Joseph Williams on Black Women’s Intellectual Activism
In today’s post, Ashley Everson, a managing editor of Global Black Thought, interviews Joseph Williams, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, about his article in the first issue of Global Black Thought, “Three Days in Boston: Nineteenth Century Black Women’s Intellectual Activism and the Case of John W. Jacks.”
Joseph Williams is an Assistant Professor of History & Africana Studies at Lehigh University. His research interests lie at the intersection of African American history, women’s and gender history, and US religious history. Prior to joining Lehigh, he completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Richards Civil War Era Center and the Africana Research Center at Penn State University. His monograph-in-progress explores Black women’s intellectual activism as they conceptualized the divine and the immaterial to shore up their campaign for racial and gender equality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Ashley Everson: Your article meticulously recovers the intellectual labor of Black clubwomen in the 1895 Boston conference. What drew you to this pivotal event, and how did you approach its archival reconstruction?
Joseph Williams: I initially encountered Black clubwomen’s response to John Jacks a little over ten years ago while reading the Woman’s Era where Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin offered the first rebuttal to his attacks and summoned her fellow clubwomen toward a national gathering. In assessing the convention minutes for a separate project, I noticed a dialectic unfolding among Black women in response to the letter. While they almost unanimously rallied against Jacks’s claims, they did so with extensive deliberations over gender, race, and class. They also considered the nature and role of truth in their larger campaign for racial uplift. Additional research conducted across various newspapers revealed the depth of Black women’s discourse on Jacks and the extent to which his letter enraged other members of the Black community.
Everson: You present a range of responses to the infamous Jacks letter, from rhetorical restraint to public denunciation. How do you interpret the strategic tensions between respectability, protest, and self-definition in these debates?
Williams: In one instance, I see that tension as a part of Black women’s attempt to self-actualize–to make sense of and embrace themselves in a dehumanizing society. Yet the tension also advanced a conversation about Black womanhood crucial to clubwomen’s maneuvering of the letter and their conference preparations. What tone will the convention set? Who will speak? What will the speakers say? What outside groups should be allowed? While not the only factor, this tension shaped Black women’s careful approach to planning their conference proceedings.
Everson: The Woman’s Era periodical plays a central role in your narrative. How do you see periodical culture shaping nineteenth-century Black feminist thought?
Williams: Unlike some mediums produced by a lone voice (e.g., speeches, poems, single-authored monographs, etc.), newspapers and magazines provide a more discursively rich platform that I see as critical to nineteenth-century Black feminist thought. Sure, all periodicals come with a certain cultural or political bent; and editorial authority exists. Yet the potential for the type of discourse that emerges in the case of Black clubwomen’s intellectual rejoinders to Jacks existed in part because the Era‘s editors welcomed a conversation about the letter, Black women responded, and Ruffin printed their commentary. As a result, we can trace patterns in the rhetoric of nineteenth-century Black feminists who authored a piece or published their thoughts in the periodical.
Everson: What challenges or opportunities did you encounter in framing clubwomen’s rhetorical interventions as a form of intellectual activism, especially in light of class-based tensions within the movement?
Williams: Some of the women I discuss are unnamed or only contribute a few sentences to the discussion on Jacks. I therefore struggled with contextualizing their contributions because I either could not trace their identity or did not have enough material to substantially frame their intervention. I, of course, mostly encountered this problem with lesser-known intellectuals as I sought to include their voices in the project. In terms of class-based tensions, I found it challenging to label some interlocutors elitist or respectable given the wide-range of views and how those views changed depending on the situation or topic.
Everson: You show how the letter’s misogynist violence mobilized a counter-discourse of Black womanhood. How might these nineteenth-century strategies inform contemporary efforts to combat media and state violence?
Williams: One of the strategies Black clubwomen employed involved fact-checking the claims central to Jacks’s letter. As AI becomes a common medium for the dissemination of ideas, it’s important for us to constantly fact-check what we see and hear. It’s also worth bearing in mind the legacy of Black women’s intellectual activism in concert with their communal labor. Ruffin and her contemporaries valued ideological resistance beyond discourse. On-the-ground activism and intellectual resistance are both vital in the effort to combat media and state violence.
Of equal importance is the power of the Black community to guard Black narratives, an effort almost certainly bolstered by the ability of Black people to establish and control their own knowledge-producing institutions. By turning to the Woman’s Era and the convention to undermine Jacks, Black women demonstrated the importance of their own spaces in disrupting rhetorical violence.
Everson: Your work highlights both the complexity and fragility of Black women’s public self-definition. What lessons might this moment offer for historians committed to excavating “minor” or marginalized Black intellectual traditions?
Williams: I learned early in the project that the perspectives and ideas of Black intellectuals are shaped as much by the conversations they have with one another as it is by the conversations they have with members of an outside group. It’s important, then, for historians to avoid an exclusive juxtaposition of Black intellectuals with thinkers from the dominant tradition. Otherwise, historians might not fully grasp the diversity and complexity of Black thought. I also learned the importance of exploring unconventional arenas in an examination of Black ideas, and now approach all sorts of spaces as potential hubs of intellectual exchange.
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