noticed, and that was intentional. I wanted to write in a style that put it all on the page. Either you are with me there or you are not with me. There are no back up or second chance notes at the end that might persuade you. I’m indebted to my editors and the friends who read early drafts. They pushed me to give my all to the words on the page.

  Most remarkable and perhaps equally regrettable is how some of my earlier work has remained relevant. For Vanguard, that meant reviving that book when Kamala Harris made her historic run for the presidency in 2024. When it comes to Birthright Citizens, that book has had a life much longer than I would have wished. It came out in 2018, just as then President Trump first called for ending birthright. As we know, he has renewed that call and acted upon it now in 2025. It has been an honor and I hope of use to share the fuller history of the birthright principle as one originated and held up by Black Americans during the many decades during which they were denied the fundamentals of citizenship. It matters, I hope, as we watch the administration attempt to return to a regime in which lawmakers might arbitrarily single out who can be a citizen and by what terms. As Blackness once disqualified Americans in the 19th century, on the table and in the courts today is an attempt to make the status of ones immigrant parents similarly disqualifying. Here, as is true for so much of our past, Black history tells the rest of the story. If there is one thread that runs through all my work it is that: Black history matters.

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A new memoir by the historian Martha S. Jones combines a trenchant analysis of race and the historical record with a homage to other Black women scholars.

THE TROUBLE OF COLOR: An American Family Memoir, by Martha S. Jones

When Martha S. Jones was a student at SUNY New Paltz, she took a course called ''Black Sociology'' with Prof. James Bowen. It was the mid-1970s, and the first Black studies department, founded at San Francisco State University at the height of 1960s student protests, was less than a decade old. As part of the first generation of African-descended young people to engage with Black culture and history in the college classroom, Jones was excited for all that Bowen's class could offer. Despite her fair skin and ''hair too limp'' (her words), she relished the chance to become ''sisters of the skin'' with her classmates.

Rather than camaraderie, however, Jones experienced a humiliating confrontation while giving an oral presentation on Frantz Fanon's book ''A Dying Colonialism.'' Looking back on the incident in her consummately readable, lyrically rendered new memoir, ''The Trouble of Color,'' Jones, an award-winning professor and gifted historian at Johns Hopkins University, acknowledges that her Blackness was not the same as Fanon's. ''Fanon came of age in colonized Martinique and then through military service and medical training,'' she writes. ''Instead, my self-discovery began in that cinder-block and linoleum upstate New York classroom.''

Anxious to please and struggling through her first attempt at public speaking, Jones gave a mechanical recitation of Fanon's work, inciting protest from her classmates. One of the most vocal critics was Ron, a ''suitably brilliant, handsome and outspokenly confident'' student, who scoffed, ''Enough of this. We shouldn't have to listen to this. She doesn't even know where the French Antilles are.''

Jones, the author of multiple, field-defining works of African American history, understands this painful moment as a consequence of adolescent racial gatekeeping, predicated on the other students' assumptions about her Blackness. But as an 18-year-old, she attempted to deflect the accusation of racial inauthenticity by saying, ''Well ... the French Antilles are in France.''

She eventually befriended Ron but never forgot what he spat at her: ''Who do you think you are?''

''The Trouble of Color'' is an attempt to answer this question through a sophisticated analysis of race using Jones's own family history as a prism, while implicitly arguing for the centrality of Black women scholars in the historical profession.

Jones's paternal grandfather was David Dallas Jones (1887-1956), a North Carolina native, graduate of Wesleyan University and president of Bennett College, in Greensboro, N.C., now one of only two all-women H.B.C.U.s in the United States (Spelman College, in Atlanta, is the other). Jones knew him as ''Grandy,'' although he died before she was born.

The affectionate nickname belies David Jones's significance. Under his presidency, Bennett, founded in 1873, became known as the ''Vassar of the South,'' a place where Black women, the children and grandchildren of enslaved people, obtained a rigorous liberal arts education in defiance of cultural expectations. Alumnae include Belinda Foster, North Carolina's first Black woman district attorney; Carolyn Payton, the first Black woman head of the Peace Corps; and Gladys A. Robinson, a North Carolina state senator.

Martha Jones's father, Paul M. Jones, along with his siblings and kin, grew up within the segregated yet racially proud world of Bennett College, and the stories she heard about ancestors, enslaved and free, who navigated the 20th-century color line shaped her subsequent scholarship.

''The Trouble of Color'' is a pointed rebuttal to those who still insist that enslaved peoples' histories are unknowable, or that Black people cannot be trusted as narrators of their own past. In a moving passage at the beginning of the book, Jones describes her frustration during the 1980s and '90s when, reviewing literature in the nascent field of Black women's history, she uncovered secondary sources that whitewashed her family's past. One source mistook her grandfather for white, an inference presumably derived from photos depicting his light complexion.

Another source, a scholar of the civil rights movement, misspelled the name of Susie W. Jones, David Dallas Jones's wife and Martha's beloved grandmother Musie, whom he'd interviewed for his book -- an error as grating for Jones as it is for many Black women who have routinely been misnamed or decredentialed, either deliberately or in ignorance.

As Martha Jones puts it, ''I boiled with outrage, and one of Musie's stories came immediately to mind: In the Jim Crow years, she'd battled local white people to be addressed by her preferred name -- 'Mrs. Jones' -- rather than the overly familiar 'Susie' or the demeaning 'Gal.' For people like my grandmother, what they were called mattered.''

Jones's account of these errors is particularly poignant coming at a time when a respected scholar and the first Black woman president of Harvard University can be dismissed as an incompetent ''diversity hire.'' Black women's history, Jones insists, is vital for those who want to honor the generations of Black people who paved the way for our current achievements.

Although she never says so explicitly, Jones's compelling descriptions of reading the archives, accompanied by images from the archives themselves, make clear that she understands the central role Black women historians have played in disrupting an academy that, like much of the world, constantly demands that we prove ourselves.

At one point, Jones recounts a visit to Oxmoor Farm, in Louisville, Ky., in search of traces of her oldest known ancestor.

Here Jones is at her analytical best, as she relates her ancestor Nancy Bell Graves's enslavement to Martha Fry Bell, the wife of a Danville, Ky., merchant. After a dogged search, Jones unearths records of Nancy and her husband, Edmund, in the papers of a white professor and enslaver, Ormond Beatty. She discovers that Nancy had at least two sisters, Tinah and Betty -- their names listed in holdings at Centre College in Danville that, according to the confident local archivist, contained no traces of Jones's family.

This find leads Jones to the Filson Historical Society in Louisville and then to Oxmoor Farm, where she is struck by the decadence of a house museum maintained on the grounds where her ancestors were possibly enslaved. Jones enters Oxmoor in a state of high emotion, but she is comforted by the words of the historian Nell Irvin Painter, who advises colleagues to ''remember the blood on the page'' -- a mantra that Jones, in a heartbreaking scene, repeats to herself as she searches for evidence of Nancy's kin at Oxmoor. The experience is a reminder, she writes, that ''the documents I sometimes read, though neat and elegantly scripted, had their origins in brutal force.''

In ''The Trouble of Color,'' Jones has done more than honor her family's history; she reinscribes their story on the tablet of our collective imagination. On Jan. 4, Thavolia Glymph, a historian at Duke University, delivered her final address as president of the American Historical Association. Like Jones, Glymph is a towering figure in her field, part of the cadre of Black women scholars who inform so much of Jones's work. In her speech, Glymph, the first Black woman to head the A.H.A., argued against popular assumptions, both within and outside the academy, that the stories of America's enslaved people can never be told, and that the archive, as we have traditionally understood it, cannot be relied upon to reveal the intricacies of Black life.

''The archive of slavery is not a black hole,'' Glymph said. ''The desires of slaveholders are not of such density and gravity that the voices of enslaved people cannot be heard. This is not the archive of the enslaved with which I work. The archive I have, and that we have, is one in which enslaved people speak, loudly, and act with intention.''

At a time when Black history is under attack, Glymph asks us to recognize that those histories we deny or deem unknowable are everywhere in the historical record -- precisely what Jones's beautiful memoir confirms.

THE TROUBLE OF COLOR: An American Family Memoir | By Martha S. Jones | Basic Books | 314 pp. | $30

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO: Members of Martha Jones's family, circa 1899. (PHOTOGRAPH VIA MARTHA S. JONES) This article appeared in print on page BR10.

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Greenidge, Kerri K. "Correcting the Record." The New York Times Book Review, 30 Mar. 2025, p. 10. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A833165761/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=62109a78. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.

Jones, Martha S. THE TROUBLE OF COLOR Basic Books (NonFiction None) $30.00 3, 4 ISBN: 9781541601000

How generations of a biracial family found their lives shaped--and distorted--by the color line.

A light-skinned African American, New York native Jones had a life-changing epiphany in college when a fellow student implied that she was "not [Black] enough." It was then she realized that her racially ambiguous appearance "unsettled, perplexed, and even provoked." In this book that began as a quest in her 20s to understand her family roots and took her to Kentucky and North Carolina, the Johns Hopkins history professor examines how perceptions of color affected different generations of men and women in her family. For some, like the light-skinned grandfather who led a historically Black women's college, living close to the color line caused painful misunderstandings and a "theft" of identity. Historians writing about him called him white, on the basis of photographs rather than background, which included a formerly enslaved mother and free person of color father. Those in her family who chose to intermarry faced some combination of legal and social discrimination. A white great-great-grandmother from the pre-Civil War era who chose to marry a man of color not only "gave up her past" but also lived in fear of facing penalties for breaking federal anti-miscegenation laws. Jones' own white mother married her Black father in 1950s Jim Crow America. The difficulties the couple experienced included obstacles buying a home together and social isolation. The price Jones paid as the pair's biracial child was to be defined as a legal ambiguity along the same color line that had so bedeviled her ancestors. Eloquent, candid, and meticulously researched, this book will appeal to both lovers of family memoir and scholars of Black history.

A deftly woven multigenerational tapestry that celebrates the complexity of African American history and identity.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Jones, Martha S.: THE TROUBLE OF COLOR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A827101033/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2267e6d1. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.

Jones, Martha S. Vanguard: how Black women broke barriers, won the vote, and insisted on equality for all. Basic Books, 2020. 352p bibl index ISBN 9781541618619 cloth, $30.00; ISBN 9781541618602 ebook, $21.99

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To coincide with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, Jones (Johns Hopkins Univ.), a historian and legal scholar, spotlights over 200 years of Black women's political history and their struggle for the ballot in Vanguard. From her very own great-great-grandmother Susan Davis's stories of voting to Stacy Abrams, Jones rigorously details how Black women created a movement and their own "spaces from which they began to tell their own stories of what it meant to call for women's rights." Hidden behind the banner of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and the white feminist women's suffrage crusade were multitudes of Black women pushing for liberation in churches, organizations, military stations, clubs, benevolent societies, and institutions of higher learning. Women such as Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Anna Julia Cooper, Hallie Quinn Brown, Mary McLeod Bethune, Pauli Murray, Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, and Kamala Harris all dealt with the brutal sting of racism and sexism, yet, linked by their shared history, leaned on one another to move forward. Despite the long-standing social injustices Black women face, they continue to struggle to secure equality and dignity for all persons, challenging the status quo. Vanguard offers a new and holistic history of the women's movement in the US. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.--A. O. Yeboah, Howard University

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Yeboah, A.O. "Jones, Martha S.: Vanguard: how Black women broke barriers, won the vote, and insisted on equality for all." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 59, no. 4, Dec. 2021, p. 614. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A684601014/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a3664936. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

BY MARTHA S. JONES. Basic Books, 2020, 352 pp.

Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote BY ELLEN CAROL DUBOIS. Simon & Schuster, 2020, 400 pp.

As Hillary Clinton proclaimed near the end of a fiery speech delivered to an international audience in Beijing in 1995, "Human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights." Some officials at the U.S. State Department were nervous about her address, believing that even such a seemingly benign mention of human rights would irritate the Chinese hosts of the UN-sponsored Fourth World Conference on Women. But in the United States and elsewhere, the phrase resonated--and still does.

Yet the fact that it was necessary to make explicit such an anodyne sentiment spoke to the troubling reality that for decades, the conventional wisdom held that women's rights had nothing to do with human rights. They were instead relegated to what was known in the nineteenth century as "the woman question," which was really a bundle of questions, the answers to which were generally no. Should women receive more than a primary education? Should they control their own wages? Should they enjoy guardianship rights with respect to their children? And of increasing concern, should they have the right to vote? Nearly two centuries later, a version of this discourse still exists in the United States, where Americans often speak of "women's issues." There is no corollary for men's matters.

From the republic's earliest days, women were constrained by a British inheritance: the common law, which dictated that women were essentially the charges of their husbands or, if unmarried, of their fathers or brothers. Women were "civilly dead," in the words of the Declaration of Sentiments, the document that emerged from the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first women's rights convention in the United States. In a society that privileged religion, women were also casualties of biblical interpretations that emphasized their original sin: Eve over Deborah, Jezebel over Sarah. Meanwhile, powerful social norms and cultural traditions relegated women to the home and demanded that they be pious, subservient, and obedient, further removing them from the public sphere.

But women had voices and pens, and so they began a long crusade that ultimately focused on the right to vote. This year marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which extended that right to women--or to most of them, at least. Two new books by first-rate scholars of the women's rights movement explore this complex history, revealing the ways in which progress rarely proceeds in a linear manner. They serve as timely reminders of the fact that freedoms as fundamental as the right to vote are hard won and remain under constant threat from antidemocratic, repressive forces.

RIGHTS AND WRONGS

Black women in the United States have long faced a kind of triple jeopardy, suffering on account of not only their gender and their race but also their invisibility in the historical record. Before 1863, they were mostly enslaved, a dehumanizing condition that deprived them of liberty and also subjected them to constant sexual violence. "You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs," the Black poet, educator, and antislavery activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper tartly informed her colleagues in the American Equal Rights Association in 1866. The voices of Black women such as Harper have mostly been overlooked by historians in accounts of the battles over suffrage. As a result, one of the central developments in U.S. history has been rendered as a tale of persistent, courageous white women.

Thanks to Martha Jones's Vanguard, Black women's rightful place in this history has been restored. Jones, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, places Black women front, center, and in many instances ahead of white women in the fight for civil rights in the United States. "Black women built their own many-faceted and two-centuries-long women's movement," she writes. What this work amounted to, Jones explains, was "a shared mission: winning women's power that would serve all humanity." Simply put, she writes, "Black women led American women, showing the way forward."

Although Jones is careful to credit her scholarly forebears, such as Paula Giddings and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Vanguard is unique: there is nothing like it in the historical literature. Jones reaches back to the period immediately following the American Revolution to unearth the stories of Black women who entered the public arena. Among those active in the early nineteenth century were Jarena Lee, a traveling minister, teacher, and abolitionist, and Maria Miller Stewart, who addressed so-called promiscuous audiences (those that included men and women) and wrote in newspapers encouraging "the daughters of Africa" to take on public roles. Sarah Mapps Douglass, the Black founder of Philadelphia's Female Literary Association in 1831, was lecturing on the sins of slavery well before two white sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, took up the cause and became two of the earliest nationally known female abolitionists. In investigating a period for which limited historical sources exist to shed light on the thoughts and activities of such Black women, Jones is adept at using letters to the editors of newspapers, including the abolitionist weekly The Liberator, as one means of ferreting out their views on a wide range of issues. For example, Douglass, writing to The Liberator under the pen name Zillah, opposed efforts to persuade American Blacks to emigrate to Haiti; in another letter, she expressed her encouragement at the sight of Black and white Americans in Philadelphia "mingling together ... without a shadow of disgust."

By the time of the Civil War, Black women had become a controversial presence at antislavery conventions, where their race and gender disqualified them from leadership positions. But many took another route to public life: through Black churches, where they persistently fought for and won the right to preach. Then, beginning in the late 1860s and early 1870s, after the 14th and 15th Amendments had opened some doors for African Americans, Black women joined the American Equal Rights Association, attended the Colored National Labor Union, and were present at meetings of the newly formed National Woman Suffrage Association --although the last proved a hostile environment, given the co-founder Elizabeth Cady Stanton's blunt assertions of Black inferiority.

Characteristic of the fascinating but lesser-known figures from this era of Black female activism is Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a schoolteacher in Washington, D.C., who took direct action by joining white women in attempting to register to vote in 1871. Rebuffed, she sent messages to congressional committees about the need to revise the texts of existing laws by removing the word "male." Shadd Cary, born in Delaware in 1823 to free parents, was "an upstart," Jones writes. She emigrated to Canada, founded the weekly Provincial Freeman, and returned to the United States during the Civil War to help recruit Black soldiers for the Union. A more celebrated activist of this era is Mary Church Terrell, who was born in 1863 to freed slaves in Tennessee and went on to graduate from Oberlin College, serve as the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and travel to Berlin in 1904 to lecture (in German) on African American history. Terrell was a committed suffragist who saw the vote as an essential instrument to end lynching and the segregation of public accommodation and who deftly navigated the undercurrents of racism within the suffrage movement. In 1913, many white members of the movement's most influential organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (which succeeded the National Woman Suffrage Association), objected to the participation of Black women in a parade that the group was planning to hold in Washington, D.C. The leader of the local NAwsA chapter, Alice Paul, considered excluding them, and some Black activists were also uneasy with the idea of marching. But Terrell, undaunted, joined a contingent of dozens of Black women who took part in the parade, which nearly devolved into a riot when, Jones writes, counter-protesters showed up and "jeered at, spit upon, and assaulted the women" while police officers looked on and let the marchers "fend for themselves."

PAVING THE WAY

As Jones makes clear, for Black female activists of this generation, suffrage was only one of a number of goals. Their causes were, as the Black activist Anna Julia Cooper wrote in her 1892 manifesto, A Voice From the South, "the rights of humanity." And for them, the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 was hardly a watershed, since for decades after its passage, the vast majority of Black women (and men) in the South continued to be denied the right to vote owing to disenfranchising tactics such as poll taxes and grandfather clauses.

For Black Americans, genuine democracy arrived only with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But just as histories of the women's suffrage movement have tended to overlook Black women, so, too, have many histories of the push for civil rights, in which men almost always appear as the main protagonists. Jones seeks to redress this lack of attention, as well, by focusing on four female leaders in the movement: Diane Nash, who organized efforts to integrate lunch counters and interstate buses; Pauli Murray, a trailblazing attorney; Rosa Parks, who became famous for her role in the 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama; and Fannie Lou Hamer, the celebrated voting-rights activist.

These Black women paved the way for others who would, in the decades that followed, gain political power through elective and appointive offices. Some of these women are familiar, such as Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to win election to the U.S. Congress, in 1968, and Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman from Texas to do so, in 1972. Others are less well known, including the lawyer Lani Guinier, who had earned a great deal of respect as an official in the Justice Department but whose nomination for a higher position was withdrawn in 1993 by President Bill Clinton after critics attacked her for espousing views they considered radical. And finally, there is Stacey Abrams, the bold Black woman who nearly won the gubernatorial race in Georgia in 2018 and who this past spring refused to hide her ambitions for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination--in marked contrast to the eventual nominee, Kamala Harris.

Jones makes a vigorous case that Black women's roles as political actors have shaped events far more than most Americans realize. As she writes, "The story of the Vanguard is still being written. Black women continue to innovate, challenge, and lead American politics to its best ideals in our own moment." Sometimes, however, she veers into hagiography. And on occasion, one or two figures become "they," standing in for all Black women. For example, the assertion that "when they gathered, Black women did so to serve the needs of everyone" is overly broad; indeed, many of the figures Jones profiles neglected to press hard for the rights of working-class women of any race. And the evidence in Jones's book does not always back her contention that, collectively, female Black activists built a movement of their own. Some were soloists, and although Jones convincingly demonstrates the intergenerational and familial legacies among them, many operated within organizations run by men. These, however, are minor flaws in a book that takes a critical step forward in understanding U.S. history and that is a welcome corrective to the conventional narrative of women's rights.

A BALANCED VIEW

Jones's work stands out as particularly valuable because other, less nuanced attempts to correct the record in this centennial year have often missed the mark. The anniversary, in fact, has sparked something of a backlash, driven by complaints that celebrating the passage of the 19th Amendment and its best-known champions--all of whom are white--contributes to the erasure of nonwhite voices from the suffrage story. In the most reductive examples of this revisionism, the traditional heroes of the story--women such as Stanton and Susan B. Anthony--are cast as something closer to villains, worthy not of celebration for their work on suffrage but of condemnation for their white supremacy. In August, an editorial in The New York Times decried the mythologizing of the movement led by Stanton and Anthony, who "got a stranglehold on the historical record... [and] established an enduring, self-serving legacy."

It is certainly true that most white suffragists held views on race that are anathema today. But should their failure to live up to contemporary standards overshadow their contribution to civil rights? As Ellen Carol DuBois points out in Suffrage, her impressive new history of the movement, other whitedominated political movements of that era, including the labor movement and the Progressive movement, also "accommodated to insurgent white supremacy." Yet compared with those movements, the push for women's suffrage seems to take far more criticism for the racism in its ranks. Few other centennial celebrations of undeniable advances in human rights have elicited such fierce criticism.

It is, then, a considerable blessing that DuBois's book provides an informed, balanced history of the movement. DuBois, a professor emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles, is considered the dean of suffrage studies in the United States. Few scholars bothered with the subject before DuBois published Feminism and Suffrage in 1978, a trailblazing study in which she explained how allowing women to vote undermined the traditional American family system by giving women an independent voice. Her most recent contribution to the field is a readable narrative of the 72-year campaign for the enfranchisement of women. It is intended for a general audience, and scholars will not find much new material in it. But all will find a thoughtful history full of striking details.

DuBois begins with the Seneca Falls Convention, the iconic event in most origin stories of the movement. Like Jones, DuBois relies on capsule biographies to propel the story forward, and she narrates this phase of the movement through the lives of Stanton and Anthony, as well as those of some less familiar figures, such as Lucretia Mott and Lucy Stone. These activists believed that as long as women were denied the right to vote, the United States would fail to live up to its founding ideals, and they hoped for an alliance with like-minded men. DuBois quotes Harper, the poet, educator, and activist, who said in a speech in 1866, "Justice is not fulfilled as long as woman is unequal to man. We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity."

That generation's attempts failed, however, and the post-Reconstruction years represented something of a nadir for the movement; not until the twentieth century did its fortunes improve. As few others have, DuBois credits Frances Willard, who served as president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, with helping revive the suffrage movement. The central mission of the WCTU, which specifically appealed to Christian women, was to promote temperance in drinking habits by challenging the liquor interests. Willard argued that temperance would provide protection for women by loosening the grip of alcohol on their family members, and she saw the right to vote as a crucial tool in spurring such change. Ballots in the hands of women would, in Willard's words, "converge on the rum shop" and destroy it. That message, DuBois shows, resonated more strongly with women in small towns and rural areas than did more abstract arguments about individual rights.

DuBois also pays close attention to Black women suffragists, especially Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, whose anti-lynching work should not obscure her contributions to the women's rights movement. DuBois also makes visible the contributions of working-class women, such as those who in 1917 stationed themselves on subway platforms in New York City carrying placards urging a yes vote on New York State's referendum on women's suffrage. She credits Harriot Stanton Blatch, the subject of her previous biography (and Stanton's daughter), with developing a strategy for political action that moved beyond petitioning and lecturing and that encouraged suffragists to engage in retail politics.

DuBois argues, however, that it was ultimately Paul, the NAwsA leader, trained in the radicalism of British suffragettes, who rejected such moderate measures and who helped push President Woodrow Wilson to support a national amendment. Paul backed confrontational strategies of civil disobedience that had been rejected by the more conservative women of NAwSA. In 1917, members of Paul's National Woman's Party picketed the White House carrying signs challenging Wilson; others burned Wilson's effigy in nearby Lafayette Park. Arrested and jailed, Paul and her followers engaged in hunger strikes. The authorities retaliated by brutally force-feeding them--treatment that, when publicized, shocked the nation.

DuBois credits Paul with invigorating the movement but rejects the idea that her tactics alone produced the congressional victories in 1918 and 1919 that led to the passage of the 19th Amendment. Suffrage covers in dramatic detail the showdown that culminated in the amendment's adoption and the subsequent fight for ratification in the states. DuBois quotes a prominent suffragist, Maud Wood Park, who concluded that it was not the social change produced by World War I that led to the "simple justice of votes for women," or even the president's grudging support. Success came, rather, as the result of a "campaign carried on by two generations of suffrage workers."

THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD

Both these books illuminate the legacies of women who struggled, as Clinton put it in Beijing, "to participate fully in the social and political lives of their countries." Their stories bear remembering as the United States finds itself in an election year in which voter suppression has become a Republican Party strategy. Today, as during the suffrage battles, powerful forces seek to divide groups that might otherwise find common ground. Today, as then, a useful tactic in that effort is to limit voting. The present strongly echoes the past as President Donald Trump rails against mail-in ballots, uses Twitter to address "the Suburban Housewives of America" with barely veiled racist warnings about an invasion of "low income housing," and suggests that the only fair election is one that he wins.

Yet in a testament to the success of the suffragists, more women vote in the United States today than do men, a Black woman is the vice-presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, and more women than ever, especially Black women, are either in elected office or running for it. Like all social movements, the fight for women's suffrage was flawed and imperfect. But its history is mostly a tale of triumph.

JEAN H. BAKER is Professor Emerita at Goucher College and the author of Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists.

Caption: The work goes on (clockwise from top left): Jarena Lee, Mary Church Terrell, and Stacey Abrams

Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
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Baker, Jean H. "The Long Road to Suffrage; How Women Won the Right to Vote." Foreign Affairs, vol. 99, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2020, pp. 154+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A639268779/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d783a350. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.

Jones, Martha S. VANGUARD Basic (NonFiction None) $32.00 9, 8 ISBN: 978-1-5416-1860-2

Johns Hopkins history professor Jones turns in a searching portrait of African American women who agitated for voting rights over generations.

Born into slavery in 1840 in Kentucky, Susan Davis—the author’s great-great-grandmother—learned a valuable truth: “without the vote, Black Americans had to build other routes to political power.” During the Reconstruction Era, in Davis’ case, this involved building women’s clubs to consolidate political power. She lived to see passage of the 19th Amendment, but that constitutional guarantee did not stop white Kentuckians from attempting to suppress the Black vote. Other activists adopted various tactics to press their cases, from Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of a bus to the sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South. As Jones writes, the truth of Davis’ conviction endured: “The women of my family, like so many Black women, constructed their political power with one eye on the polls and the other on organizing, lobbying, and institution building.” Naturally, they met opposition from Whites—and often from Black men, who, notes the author, were glad to accept women as helpmeets in political situations but expected them to hold subsidiary roles. In many instances, Black women neatly sidestepped racism; in the case of her great-grandmother, Jones writes, “she would link arms with white women when they shared her sense that American women, even after the Nineteenth Amendment, had a distance to go before they realized their full influence upon politics and policy.” In the end, though, many of the voting rights and civil rights activists realized that they had to build their own movement, cultivating a strong emergent leadership that included lawyers, politicians, and the first Black woman to serve as a priest in the Episcopal Church. The work continues today: Jones’ sharp chronicle closes with Stacey Abrams, the Georgia politician who wages a constant campaign against voter suppression meant to keep Black voters away from the ballot box.

Highly charged, absorbing reading and most timely in the era of renewed advocacy for civil rights.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Jones, Martha S.: VANGUARD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A630892375/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=07dcbd14. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.

Jones, Martha S. Birthright citizens: a history of race and rights in antebellum America. Cambridge, 2018. 248p bibl index ISBN 9781107150348 cloth, $110.00; ISBN 9781316604724 pbk, $27.99; ISBN 9781108607872 ebook, $22.00

56-2127

KF4757

CIP

This book is both an impressive work of scholarship and a timely intervention in the current national conversation about US citizenship. As Jones (Johns Hopkins Univ.) demonstrates, Baltimore's 19th-century African American community reveals much about the contested origins of birthright citizenship and the debate over who exactly is an "American." Jones shows how Baltimore's free blacks (including seamen) worked to acquire the legal knowledge, tools, and access to define a place for themselves within the community of citizens. Employing lawsuits to establish a right to sue or be sued enabled blacks to carve out civic space for themselves. Not everyone in the struggle remained there; Jones also discusses emigration by those who tired of this uncertain civic existence. The process encountered obstacles over time, of course, including the Dred Scott decision from Maryland's own Roger Taney denying blacks had any rights, much less the ability to become citizens. Yet, Jones shows, the decision was not fully enacted in Baltimore, due to earlier black efforts to claim at least basic rights. Jones's book is an essential read for any student of race or law in US history. Summing Up: **** Essential. Advanced undergraduates and above.--K. M. Gannon, Grand View University

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Gannon, K.M. "Jones, Martha S.: Birthright citizens: a history of race and rights in antebellum America." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 56, no. 5, Jan. 2019, p. 675. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A570198544/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=93cf9ea3. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.

Greenidge, Kerri K. "Correcting the Record." The New York Times Book Review, 30 Mar. 2025, p. 10. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A833165761/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=62109a78. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025. "Jones, Martha S.: THE TROUBLE OF COLOR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A827101033/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2267e6d1. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025. Yeboah, A.O. "Jones, Martha S.: Vanguard: how Black women broke barriers, won the vote, and insisted on equality for all." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 59, no. 4, Dec. 2021, p. 614. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A684601014/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a3664936. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025. Baker, Jean H. "The Long Road to Suffrage; How Women Won the Right to Vote." Foreign Affairs, vol. 99, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2020, pp. 154+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A639268779/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d783a350. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025. "Jones, Martha S.: VANGUARD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A630892375/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=07dcbd14. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025. Gannon, K.M. "Jones, Martha S.: Birthright citizens: a history of race and rights in antebellum America." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 56, no. 5, Jan. 2019, p. 675. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A570198544/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=93cf9ea3. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.

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