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Marian Miner Cook
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Our Democracy is a Debate

Mon, April 18, 2022
Dinner Program
Martha S. Jones
Martha Jones

A legal and cultural historian whose work examines how Black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy, Martha Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. Author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020) and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), Jones will explore what historical thinking reveals about the nature of democracy in the United States. At its core is debate. Martin Luther King, Jr. echoed abolitionist Theodore Parker when he adopted the metaphor of the arc, as in "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Barack Obama, borrowing from the U.S. Constitution, anticipated progress for a nation that was on "the path to a more perfect union." What these framings elide is how, across our past as a nearly 250-year-old nation, debate rather than progress has best characterized American democracy. Two central questions—citizenship and voting rights—troubled the United States from its very start. And, while the details have changed over time, these two foundational facets of our democracy continue to generate debate—and change—in our own time. Rather than fall back on adages about our journey as circular or being destined to repeat the past or even backlash, we can appreciate how contests over the character of the body politic have challenged every generation. History strongly suggests that our distinct tradition and indeed our future will include much more of the same.

As one of CMC’s 75th Anniversary Distinguished Speakers, Professor Jones will highlight issues in “Unity and Division,” one of the three academic collaboration themes of our special 75th Anniversary celebration.

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. 

Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), selected as one of Time's 100 must-read books for 2020.  Her 2018 book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), was winner of the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award (best book in civil rights history), the American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize (best book in American legal history), the American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid book award (best book in Anglo-American legal history) and the Baltimore City Historical Society Scholars honor for 2020. Jones is also author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press (2015), together with many articles and essay. 

A public historian, she also writes for the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, Talking Points Memo, Politico, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time. She is an exhibition curator for “Reframing the Color Line” and “Proclaiming Emancipation” at the William L. Clements Library, and an expert consultant for museum, film and video productions with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, PBS American Experience, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Netflix, and Arte (France.) 

Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law which bestowed upon her the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa in 2019. Prior to her academic career, she was a public interest litigator in New York City, recognized for her work as a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University. 

Jones is an immediate past co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and today serves on the boards of the Society of American Historians, the National Women's History Museum, the US Capitol Historical Society, the Johns Hopkins University Press, the Journal of African American History and Slavery & Abolition.

View Video: YouTube with Martha S. Jones

Food for Thought: Podcast with Martha S. Jones

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Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
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Claremont, CA 91711

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