Martha S. Jones (she/her/hers)

Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, Professor at the SNF Agora Institute, and Director of Graduate Studies

Research Interests: Race and rights in the 19th century U.S. with an emphasis on slavery, law, gender, and visual culture

Education: PhD, Columbia University

History > People > Martha S. Jones

Biography
Teaching
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I am a writer, historian, legal scholar and public intellectual whose work is devoted 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, challenge 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 personal journey with race and color through the story of my ancestors’ 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. 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, Civil War and Reconstruction, and 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 from the first Black women preachers on through the candidacy of Kamala Harris. Birthright Citizens (2018) told a new history of citizenship in the U.S. as the product of Black American activism and persistence. My work is grounded by women’s history, and Black feminist theory and my first two books – the edited Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015) and All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture: 1830 to 1900 (2007) – are that foundation.

My work has received far-ranging support and recognition including book prizes from the Los Angeles Times, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Society for Legal History. ASLH in fall 2024 named me an honorary fellow, the highest honor that the society bestows. Deeply meaningful are the distinctions extended to me by my alma maters. In 2019, the CUNY School of Law awarded me an honorary doctor of laws degree; in 2021 Columbia University granted me the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement, and in 2024 Hunter College inducted me into the school’s hall of fame. Fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study,) the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Humanities Center. I am an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, the Society of American Historians, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. In 2023, President Joe Biden appointed me a member of the Permanent Committee on the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise.

Expect to encounter my by-line from time to time. For the New York Times I have written on culture and travel, including the widely read “Enslaved to A Founding Father, She Sought Freedom in France” about Abigail, an enslaved woman held by the family of John Jay. My opinion columns have appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Politico, Talking Points Memo, and USA Today. You can also hear or see me via outlets such as NPR’s Here & Now and 1A, CNN’s Amanpour, and MSNBC’s the Rachel Maddow Show. Podcasts such as the Ezra Klein Show and the 19^th*’s Amendment have given me opportunities for long-form conversation.

Behind the scenes, my expertise supports media productions and cultural institutions. Check the fine print and you’ll see that I’ve been an advisor and consultant to the Library of Congress, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Obama Foundation, the National Women’s History Museum, and the U.S. Capital Historical Society. I have joined television and film productions, in front of and behind the camera for Netflix, Arte (France), and PBS American Experience.

At Johns Hopkins University, I teach for the department of history and the SNF Agora Institute. I also direct the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project where my lab investigates the history of slavery and racism connected with Johns Hopkins University and Medicine. Teaching takes me farther afield, reaching learners of many ages and stations thanks to organizations such as the National Constitution Center, the Pulitzer Center, the Zinn Education Project, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, and the Institute for Constitutional History at New York Historical. I am indebted to my own teachers. At the CUNY School of Law, I was trained by mentors like Patricia Williams and Victor Goode, and at Columbia University I studied with Eric Foner, Manning Marable, and Alice Kessler-Harris.

My parents, a full decade before Loving v. Virginia, married despite the persistence of the color line. I was baptized in upper Manhattan’s Ascension Roman Catholic Church, took my first steps on the sidewalks of Harlem’s Riverton, and started school in the Long Island suburb of Port Washington. I eventually returned to New York City, a student at Hunter College and after law school as a store-front poverty lawyer battling for people facing homelessness, mental illness, and HIV/AIDS. A year as a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York let me see how I might mix social justice and academic research.

I live in Baltimore, Maryland, and Greenport, New York, with my husband, historian Jean Hébrard.

Graduate Seminars

AS.100.645 Race, Law, History
AS.100.713 Black Womanhood (with Professor Jessica Marie Johnson)
AS.100.738 Women, Genders and Sexualities

Undergraduate Courses

AS.100.375 Histories of Women and the Vote
AS.100.389 History of Law and Social Justice
AS.100.450 (01) History research Lab: Histories of Women and the Vote
AS.100.450 (03) History Research Lab: Discovering Hard Histories at Hopkins

Articles (selected)

“Forgetting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the United States: How History Troubled Memory in 2008.” Distant Ripples of the British Abolitionist Wave: Africa, Asia, and the Americas, eds. Myriam Cottias and Marie Jeanne Rossignol (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press Tubman Institute Series, 2017.)

“Birthright Citizenship and Reconstruction’s Unfinished Revolution,” Journal of the Civil War Era, in Forum: The Future of Reconstruction Studies, Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 1 (March 2017): 10.

“First the Streets, Then the Archives,” American Journal of Legal History 56, no. 1 (March 2016): 92-96.

“Marin et citoyen : être noir et libre à bord des navires états-uniens avant la Guerre civile.” Le movement social, 3 (2015): 93-112.

“Histories, Fictions, and Black Womanhood Bodies: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Politics in the Twenty-First Century.” Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, eds. Mia Bay, Farah Griffin, Martha S. Jones and Barbara D. Savage (University of North Carolina Press, 2015.)

“History and Commemoration: The Emancipation Proclamation at 150.” Journal of the Civil War Era, 3, no. 4 (December 2013): 452-457.

“Emancipation’s Encounters: Seeing the Proclamation Through Soldiers’ Sketchbooks.” Journal of the Civil War Era, 3, no. 4 (December 2013): 533 548.

“Hughes v. Jackson: Race and Rights Beyond Dred Scott.” 91, no. 5 North Carolina Law Review (June 2013): 1757-1783.

“The Case of Jean Baptiste, un Créole de Saint-Domingue: Narrating Slavery, Freedom, and the Haitian Revolution in Baltimore City.” Chapter 5 in The American South and the Atlantic World eds. Brian Ward, Martin Bone, and William A. Link (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013): 104-128.

“Historians’ Forum: The Emancipation Proclamation.” (with Kate Masur, Louis Masur, James Oakes, and Manisha Sinha.) 59, no. 1 Civil War History (March 2013.)

“Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York.” Law and History Review 29, no 4 (November 2011): 1031-1060.

“Overthrowing the ‘Monopoly of the Pulpit’: Race and the Rights of Churchwomen in Nineteenth Century America.” No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism, ed. Nancy Hewitt (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010.)

“Leave of Court: African-American Legal Claims Making In the Era of Dred Scott v. Sandford.” Contested Democracy: Politics, Ideology and Race in American History, eds. Manisha Sinha and Penny Von Eschen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.)

“Make us a Power”: African-American Methodists Debate the Rights of Women, 1870-1900.” Women and Religion in the African Diaspora, eds. R. Marie Griffith and Barbara D. Savage. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

“Perspectives on Teaching Women’s History: Views from the Classroom, the Library, and the Internet,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 143-176.

Essays

“Before Frederick Douglass: William Watkins Speaks for Black Americans on Independence Day. July4, 1831.” Medium. July 4, 2017.

“Are There New Lives for Old Objects at the National Museum of African American History and Culture?” Muster: The Blog of the Journal of the Civil War Era. October 11, 2016.

“Thurgood Marshall and His Hometown Courthouse.” We’re History. July 11, 2016.

“We Are the Intellectuals.” Roundtable: Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women.” African-American Intellectual History Society Blog. June 5, 2015.

“On The Cherokee Rose, Historical Fiction, and Silences in the Archives.” Process: The Blog of the Organization of American Historians. May 26, 2015.

“History, Myth and the Emancipation Proclamation.” Proclaiming Emancipation: The Exhibition Catalogue (Ann Arbor, MI: The William L. Clements Library, 2013.)

“A Bellwether: Phil Lapsansky at the Library Company of Philadelphia.” Phil Lapsansky: Appreciations (Philadelphia, PA: Library Company of Philadelphia, 2012): 84-88.

“Edward Clay’s Life in Philadelphia.” An Americana Sampler: Essays on Selections from the William L. Clements Library, eds. Brian Leigh Dunnigan and J. Kevin Graffagnino (Ann Arbor, MI: The William L. Clements Library, 2011).

“Reflections of an Archive Rat.” (Ann Arbor, MI: The William L. Clements Library, 2009.)

“Reframing the Color Line.” Reframing the Color Line: The Exhibition Catalog (Ann Arbor, MI: The William L. Clements Library, 2009.)

“Learning a Pedagogy of Love: Thomas Merton.” Living Legacies at Columbia, ed, Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.)

“Mining Our Collective Memory: Beyond the Academic-Activist Divide in Black Studies,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. 6, no. 3/4 (October 2004): 71-76.