Martha Jones: Historians can help us as institutions understand ourselves better, understand why some of our challenges are so deeply entrenched and they feel so intractable. And when we probe the past, what we discover is part of what makes them so entrenched and intractable is that they have been with us for a very long time, oftentimes covered over by self-pleasing myths about who we are.

And so I think historians really can contribute to that self-examination of ourselves that gives us space and impetus to write new stories for a future.

Alex Lovit: Welcome to The Context, a podcast about the past, present, and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is Martha Jones. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She’s also the Director of the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project.

All of those institutions and programs I just mentioned are really interesting and impactful. But suffice it to say, Martha Jones is also an acclaimed scholar. She’s written three award-winning books about American history, and she’s an expert on race and rights, particularly in the 1800s. As it turns out, she also served on my own dissertation committee back when I was receiving my doctorate in American History. Her most recent book is “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.”

A lot of the conversation you’re about to listen to is about citizenship, who gets counted as a citizen, and who is afforded all the rights of citizenship, including the vote. The Kettering Foundation’s mission is to advance inclusive democracies by fostering citizen engagement, promoting government accountability, and countering authoritarianism. There’s a lot we can learn from our country’s history as an expanding democracy, which became more inclusive over time.

But as you’ll hear, this only happened through hard work and sacrifice. That’s the citizen engagement part in Kettering’s mission statement. And there were also moments of backlash and retrenchment when hard-won rights were stripped away. The story of American citizenship is a complicated one, and it’s one we’ll be continuing to write as long as this country exists. But learning our past can also help illuminate the path forward.

When the United States was founded, only white men with property could vote. That was less than a quarter of the adult population at the time. The first expansion of the franchise happened during the nation’s early decades when, one by one, states dropped property requirements. But as a nation, that only got us as far as all white men being able to vote and, in some cases, it came with the expense of kicking other people off of the voter rolls.

Martha Jones’s work tells the story of all the expansions of citizenship that happened after that. After the Civil War, the United States passed three enormously important amendments in rapid succession between 1865 and 1870. The 13th, which abolished slavery, and the 15th, which guaranteed formerly enslaved people and all African Americans the right to vote.

The 14th Amendment was a little more complicated, but one of the things it did was establish the right of birthright citizenship, that if you’re born in the U.S., you’re an American. This was an important protection for people who had been born into slavery and their dependents. But as Martha Jones argues, it was also an idea that Black Americans had been fighting for long before the Civil War. And it’s an ideal with lasting consequences for American history, even though we haven’t always fully lived up to it.

The most egregious violations of the 14th and 15th Amendments began within a decade or two of their ratification. Through the better half of the 20th century—or I might say the worse half, most Black Americans continued to be denied full citizenship rights, including access to the ballot. This Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 went a long way towards fixing that.

In the meantime, women started winning the right to vote in some states in the late 1800s and nationally with the 19th Amendment in 1920. Black women had to fight on both fronts. And of course, the fight for equal citizenship and equal access to vote didn’t end in 1965 and continues today.

One lesson I take from Jones’s work is that, if we claim democracy as a national value, it’s not James Madison we really have to thank for that. It’s not even necessarily Thaddeus Stevens and John Bingham and all the rest of the guys who wrote and fought for the 14th Amendment. It’s Maria Stewart and Frances Harper and Ida B. Wells and all the women and men Jones writes about.

If you value living in a country where all voices are counted and not just a quarter of us, these are the people who did the hard work of protesting and arguing and pushing the country towards its best democratic ideals over the span of generations and centuries and backlash and disappointment. Hang out with Martha Jones for a while, and she’ll make you think differently about who America’s founders are.

Alex Lovit: Martha Jones, welcome to The Context.

Martha Jones: Thanks for having me.

Alex Lovit: Much of your work focuses on the centuries’ long campaign by Black Americans for human, political, and civil rights. But let’s start at the beginning of the American story. The early American republic was a slave society. According to the 1830 census, for example, there were about two million enslaved people in the country, which accounted for about 16 percent of the American population at that time.

And those two million enslaved people accounted for the vast majority of Americans with African ancestry. But in that same census, there were also 319,000 free people of color, almost all of whom were descendants of enslaved people. I want to ask what legal rights Black Americans had during this time period. Of course, for enslaved people, the answer is almost none.

But as your work describes, the legal status of free Black Americans was somewhat ambiguous, sometimes a source of cultural anxiety for white Americans. Can you describe the legal status of free people of color during early American history?

Martha Jones: Let me start by saying that even enslaved people have rights recognized by American courts in the early republic. They are profoundly limited, but, for example, in nearly all jurisdictions, enslaved people have under specific circumstances the standing to challenge their enslavement and bring freedom suits. And so even in an era where enslaved people are largely excluded from the things that today we consider political rights or civil rights, they do have standing in some American courts, and we find them there, importantly, exercising that access to legal culture.

But you asked about free African Americans. And of course, in my work, this has been a focus because an understanding of those 300,000 individuals, who grow by the Civil War era into a half million, are folks who really do allow us to understand how fractured a political culture they lived in in the early decades of the 19th century. Again, what rights do free Black Americans have? Well, it depends on where you are and whom you ask.

There is no particular provision in, for example, the U.S. Constitution with respect to free people of color. But when we look to state law, we will find many, many iterations of, for example, what we call Black laws, laws that constrained employment, that constrained movement, that constrained public gatherings, that constrained institution building, property holding, all based upon race or color in the early American republic.

And at the same time, we will find Black Americans in the courthouse using ordinary civil remedies from the writ of habeas corpus to bankruptcy and more to secure oftentimes their personal rights and, of course, their property rights. It’s to say that probably what best characterizes the early republic is how unsettled, how fraught a scene free Black Americans encounter when they enter a courthouse. It’s very different if you enter a courthouse in Boston, Massachusetts, or Baltimore, Maryland, or Charleston, South Carolina, or New Orleans in Louisiana.

And so as much as I know it’s a cliché coming from a historian, the answer is it’s complicated, but it’s importantly complicated because this, in my view, is really the legal disability to which free people of color are subjected. This tyranny of uncertainty, the changeability across time and space of who they are and who they are before the law is its own kind of terror. Whether one is in a given instance benefiting or winning a particular suite or losing in front of a judge, it is that changeability, that uncertainty about where you stand that really characterizes who free people of color are.

Alex Lovit: So as you’re describing there, Black Americans and women faced severe discrimination in the early republic. But over the course of multiple generations, they convinced other Americans, white male Americans, to extend privileges of citizenship, such as the vote. I think it’s easy to see your work as chronicling a success story of African Americans and black women and gaining greater inclusion into American democracy.

Martha Jones: Mm.

Alex Lovit: And a lot of who Black men and Black women accomplished that change was through building their own institutions and networks—churches, conventions, mutual aid organizations, et cetera. What role did collective institutions play as Black Americans worked to extend their privileges of citizenship?

Martha Jones: One of the things that’s clear about free Black Americans is that they are not going to forego or postpone their embodiment of membership in the body politic simply because they are excluded. So for example, our best example comes from what by the 1830s comes to be known as the Colored Convention Movement. Black Americans are by and large excluded from state legislatures, excluded from Congress.

And they begin a shadow collection of political organizations, bodies of deliberation that meet in convention, that debate the issues of the day, that issue their own decrees and manifestos and more mirroring, shadowing the kinds of deliberations that white men are invited to take part in before the Civil War. They might have simply waited until their activism opened those doors in Congress and in state legislatures. But they don’t wait.

And their deliberations are meaningful in the sense that they are a site for the sophisticated and sustained development of ideas. And I write about in one of my books the ways in which American thinking about birth right citizenship emerges directly out of those convention deliberations in the decades before the Civil War. So they are developing ideas, debating their terms, promoting ideas. At the same time, they are working together strategically creating networks of knowledge and of organization that are linked importantly to antislavery, organizing in activism in the same period.

And at the same time, they are giving birth at the local level to a whole panoply of self-help and benevolent enterprises that are the safety net for Black Americans who cannot look the state or even their localities for relief from the basic wants of life—poverty, hunger, homelessness, et cetera. But this is not a separatist or a nationalist impulse.

It is a profoundly pragmatic response to generations of exclusion that both looks to sustain a community as it is and to build it up as it can be, but also has its sites on, as we often put it, breaking down barriers and gaining access to real or mainstream sites of political power.

Alex Lovit: So I want to follow up on a couple of things you said there. One is that, as you’re talking about the Colored Convention Movement as, in some ways, based on the model of American democracy from which those Black Americans were excluded, and one thing that I’ve always found interesting about this is that the people you’re writing about are facing the most discrimination under the current system.

But mostly, they’re not arguing for destroying that system. They’re saying they should be included in it. They’re not saying democracy’s a bankrupt idea. What do you make of this? Despite all the discrimination they’ve faced and all the evidence they saw in their own lives that American democracy didn’t live up to its own ideals, why do you think Black Americans and women in this time period drew from arguments and rhetoric from that sort of American democratic tradition?

Martha Jones: There are debates among Black activists in this period about the wisdom and the efficacy, even the legitimacy of signing on to the American project. And there are, within the convention debates, moments at which some even caution against the prospect of full inclusion. The thinking goes something like if we become fully Americans, we become liable for the sins of the nation, and not only do we become beneficiaries, right, of the largesse of the nation.

So it is a complex and a fraught prospect. And yet—you know this—I’m not one who would judge convention activists from the knowingness of the 21st century, which is to say these are not men and women who yet know that it will take a Civil War to abolish slavery, that on the near heels of Reconstruction will rise up a century of Jim Crow, et cetera.

And so without the benefit of that kind of hindsight, these are generations of folks who look to pick up from the founding generation and its documents, its best ideals, and then to hold the feet of the nation to a fire that might cause the U.S. to live up to those ideals.

Now we know it’s a long and fraught story [laughs] going forward, but I would still argue that the legacy of, for example, those Colored Conventions that worked out the concept of birthright citizenship contributed to this nation, if not a wholesale and ironclad democratic regime, helped to set in place one remarkable pillar of that regime that is still with us today, a pillar upon which we build as we think about broadly and very specifically questions of justice and inclusion and rights.

So I think we’re right to hear their trepidation about what it means to be Americans and, at the same time, to appreciate that they were among historically some of the nation’s best champions, or at least champions of its best ideals.

Alex Lovit: Well, so one aspect of that might be this concept of birthright citizenship. You’ve mentioned this a couple of times. That’s something that does end up in the 14th Amendment and is now part of our Constitution, has continued to be a subject of some debate. Donald Trump likes to talk about ending birthright citizenship. So what is birthright citizenship? And how does this African American reform movement contribute to making it part of the American political culture?

Martha Jones: The original Constitution of 1787 does not define who is a citizen of the United States. It variously provides for the rights of citizens. It requires that the President be a natural-born citizen, and at the same time does not tell us who is and who is not a citizen of the United States. With that opening, we begin as a nation with hardly a free-for-all but a kind of open market on who gets to decide who is a citizen.

And so we will see Congress at various junctures mobilizing its definitions of who is a citizen. We will see state legislatures use their own definitions of who is a citizen. We will see courts, both state and local and federal courts, all offer their interpretations of who is a citizen. But it’s really an open question.

So here within the convention movement, within church deliberations, and many in Black newspapers and more, there grows up a critical look at the Constitution itself, its text. They recognize that the President must be a natural-born citizen of the United States. And they reason if the President is a natural-born citizen, there must be such a thing, right? There’s a category that is the natural-born citizen. And aren’t we as natural born as any citizen of the United States.

In one way they make this very textualist argument. But of course, they have to make this argument in many places and in many circumstances, reaching an important point in 1857 when the U.S. Supreme Court in I think still its most notorious decision Dred Scott versus Sandford, the U.S. Supreme Court concludes that no Black person can be a citizen of the United States.

Alex Lovit: And so let me ask what the 14th Amendment says about birthright citizenship. How is birthright citizenship defined today in our Constitution?

Martha Jones: So the Civil War era really not only brings us transformations that are rooted in the abolition of slavery, it is also the site for transformations in the body politic, including who is a citizen. And Congress looks to remedy the oversight in the 1787 Constitution and also the ruling in Dred Scott in 1857. And now through a series of interventions, first the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and finally in 1868 the 14th Amendment, which provides that all persons born in the United States are citizens of the United States. And this is the regime in which we continue to live until today.

Alex Lovit: Well, it is and it isn’t, right, because the Reconstruction is enforced for a limited period of time in the South. What I want to ask here is about this time period when, as you’re saying, you have Dred Scott in 1857 that says Black people aren’t citizens and can never be citizens. And then within a decade—or almost a decade, you have a series of new Reconstruction amendments redefining citizenship, saying that African Americans born in the U.S. are citizens of the United States.

And then another decade after that, you have the beginnings of Jim Crow segregation in the South and those Reconstruction amendments essentially being ignored. So that feels like pretty rapid change for people who were living through that in the span of a single generation in the legal status of Black Americans. How do you understand the experience of that for people who are living through that time period?

Martha Jones: Reconstruction, the term we give to the period that follows the Civil War, that political era that is characterized by the incorporation of formerly enslaved people into the nation, including into the body politic, Reconstruction is an extraordinary experiment in interracial democracy. It is right, of course, that by the 1890s, Reconstruction will be defeated, both politically and on the ground, for Black Americans with the rise of a new regimen that we call Jim Crow characterized by segregation, disenfranchisement at the polls, and violence, the violence of lynching.

But I would caution us not to dismiss the accomplishments of Reconstruction. That provision of the 14th Amendment, the birthright citizenship provision that we’ve spent some time looking at closely, survives the rise of Jim Crow. It survives so much so that at the end of the 1890s, when there are attempts to exclude Chinese Americans from the country, the charges that even Chinese people born in the United States or people of Chinese descent born in the United States cannot be citizens of the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court is clear that the birthright principle holds, and the children of Chinese immigrants, immigrants who themselves cannot be citizens, are citizens of the United States.

And that is the regime in which we live even today. So there are provisions within the Reconstruction amendments that hold and hold importantly. Reconstruction is the era in which we have the blossoming of an African American public culture begun in those free states and territories before the war now extending to the American South, the growth of Black churches, big institutions like Methodist and Baptist denominations.

The establishment of public education across the American South, for the very first time for most of the region, is a credit to Reconstruction and its accomplishments. And those amendments that, yes, get overlooked and overwritten, are still powerful instruments even today, are still the terms by which we debate rights in the 21st century. And it’s important to say—and this is my view of American history—these big questions—citizenship, voting rights—are not questions that in the American story are destined to be settled.

They are destined to be always debated. And they may be settled in some cases and in some communities, in some circumstances. And we will find ourselves, as we do now, again asking questions about who should be a citizen, who should enjoy the rights of citizens. Who should cast the ballot, under what circumstances? These are perpetual, permanent American questions. Our story is not about an arc and perfection. Our story is really about a long debate about those founding principles to whom they apply, under what circumstances they are meaningful and impactful.

And so the testament to Reconstruction is not that it is a triumph. It is that it redefines the questions we ask and the terms by which we ask them.

Alex Lovit: So you’re talking there about the enduring impact of law of the Reconstruction amendments, for example, is once they’re in the Constitution, they’re in there for good, and they may not always be fully respected, but they continue to have some weight and some influence throughout even the darkest periods of American history. You know, it’s no coincidence that you’re focused on law. You have academic training not only in history but also in law. And so much of your work looks at these reform movements, at activists seeking to expand the boundaries of American citizenship.

And they’re working on multiple fronts. They’re working simultaneously on political reform to try to elect candidates and make changes in those laws. They’re also trying to make use of whatever laws are available to them at that time, sometimes flawed instruments, and simultaneously pushing for cultural change, trying to just change minds.

How do you see those tactical decisions among these reform movements? Sometimes there’re tactical debates about which of these is the correct approach, but really all three are going on together. Is this a case where one approach is more powerful than the others, or does it really require kind of a combined approach?

Martha Jones: I’ll speak to that if I could through the example of voting rights because this is part, of course, of the long legacy of Reconstruction that is the 15th Amendment that bars individual states from continuing to use race as a criterion when determining who has access to the polls. And we spend upwards of a century then looking to give teeth to that amendment, which happens in 1965 when the Voting Rights Act is adopted.

But I write about Black women in that struggle for voting rights. And one of the things we know about Reconstruction is that it does not set in the Constitution a prohibition against denying the vote based upon sex. And with that, American women, including Black American women, will be denied access to the polls. Black women become, sometimes alongside and sometimes in tension with white women, suffragettes of a new sort for two generations as they drive toward what we now became the 19th Amendment in 1920, which then finally prohibited the states from using sex as a criterion when it came to voting rights.

But all that is a way of getting to what happens to African American women in the wake of 1920 and how they confront the challenges in front of them because nothing in the 19th Amendment prohibits individual states from using poll taxes and literacy tests, understanding clauses, grandfather clauses. Nothing prevents the states from using those sorts of tactics that have kept Black men from the polls since the 1890s from now keeping Black women from the polls.

And the women I write about work on all the fronts that you describe [laughs]—that’s what I’m getting to—which is to say they are attached to a legal campaign, yes. The relatively new NAACP is going to use the Constitution as it is and look to chip away at some of those state laws like grandfather clauses that are keeping Black Americans from the polls with modest success. But it’s not enough.

Black women are organizing themselves locally at the grassroots level to get themselves registered, to infiltrate party politics, to use their power at the polls collectively to move the needle on election day, right? This is grassroots organizing 101. And then, of course, by the 1930s and certainly the 1940s, these same women are going to become both the foot soldiers and the architects of the modern civil rights revolution.

And so I share that example as a way of saying I don’t think this is an either-or equation. There are some women who are early-on suffragists who will grow exasperated and doubtful about their prospects as citizens of the United States and will join the Garvey movement and channel their political energies and visions into a Pan-African vision of a political future.

And so these are interwoven and interrelated rather than distinct or hermetically sealed approaches to the question of power, because that’s what we’re really talking about is power, I think.

Alex Lovit: You’re talking about the political activism of Black women there. A lot of these stories are told in your book, “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.” I want to ask more about that book, but before we get there, let’s provide a little context. At the beginning of this conversation, I asked about the status of free people of color in the early American republic. Now let me ask about women. What was their legal status? How were they viewed by the state and by society differently than men?

Martha Jones: One of the things that our founding documents, including the U.S. Constitution, doesn’t take into account is the status of women. And so in order to understand or to answer your question, we have to look in many sorts of places. Could women, for example, own property? Generally no, though we certainly have documented many exceptions in which American women, particularly as widows are property holders and business owners.

Do women enjoy bodily autonomy as we think of it in the 21st century? Absolutely not. And the end of the 18th century is an era in which we see the writing of new, more modern statutes that begin to address women’s bodily autonomy, their liberty from sexual assault, for example. But your question, I think, most pointedly is about political rights. And what we know is that there’s nothing in American law that expressly provides for guarantees to women any political rights, including the right to vote, but also, for example, the right to hold office or to sit on juries.

And at the same time, we can point to exceptional places, like the state of New Jersey where, for a very brief time in the early republic, there are American women who do vote. So our national story is also a state-level story. It is also a story of exceptions as well as rules. But to put the answer most plainly, American women are really not considered and not included in the body politic at the nation’s founding.

Alex Lovit: Well, so let’s talk about your work about Black women who are facing kind of a doubly whammy of discrimination, both on gender and race terms, when the women’s movement can be racist, and the Black rights movement can be sexist. In some ways, that causes some splintering in the movements. In 1840, the biggest organization in the U.S. dedicated to the abolition of slavery splintered into two organizations, largely over the role of women in the organization.

And in 1869, the largest women’s suffrage organization divided mostly over the question of citizenship and voting rights for Black men, the Reconstruction amendments we were previously discussing. So one way to see that is as evidence of gender discrimination in the racial justice movement and race discrimination in the gender justice movement.

But another reading is that there were enough strong supporters of women’s rights in the abolition movement and enough strong supporters of Black rights in the suffrage movement that they were willing to endure conflict and insist on those values. How do you think about this? How do you see these two movements as being allies, and where are there disconnections?

Martha Jones: When I think about your question, I do so through the thinking of a remarkable figure of the 19th century, the poet, abolitionist, novelist, and suffragist, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. And Harper is someone who is there in all these scenes that you allude to. She’s on the antislavery stump. She’s in the debates over the Reconstruction amendments among that coalition of abolitionists and women’s rights advocates. She goes on to be a suffragist, a critic of lynching, and a great deal more across a long lifetime.

But by the 1860s, Harper is very clear that the measure of any political vision should be taken through how it regards Black women, precisely for the reason you alluded to at the opening of your question. She knows that Black women sit at the crux of much of what ails American society—sexism, racism, and the problem of poverty, of class. And she not only holds up Black women as the measure of the nation, but she tells us that what we are striving for is that universal vision in which race, status, color, class, gender matter not for one’s force, one’s inclusion, one’s power in the body politic.

And she is alone [laughs]. She’s nearly alone in the 1860s, right, to champion that vision. And what we have as a consequence is the emergency of a distinctly Black women’s vision for democracy, one that is truer to the founding ideals than nearly any other being espoused in the same period. And this will continue to be the core tenet of Black women’s politics through the 19th Amendment to the Constitution and beyond. They use their own experience, their own position to reframe politics in radically universal terms.

Alex Lovit: So speaking of Black women carrying an idea forward over the course of a long span of time, your book “Vanguard,” which focuses on the history of Black women in the U.S., starts in the 1810s with Jarena Lee, and it ends two centuries later with Stacey Abrams. So over the span of those two centuries, there’s a revolution in cultural attitudes and government policies towards Black women. But that certainly isn’t quick. So this is a story of Black women fighting for inclusion over the span of multiple generations with many of those women not living to see access to the ballot box or some of the other goals that they’re fighting for.

Do you think there’s a lesson here about social change more broadly? And how should social activists today be thinking about the kind of timespan of change?

Martha Jones: One of the things that I learned as I probed the biographies of many of the women who were in “Vanguard” is that those who are fortunate enough, many of them are in their first vocation educators. And this is a clue to how they are thinking about time, which is to say these are activist women who are always investing in the next generations, whether it is their students or their daughters or their granddaughters.

These are women who assume that their struggle will unfold across generations and assume that part of their challenge is to ensure that there are next generations of girls who become women who pick up the mantle and continue the work. Manh of them, as you alluded to earlier, will dedicate important parts of their lives, for example, to winning voting rights but not live to see the adoption of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

So there is an immediacy and an urgency about the now, but it is coupled with a long view in the sense that the kinds of principles that they are committed to will not be easily or immediately or thoroughly won.

Alex Lovit: So on the one hand, historians tend to caution against applying today’s standards to people from the past. You did that earlier in this conversation. But on the other hand, it’s pretty common for historical analysis to include either implicitly or explicitly some moral judgment. How do you see the role of moral judgment in historical analysis? And does history help us to shape our morals as a society?

Martha Jones: I have two thoughts. I mean, I think the first one is that we don’t need to export or impose our hard-won and well-considered moral perspective from the 21st century on the past. We only need to probe that past to discover those voices, oftentimes dissident, oftentimes marginalized, oftentimes suppressed. But clearly discernable in U.S. history, a relatively young nation, right, clearly discernable in our past are those like Maria Stewart, by the 1830s standing up at podiums in Boston and imploring audiences to abandon not only their racism but their sexism in the hope of creating a different kind of nation.

That’s not a 21st century idea. That’s a 19th century idea. And so part of what historians can do is help to surface the panoply of voices, those dissident voices, those moral voices that tell us something not only about who we were but who we aspire to be, even centuries ago. And I hope that the work I do on Black struggles for citizenship, on Black struggles for voting rights, helps us to see the ways in which we didn’t invent those concerns in the 21st century. We inherited them, and that our best thinking is also an inheritance from these early decades.

The other thing I want to say in response to your question is that I direct a project these days called Hard Histories, and Hard Histories uses the historical research, historical analysis to challenge directly some of the misguided, misleading, and even false myths that enshroud many of our institutions and, in my case, the university that I work at, Johns Hopkins.

And so historians can help to reset the table in the 21st century by helping us set aside the misunderstandings about who we are and where we came from, to make it possible for new seats at the table, new voices, new ideas at the table. At Johns Hopkins, we had long told the story about our Founder and namesake, Mr. Hopkins, as having been a Quaker and an abolitionist. This was not correct. And Mr. Hopkins, we discovered, had been a miner, but someone who had held enslaved people in his home. He had no affiliation with an abolitionist movement.

And this has required us to rethink who we are as an institution, who our founders are, what ideals animate us, who must be at the table as we chart out a future. And I think historians can help us as institutions understand ourselves better, understand why some of our challenges are so deeply entrenched, how they feel so intractable. And when we probe the past, what we discover is part of what makes them so entrenched and intractable is that they have been with us for a very long time, oftentimes covered over by self-pleasing myths about who we are.

And so I think historians really can contribute to that self-examination of ourselves that gives us space and impetus to write new stories for a future.

Alex Lovit: Well, so on this subject of kind of the purpose of history, the argument you’re making about the importance of really examining the roots of our institutions, even when we might not like the answers we’re finding, that’s a contested idea. We’ve seen a lot of political conflict in the U.S. in the last few years over how our history should be understood and taught. Conservatives have argued that too much attention on America’s history of racism and exclusion is divisive, will cause distress for white students.

Several states have passed legislation to limit how history is taught in public institutions. Your own work has been repressed in some cases. How do you understand what’s going on here? Why has history become such a battleground in our country’s political culture wars? What are conservatives scared of, and are they right to be scared?

Martha Jones: I’m not someone who believes that, in a democracy, power is a zero-sum game. I think the vision of democracy is about deliberation and shared power—complicated, fraught, messy, but shared power across a polity. But I think we understand wherever we sit in the debate, I think we understand how folks feel threatened about giving up power.

At the same time, I think there is a sea change that has long been afoot but is apparent today, which is that the storytellers themselves have changed and have shifted. And I think that my experience is, in part, a confrontation with questions about how it is or why it is or should it be that someone like me gets to write the history of the nation, including the history of its Constitution. Perhaps I’m better suited to some sidebar rather than the main stage.

And so we are living through a transformation in who the historian is and who gets to tell the stories. But I think it would be a mistake to frame our present-day strife as new. Well, of course, it is new and of its own time. But history has always been the site of power. The power to write the nation’s story, to tell it, to frame it, to shape it, to embrace some parts of it, to leave other parts out has always been an exercise of power on the part of historians and has always been a contested dimension of history.

And so we are living through, in my view, this generation’s version of that. But it’s not to minimize it, but it’s just to recognize that for many questions, on many issues, for many Americans, history has always been fraught and contested in a space in which some people are holding the gates and other people are trying to force those gates open. That’s not unique to us in the 21st century. That is as old as history, as a profession itself.

Alex Lovit: Well, thank you for that eloquent defense of history, a subject that I’ve spent a good chunk of my life studying and which, obviously, I think is quite important. Martha Jones, thank you for joining me on The Context.

Martha Jones: Thanks very much for having me, Alex.

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m Alex Lovit, a Senior Program Officer and historian with the Foundation. Other people who work on the show include our Research Assistant, Isabel Pergande; our Episode Producer, George [Strait], Junior; and our Director of Communications, Linda Gilmore. If you have questions or thoughts about the show, reach out at The Context@Kettering.org. Visit our website, Kettering.org, to learn more about the Foundation or to subscribe to our newsletter.

And if you like the show, please leave a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Thanks, and we’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. The views expressed during this program are critical to us having a productive dialogue, but they do not reflect the views or opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The Foundation’s broadcast and related promotional activities should not be construed as an endorsement of its content.

The Foundation hereby disclaims liability to any part for direct, indirect, implied, punitive, special, incidental, or other consequential damages that may arise in connection with this broadcast, which is provide as-is and without warranties.

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a Kettering Foundation contractor and may contain small errors. The authoritative record is the audio recording.