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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, Prof. 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.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The episode audio is “Family trouble blues,” composed by Olman J. Cobb, and performed in New York on May 5, 1923, with Lizzie Miles on vocals and Clarence Johnson on piano; the recording is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is Jennie Holley Jones and family, from the cover of The Trouble of Color.
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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 pre… Read More
Here are some great episodes to start with.
