CBH Talk | Blair Kelley and Martha Jones Discuss “Black Folk”
Historian Blair LM Kelley’s new book Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class is a brilliant corrective to a national discourse which focuses on ‘white working class’ only and obscures the labor and very existence of entire groups of working people. Kelley traces her family’s 200-year history and in doing so describes the lives and impact of generations of Black laborers who laid the groundwork for better jobs, better pay, and equal rights. Kelley is joined in conversation by acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones.
Participants
Blair LM Kelley, Ph.D. is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. A dedicated public historian, Kelley works to amplify the histories of Black people, chronicling the everyday impact of their activism. Kelley is currently the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history.
Kelley is the author of two books that trace the protests that toppled segregation and the people and movements that challenged the inequities of race and class. The first, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship (UNC Press), chronicles the little-known Black men and women who protested the passage of laws segregating trains and streetcars at the turn of the twentieth century. Right to Ride highlights the women and men who led and participated in protests, recounting those thousands of Black southerners who fought valiantly for equal treatment despite the tremendous threat of racial violence. The first book-length treatment of the streetcar boycott movement, Right to Ride was awarded the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians, and has become canonical for scholars studying the history of segregation, civil rights, and Black women’s history, reviving scholarly interest in the streetcar boycott movement and turn of the century African American activism.
Kelley’s newest book, Black Folk: The Roots the Black Working Class (Liveright), begins with the question “What does it mean to be Black and working class?” Drawing on family histories and continuing into the archive, Black Folk illuminates the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America in the past and present. Connecting the everyday, lived experience of working black people to wider discussions of the American working class, Black Folk argues that the history of the Black working class provide a crucial model of how we should engage a wider swath of Americans citizens in informed citizenship. Black Folk was awarded a 2020 Creative Nonfiction Grant by the Whiting Foundation, and the 2022-23 John Hope Franklin/NEH Fellowship by National Humanities Center.
Active inside the academy and out, Kelley has produced and hosted her own podcast and has been a guest on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon; MSNBC’s All In and Melissa Harris Perry Show, and Velshi; NPR’s Here and Now, WNYC’s The Takeaway, Democracy Now and WUNC’s The State of Things. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Root, The Grio, Ebony, Salon, and Jet Magazine. Highlighted as one of the top-tweeting historians by History News Network, she has been tweeting as @profblmkelley for more than thirteen years and has over 46,000 followers.
Kelley received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in History and African and African American Studies. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in History, and graduate certificates in African and African American Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University.
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. She is a legal and cultural historian whose research explores how Black people have shaped the story of American democracy and today extends to work on memorial landscapes, family memoir. She also directs the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project which, since 2020, has examined the role of slavery and racism at the Johns Hopkins university and hospital. She is on research leave during the 2023-24 academic year as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Germany) and will return to campus in fall 2024.
Martha S. Jones’s most recent book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), received the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. Her 2018 book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), was recognized with awards from the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the American Society for Legal History, and the Baltimore City Historical Society Scholars. She 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 (2015), together with many articles, reviews, and essays.
Jones is a public historian, writing for broader audiences at the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, Talking Points Memo, Politico, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time and has been an expert consultant for museum, film, and video productions with the Obama Presidential Center, Monument Lab, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and National Museum of African American History and Culture, PBS American Experience, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Netflix, and Arte (France.)
Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law, and a B.A. from Hunter College. Prior to her academic career, she was a public interest litigator in New York City, recognized for her work with a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University.
In 2023, she was appointed by President Joe Biden as a member of the Permanent Committee on the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise at the Library of Congress. She is a past co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and today serves on the boards and committees for the Library of Congress Kluge Center, the National Women's History Museum, the US Capitol Historical Society, the Johns Hopkins University Press, the CUNY Law School Foundation, the Journal of American Constitutional History, the Journal of African American History, and Slavery & Abolition.
She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and Paris, France, with her husband, historian Jean Hébrard.
