The Color Line

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. My guest today is Dr. Martha S. Jones, the Society of Black Alumni, Presidential Professor, Professor of History and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University, and author of, "The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir." In this book, Professor Jones researches her family's past to understand how each generation encountered and negotiated the color line, beginning with her great, great, great grandmother, who survived enslavement and raised a free family. Because this is her family's story, and because I believe that this interview stands on its own, I've chosen to forgo a narrative introduction for this episode, and launch right into the interview,

Hi, Martha. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Martha S. Jones  2:09  
 I'm really happy to be here. Thank you. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  2:11  
I absolutely loved your book. I think if you could sort of go into a lab and create a book that is perfect for me, this was it. So I'm super excited to talk to you about it.

Dr. Martha S. Jones  2:22  
Well, that's amazing. Thank you for that. That's a great way to begin. So I appreciate it very much. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  2:28  
Yeah, of course. So I wanted to hear a little bit, you have, of course, written several other books that are more sort of straight history books. So I want to hear a little bit about what got you started on writing this book, which is a memoir. 

Dr. Martha S. Jones  2:42  
Yeah, I think the first thing that I think of when you ask me, you know, how did this begin? Where did this begin? Why did this begin? You know, in some ways, I think somewhat unconsciously, I had been working on this book like my whole life. I think probably a lot of memoirs say that, but I'll say why that's true for me, because while I didn't have a book in mind, I am the kind of person who saves everything, writes everything down. You know, I've got the letters and the interviews and the scratchy notes, and so I think, in a way, I was one way of making sense of yourself and your family is just in the collecting of things, you know, is in holding on to the artifacts and having things to go back to. But in my case, as you said, you know, I'd become a writer, I'd become a historian. And so books become like my way of speaking to the past and to the present, to you, to other people. So I think the other piece of it was that I think I could have, I could have written this as a history, and what that means is a lot of things, but one of the things it means is that I would have kept myself largely out of the book. But every time I tried to write any part of this book as a or the story as a straightforward history, I just kept failing. I just I just didn't like it. It didn't work. And it took me a long time to realize that what wasn't working was that I was holding back my own role in the story, my own recollections, and maybe most importantly, in memoir, right, my own feelings about the story I was telling so and once I understood that I was able to just change directions and try and learn a new way of writing, thanks to wonderful editors and and readers. But, you know, learning a new way of writing, and it turned out for me, at least, memoir was really the right approach. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  5:04  
Of course, for a memoir, there's still an awful lot of time spent in the archives, but I think that's part of what I enjoyed so much, was getting because you yourself are in this story, we get to see you going to the archives. We get to see the process of you doing the research. So I wonder if you could talk some about the kinds of archives you're able to look at that where all your family's story is located. Of course, some of that is your own memories, is the pieces of paper and archival stuff that you yourself have, but a lot of it is in archives that are all over the country as well. So when, what? Where were the places that you were able to access this story? 

Dr. Martha S. Jones  5:52  
Yeah, now my husband would say, "Make sure you tell them that I carried those boxes around for years until you figured out what to do with them." So, you know, hats off to my husband for for letting me lug the personal things around for a long time. But you're right that very soon, I'm I'm eager for more. I think I need more. I wonder if there is more, and I think there are maybe two or three buckets. I mean, one bucket is, I think, the one that is very familiar to any family historian you know, which are sort of the quote, unquote official records. And so I build a family tree over time that has birth certificates and death certificates and census returns and wills and the kinds of things that are now, you know, the stock of family history research, but I try and use those critically and not treat them as gospel or as fact. But think about census takers and the doctors who fill out birth certificates and death certificates as storytellers in their own way. And then there's a set of materials that are, you know, I go to somewhat reluctantly, in particular, tucked away in the collections of a college in central Kentucky or the papers of a former college president who also was the last person to own members of my grandmother's family. There was a part of me that had never wanted to look there, but I don't know, I work up the nerve, you know, the courage and I harness my, you know, really strong drive to want to know more, to kind of face those kinds of materials, and again, using them critically. And then I think the last bucket is in, and I think this comes through, I hope it comes through, you know, is I spent a lot of time on the road, you know, visiting places, walking places, you know, cemeteries and neighborhoods and campuses. And really, it's an old habit, one that I acquired as a historian. I never really understood why you do that as a historian, because oftentimes, signs of the place you're writing about are long gone. Right places have been covered over and remade. But I found it really generative, you know, to visit grave sites and to think about those sites also as telling stories about lives and and with all that you know, memoir lets me also mine my own imagination, even when I don't have anything material in front of me to wholly bear it out, And that maybe, in some ways, was the most unexpected thing.

Kelly Therese Pollock  9:05  
So this story, of course, you're looking at the color line, and what you say several times is the sort of jagged color line. I think the the color line moves. Of course, it people move over the color line. The color line moves over them at times. Did you expect going into this that all five generations that you looked at would have this complicated relationship with the color line? Which is what you really ended up finding out?

Dr. Martha S. Jones  9:35  
I wasn't sure. I'll say that part of the the impetus for really writing a book comes from some early recognitions that the kind of now people aren't looking at me so they don't know what I look like, but you're smiling because you do, because I. You know what I'm gonna say, you know, but I'm someone whose so called racial identity has been ambiguous enough over time that I am taken and mistaken for things that I am not. And I come from people who are descended from Africans and from Europeans, and maybe some of them from Native people. Though, I don't think I'm directly descended from Native people. And I thought this was my kind of 20th century, 21st century kind of problem, if you will. But almost by accident, I discover my own grandfather being mistaken for a so called white man in in an encyclopedia entry about the college that he led for many years, and and that is clues me in right to the idea that actually what I think of as my problem or my challenge or my dilemma is actually shared or has been shared by people in my family. And indeed, maybe not surprisingly, you know that race and color are, you know, one of the core American stories, you know from well beyond our founding, you know, back to the 17th century, certainly. And so when I, you know, dug a little into some of the stories, even ones that go back long before my grandfather, everybody, in their own way, wrestled with, yes, race and racism, but in particular the vagaries of color. And this is why I call it the jagged color line, because we seem to encounter it, bump up against it, get snagged by it, and yeah, in every generation. And I didn't know that when I started, but that was definitely my question. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:00  
Yeah. And, of course, finding that out in a couple of the generations you referenced earlier that you didn't want to go looking at the records of the last man who had owned some of your family members, you have to face, of course, sexual violence that is perpetrated on members of your family. What? What is that like? Not just looking as a historian, but looking as a descendant, you know, how do you? How do you sort of face that in in the archives, knowing that this is not just history, but this is a family story?

Speaker 1  12:40  
You know, as a as a historian, I think I knew very well the history of slavery and sexual violence. I knew to an important degree, you know, the exploitation of enslaved women, that is a thorough going part of the history of enslavement, but the history of our country and the history of families, but it was really, in a way, less me and more my great great grandmother Isabella, who's born in eastern North Carolina, and after the Civil War, is becomes a free woman. She has four living children. And she tells her story, before I ever imagined, or maybe even if she'd never told it, maybe I never could, but she tells her story, and it's a story about having been owned, quote, unquote, by a man by whom she bore nine children, four of whom had survived. She never characterizes that relationship, but what we know is, by very soon after slavery's end, she has left that plantation and is on her own with her children in the Piedmont of North Carolina, in a city called Greensboro. And so it gets to speak to your question, in a way, how could I refuse Isabella her story when she had been courageous enough and had taken the risk of visiting, visiting with federal officials and filing a complaint against this man, when he all but abandoned her and her children, leaving them impoverished and really at risk. So I, you know, in that sense, it was a very hard story, difficult story for me to encounter. I put it away for a long time. A cousin sent me the documents, and I put them away for a very long time. I didn't know what to do with them. But I think that part of what this book asked of me, and what any effort to tell Isabella's story asked of me, was to be, you know, just  have a modicum of courage relative to the kind of courage she had, and not to be ashamed of her story, or afraid of her story, right, but to, in my own way, to honor that story. And of course, her sexual encounters with her owner are one of the keys to understanding how we come to look like we do, and how in understanding how, generations before mine thought about family, sometimes they even thought about family as extending to the family of that man who had once owned them.

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:40  
 Yeah, and Isabella's daughter then never claims her father, but has this interesting story about her grandfather, whom she claims is John Jacob Astor. And you actually followed that, and think it could be plausible. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Martha S. Jones  15:55  
Yeah, so Isabella's daughter Jenny, is born enslaved on that plantation and in Chowan County, but she, in her late teens, is now a free young person and spends the rest of her life in Greensboro. Isabella's daughter doesn't tell the same story that her mother told. She has her own story to tell. Best I know, she never tells the story about this man who it appears was her father and her owner. He disappears from the story she tells, but almost in his place, in an interesting way, I think, she offers up a story about her, her grandmother, about Isabella's mother. Sorry, I know the family tree stuff is complicated for people, but the essence of it is Jenny says that she's the granddaughter of John Jacob Astor, and in my family, this was a an often repeated story, has been an often repeated story. Oftentimes it's told a little tongue in cheek. But I wanted, again, to take Jenny's word and her story about herself seriously enough that I begin to first imagine what that story might be. John Jacob Astor never lived in North Carolina, best I know, never, perhaps even visited North Carolina. He was a by the time Jenny's born, he's a real estate magnet in New York, and said to be the richest man in America. So, you know, on the one hand, you could say he's a perfect, you know, sort of foil for a myth. But you're right that I'm able to sort of piece together enough that, and I have to let you decide, but I have to let readers decide, you know, how the story strikes them, but there was enough there that I think that, of course, if she is was asked his granddaughter, it's not a story that anyone might especially have written down or documented. So we wouldn't expect to find, you know, traces, like those official records, but I thought there was enough there that that it was possible and and as I said, readers have to judge for themselves. But it's one of the things that I really enjoyed about writing this book was that license, if you will, in memoir to tell you about how I feel and what I dream and what I imagine as well as what I know. And as long as I tell you when I'm imagining, it seems fair game and interesting, because we all fill in, I think, many of us fill in the past with our imaginations and our hopes and our dreams for people we never knew or whom we only know in fragmentary ways. And Jenny is one of those figures for me, someone who I wanted to imagine more wholly than any archive would really let me do. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:49  
Another sort of family story that you chased down, or at least a story that had been in your family a lot, was the founding of Bennett College, which you say in the book, you could sort of say by rote because you had heard it so much. And it turned out to be maybe a little more complicated than you thought once you were looking into the the actual history. What? What were some of the reasons for that, that you talk some in the book about that, but that, that the the sort of story that is told is a little bit different, perhaps, than the sort of actual, I don't know, actual is a weird word there, but you know, well, we can say there's more than one story for sure, then another story that could be told.

Speaker 1  19:41  
So you know the story I had learned about Bennett College, which I'll, I'll say for folks who don't already know Bennett is still today an historically Black college, a four year liberal arts school for principally for African American girls and young women in Greensboro, North Carolina. And Jenny, who I've mentioned, my great grandmother, Jenny's children attend Bennett when it was a sort of K through normal school, and then many years later, my own grandfather becomes president of Bennett. So this goal figures very prominently in this story. And you're right, I visit Bennet for the first time, I'm weeks old. I I've seen the photographs. I look, you know, quite like a newborn looks, you know.I don't even have baby fat, quite. I'm that young. And I visit, you know, quite every year after that, until my grandmother's death, a long time afterward. And I had learned a story about the founding of the school. The school had been founded in the church that Jenny and her family had attended, St. Matthew's Methodist Church, and still exists today, and that in that church basement, Black parishioners had founded a school that eventually became affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church and became a fully fledged college in the 1920s. And it's a story that very firmly places the origin of Bennett in the hands of former slaves, and they are the agents or the heroes, however, you know, however, you sort of understand the story and and I should say, I think that is that remains true, right? I mean, that remains a part of how we know and should understand the founding of Bennett. But there was a biography written of a rather fascinating it turned out for me figure, a northerner who comes to North Carolina after the Civil War, a white man named AlbionTourgee. And Tourgee is a radical Republican activist, a great ally to former slaves in the very tumultuous and dangerous politics of the post Civil War era in Greensboro. And some years ago, a historian wrote a biography of Tourgee and said, "No that it had been Tourgee and his wife." Well, he doesn't say no. He doesn't comment on the story I've told. He just says, Tourgee and his wife were responsible for founding Bennett. And when this gets published and it's published in a local newspaper, you know, a letter to the editor appears, a Bennett alum who says, "No, no, no. Tourgee had nothing to do with the school." So I realized there is a puzzle. And I do my own research, because I do, I still do that, and I arrive at this sense that both stories are true. Tourgee had a role, not an insignificant role, in the early years of the school, but that it was also the case that the school really has its, you know, important origins in that St.Matthew's church basement. So then my question is, sort of, why did Tourgee get forgotten? And and that, I think again, is sort of now, my thinking, my intuition, my reflections on a bigger question about who gets remembered, and the politics of who is remembered and who must be forgotten, is forgotten in these stories that we have constructed about a critical and remarkable but also profoundly fraught period of US history, which is the reconstruction of the post war period and then the destruction of reconstruction and the rise of segregation and Jim Crow and violence. And Tourgee, I think, gets caught up in that, or it's what I try to explain how not Tourgee, but other figures, including my own great grandfather, Jenny's husband, are caught up in the ways in which memories about that time, fraught as they were, get made, and some people are part of those memories, and other people need to be left behind.

Kelly Therese Pollock  20:28  
So I want to ask, one of the sources that you look at is archival records of your grandfather, and in those records, you came across personal personal letters, including letters about your own father. What was that experience like? I have to imagine that that that is very difficult to see not just personal letters about a parent, but to see that being in a an official archive that that other people then also have access to,

Speaker 1  25:47  
I don't know if this will surprise you, because what you're referring to, I'll say is, is, is a part of my father's story that includes a an important moment when, as a young man, he tries to take his own life. And by the time I in my grandfather's papers, and, you know, discover the letters that kind of document, in a very detailed and somewhat systematic way, that time in my father's life, I've known the story for a long time, but I had heard it as a girl from my father, and it was muddled, you know, by how young I had been, how hard and confusing it was to hear that sort of story as a girl, and then, of course, the passage of time. So in a way, there was something calming about being able to piece that story together systematically, on the one hand, and on the other hand, I think throughout this book, and my father's no exception, perhaps he's, you know, he is the the rule, I'm searching for understanding, compassion, and tenderness for people who make choices and live lives that are different from the way I would have had them do it. Let's put it that way. And I think so for me, re-encountering that story as an as an adult, and no longer the girl who had heard it and been so frightened by it, was a very calming thing that let me then make room for understanding him as a young man, troubled as he was. And I think that is, you know, partly has been for me, right, the gift of of memoir is that it changes, it can change us. And the things that you go in afraid of, you might on the other side, be left with understanding and tenderness for people whose lives were their own and complicated and more. And so I'm glad to have found that material, even as it was difficult, because I think it helped me understand him better, and I wanted to understand him better in this book.

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:33  
As I mentioned up top, I absolutely love this book. I would love to encourage listeners to get a copy. Can you please tell them how they can do so?

Speaker 1  28:43  
Sure. "The Trouble of Color" is available wherever you buy your books. I encourage folks to, when they can, seek out their independent bookseller who, if they don't carry it, I'm sure can get it for you. I hope you'll find it in your public library, if it's not in your means to buy a copy, but yeah, please read it. Let me know what you find in it for you, because that's really partly what it turns out this book, you know was for me and for my family. Maybe that goes without saying, but it is turned out, I think, to speak to many people who have families whose origins and whose identities and whose unfolding stories are not linear, not straightforward, not simple, not one note. And so I'm so honored to meet people you know who read the book and then are able to share their own stories with me. So wherever you buy your books.

Kelly Therese Pollock  29:54  
I also want to ask, you have written a book about the history of birthright citizenship in this country. This is, of course, a topic that is in the news a lot right now. So I wonder, this is, of course, a very big question and a very big topic. But I wonder if you could talk just briefly about the history behind the inclusion of birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment and the activism that went into that.

Speaker 1  30:24  
Sure. In 2018, I did indeed write a book called "Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America." I was interested in the origins of this concept that has become much more widely understood, birthright citizenship, and in particular, I wanted to understand why it was that Black Americans had become very attentive to and even advocates of this principle in the US. One version of the story, the short version of the story is that the US Constitution of 1787, is silent about who is a citizen and who is not. And we spend many, many decades as a nation working by way of the assumption that birth on US soil confers citizenship, except that there is one major wrinkle, and that is that no one assumes that birth on US soil makes Black Americans citizens of the United States. And so as we have, which we do by the end of the 18th century, the establishment and the growth of increasingly large and established free African American communities in the north, but to some degree in the south as well, and as those communities are facing discrimination, efforts to remove them from the country and more, they turn to this principle of birthright and really surface it in the Constitution and then surface it in politics as a way to push back or to protect themselves from discriminatory laws and from movements that try and remove them altogether from the United States. It's a story about many decades before the Civil War, and about African American political culture and how that works for people who are excluded from Congress and excluded from courthouses to important degrees, excluded from state legislatures and such things. And it is a story about how with the Civil War and both the war effort and ultimately, the union's vision, vision that comes to include the abolition of slavery, now there is room in Civil Rights Act in 1866 and the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1868, to set the birthright principle in law. But when it is set in law, it is not exclusively written to benefit former slaves or Black Americans. It is a provision that says all persons born in the United States are citizens or naturalized are citizens of the United States, and that is, to an important degree, even today, how most Americans become citizens of the United States, even if we're not aware of it. No one confers citizenship on us. No one asks us to sign a loyalty oath. No one asks us for our papers or the papers of our parents. Our birth on US soil makes us citizens of the United States, many of us. And today, of course, the regime in Washington is looking to reinterpret that particular provision of the Constitution to exclude from birthright citizenship children born to those who are temporarily in the US or are in the US without legal authorization, and this is unprecedented in our history, has no evident basis in law or policy. But we are living in times where questions that we might never have imagined were even questions are being asked, being posed. So I think today, the story of Black Americans and their struggles to become birthright citizens is one that a) reminds us that who's a citizen has changed over time in our national history, but also, I hope, offers to people who are on the front lines, whose lives, whose families, whose communities are on the front lines, a kind of window into the struggle that they are a part of. It's a long struggle in this country, and and a venerable one, even as it is so difficult, I think.

Kelly Therese Pollock  34:32  
Is there anything else that you wanted to make sure we talk about today?

Speaker 1  35:11  
Maybe, if I could just to, you know, come back to "The Trouble of Color." You know, there are there, there's a chapter in the book you know that is set in this tumultuous period in which birthright citizenship is becomes part of the Constitution. But as I recall that past and that past in my own family, I'm reminded that it's important to say that birthright citizenship is not a panacea, and that even as my great, great grandparents become citizens of the United States in 1868, seemingly unassailably, what citizenship means if it in fact bestows any rights, any privileges, is a very open question and a very fraught question. And Jenny, who I mentioned earlier, and her husband, Dallas, their lives are really wrecked in a way, by that enduring question about, well, if you're a citizen, does that mean anything at all?

Kelly Therese Pollock  36:18  
 Martha, thank you so much for speaking with me today. 

Dr. Martha S. Jones  36:21  
Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. 

Teddy  37:04  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistoryPodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistoryPodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistoryPodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!