Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And before we dive into today’s topic, we have some exciting news from CAFE’s team

Joanne Freeman:

That’s right Up Against The Mob hosted by Elie Honig is back with a new season, the Springfield Crew. The podcast follows the rise and fall of the notorious Genovese crime family. It’s a riveting tale of turf wars, escalating violence and betrayal, culminating in the shocking murder of Springfield, Massachusetts mob boss, Al Bruno.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Elie is a former federal prosecutor who served as Chief of Organized Crime at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. Our listeners might remember that he joined us on this podcast back in November, 2021 to talk about the growth of organized crime during the time of prohibition.

Joanne Freeman:

And I remember he took us through the origins and goals of the controversial Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization’s RICO Act. And it was really fascinating to learn how prosecutors go about dismantling the mafia.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And why they wrote that law to enable them to do it so that it wasn’t just the little guys who got into trouble, but the people behind the scenes pulling the strings. I’ll tell you as a fan of these stories and what they say about society, I’m really excited for this one. Elie has prosecuted more than 100 members of the mafia and he says this case had more twists and turns than anybody could ever dream of in the wildest works of fiction.

Joanne Freeman:

Episode one of Up Against The Mob season two is out now, so search for and follow Up Against The Mob in your listening app.

Okay, so now let’s turn to our topic for this week. The topic today is actually pegged to the start of Women’s History month, the month of March. And what we thought we would do would be to look at that not simply by looking at women who have achieved things, but more specifically to look at women who use the tool of law to seek justice often in courageous and particularly innovative ways. All of them, as you’re going to hear today, overcame immense barriers in the end to claim justice for themselves and in some ways to make a mark on history. These three women are Martha Bradstreet, Josephine Goldmark, and Rosa Parks. Now we’re guessing you have heard of one of them, maybe not the other two of them so you’ll learn about them today and you’ll learn about what Rosa Parks did in addition to not sitting in a seat on the bus in the right part of the bus.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What we liked about these women was that they used the tools that they had at hand to change the American system itself and also that they were instrumental in making changes that people know about, but they were always behind the scenes. That says a lot about women’s history of course, but it also says a lot I think about our society and what the role of these women and perhaps all women is in American history.

Joanne Freeman:

Well now, particularly as you’re suggesting Heather, that women have a long history of doing a lot of work in the background and often not getting any credit for it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So it’s significant here that with all of these women that we’re going to be talking about today, none of them were lawyers in the formal sense because there were so few women lawyers at the time. And one of the reasons that we thought to focus on them was because that has changed and women lawyers have been really stepping to the fore to change American society today.

So in 2016, according to the American Bar Association, women became a majority of law school graduates for the first time. A really interesting date there I think. And today they make up about 55% of all law graduates. In the year 2000, only 10% of law school deans were women. Today that number is 43%.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s pretty amazing.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s a pretty huge jump in 23 years. And it also suggests that our understanding of the legal system is perhaps moving towards some kind of a balance that it has not had before in our history.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, there are any number of women that we could highlight. I’m sure you’re listening to this and thinking of some. For example, we could talk about State Attorneys General like Letitia James in New York and Dana Nessel in Michigan. One that particularly comes to mind is a recent example of a lawyer who has publicly honored the lineage of women who came before her, and that’s Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson when she was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Biden in February of 2022, she paid tribute to Judge Constance Baker Motley, and Motley was the first black woman to serve as a federal judge. And before that, she was a civil rights lawyer for the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund and a trailblazing elected official in New York. This is actually what she said to make that connection.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (archival):

As it happens, I share a birthday with the first black woman ever to be appointed as a federal judge, the honorable Constance Baker Motley. We were born exactly 49 years to the day apart. Today I proudly stand on Judge Motley’s shoulders, sharing not only her birthday, but also her steadfast and courageous commitment to equal justice under law. Judge Motley’s life and career has been a true inspiration to me as I have pursued this professional path.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that’s a great entryway into this particular episode because first of all, the idea that Constance Baker Motley and Ketanji Brown Jackson were born less than 50 years apart. And Motley is famous for many reasons, but she was standing next to Thurgood Marshall in his many attempts to desegregate American society in the 1950s and the 1960s. Motley and of course Thurgood Marshall brought a whole new way of looking at the law and what the law was supposed to do for black Americans. And what they did was they relied on the 14th Amendment and to say that the federal government should apply equal protection at the state level as well.

What’s interesting about that is Ketanji Brown Jackson is bringing that voice to the Supreme Court now. But I do find it really sort of shocking to think that they were born less than 50 years apart and now Ketanji Brown Jackson is on the Supreme Court, which on the one hand is eye-popping change, but at the same time is really having to reach back once again to that 14th Amendment and rework the law.

I also love that using Motley as an example here is great because pretty much everybody’s heard of Thurgood Marshall. Not so many people have necessarily heard of Constance Baker Motley.

Joanne Freeman:

And talking about how recent so much of this history is Women’s History Month only dates to 1987.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So this is the part, Joanne, where I turn to you and say, tell us something cool from Colonial America. I either do that or I say, “And everything was great in Colonial America.”

Joanne Freeman:

Or the third possibility, “Joanne, are you going to say anything about Thomas Jefferson?” Or you just give me the Jefferson look on your face actually. You don’t even say the cursed name.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So tell us about this first woman you picked.

Joanne Freeman:

Okay, Martha Bradstreet. Now I’ll say at the outset as a proud graduate mentor that the story of Martha Bradstreet was pulled together by Michael Blakeman in a 2015 article titled Martha Bradstreet and the “Epithet of Woman”: A Story of Land, Libel, Litigation, and Legitimating “Unwomanly” Behavior in the Early Republic, which was published in Early American studies.

Now, Martha Bradstreet was born in Antigua in 1780. She ended up going to Ireland in the 1790s where she met her husband Matthew Cod, who was destitute and as we’ll hear in a few moments, had a few other problems as well.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The historic word for people like Matthew Cod is loser, just in case you… I love you’re putting it so delicately.

Joanne Freeman:

I know. I know. Well, I am being diplomatic. I like Martha Bradstreet. I’m not so fond of Matthew Cod.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think I’m angrier at him than you are.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He’s not a good boy.

Joanne Freeman:

He is not a good boy, but he gets what he deserves in the end. So in 1799, the couple immigrated to the United States basically to claim some Mohawk Valley land in New York that Martha inherited from a relative. It was being held in trust by a New York merchant and attorney named Edward Gould. Gould mishandled some of her inheritance, although they did manage to get some of the land and settled in nearby Utica. That’s a reason why many people came to the colonies and then the United States was it was far easier whether you were inheriting it or not to get land. So this makes perfect sense in this moment that this is when they’re pursuing that.

Now, by 1809, Martha had given birth to five children and Matthew had become a violent alcoholic. Now this is an important point here-

Heather Cox Richardson:

Loser. Sorry.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes, but I’m going to continue to be diplomatic and I won’t say Matthew Cod had shown himself to be a loser. This is an important point to mention here, and that is the common law doctrine of coverture. Essentially what that meant was that when a woman married her legal rights were essentially assumed by her husband. Coverture comes from feme covert, which is covered woman. Basically you surrender in a certain degree your legal rights when you marry. It’s why for those of you who love 18th and 19th century novels in which there’s so much attention being paid to who women are marrying and when they marry and how can they tell how wealthy they are or aren’t, that last moment of choice you have before you get brought into marriage and essentially subsumed by your husband. That’s a moment of power for women that they really had to think about because they were going to make a big choice that could shape the rest of their lives.

So here’s Martha and she marries Matthew. She ultimately took advantage of some loopholes in the New York Chancery court, and this is what I love about Martha is that this woman was not shy in any way. This woman had a sense of what she wanted and what she deserved, and she was very upfront about demanding it in a way that I think in this time period would’ve been noteworthy if she were a male, nevermind a woman who is making these demands at a time when people didn’t see her as having any right to do that at all. So she takes advantage of some loopholes in the New York Chancery court and she manages to convince Matthew to enter into a post-nuptial agreement that granted her much of the land via a trustee system. That same contract stipulated that if Martha found Matthew drunk again, he would give up all rights to their land holdings, which is pretty remarkable. She explained in a letter to her estranged husband, “I should have no claim to pity if I returned to you without strictly guarding against the worst that may happen.”

Now, they didn’t have a formal divorce at this point. Instead, they divided up property as a kind of separation agreement, and Martha explained why she thought that was a better idea than a formal divorce. She said, “It is not altogether for myself. I wish to avoid this measure,” divorce, “to bury in oblivion disgraceful circumstances and to save for their sakes,” her children’s sakes, “a property I have ever since I became a mother considered as belonging to my children.” So even as she’s out here contesting the legal system, of course she has to think about her reputation and the reputations of her children and how her reputation will be passed on to them in one way or another.

It’s worth noting too at this point, it’s not as though you could easily sail into a courtroom and get a divorce. It was difficult to get a divorce. There had to be reasons, they had to be proven, you had to have a lawyer. There are any number of reasons why a formal divorce was not necessarily an easy thing to get.

Now, in the process of trying to deal with her property in New York, she’s also dealing with some debts in England, which she’s trying to pay off. And in the course of doing that, she apparently overlooked one fee that was outstanding. And the distant relative who was helping her, named Edward Bell, got angry at her for that one misstep and he wrote a series of angry letters to Martha and the attorneys in which he called her this woman and belittled her gender. And Martha responded with a great letter.

She said, “If Mr. Bell fancied that thrice using the un-courtly epithet of woman would wound my pride, I must through you prove his mistake. I shrink not from the term as long as I retain those sentiments that teach me to despise the actor or an act of meanness.” Now, Matthew doesn’t give up and she returns to the United States and he’s still trying to get land. Ultimately, Martha sues Matthew for divorce. There is a nasty divorce trial with all kinds of claims on both sides of affairs and infidelity but in the end, Martha secures retainment of her land in the process of getting that divorce. But her reputation has been damaged by Matthew’s attorneys who did, as I just mentioned, accuse her of having affairs, of even having conspired to kill Matthew. So she wrote, and this is the other thing I love about Martha, she puts things into writing and she throws them before the public.

She wrote an editorial about the lawyers in the New York Evening Post accusing them of making her quote “the subject of abusive invective in places of public resort.” Matthew’s attorney sued Martha for malice as a result of that letter, and Martha’s attorney ended up crafting a defense based interestingly enough on the fact that she was a woman protecting her family and had difficulties mounting a legal defense. So her gender made it hard for her to respond to this in the way that a man might and Martha was acquitted.

So this is what Martha’s attorney says. “My client was the mother of a family of five children whose welfare and future prospects were involved in the fame of that parent”, fame meaning reputation. “Her daughters were just rising in life and they looked up to the mother as their only guardian and protector. Yet the reputation of that mother was dispersed and insinuation circulated, which were calculated to inflict the most serious injury on her character. The weakness of her sex forbid the infliction of a just chastisement on the authors of her sufferings.” Now just chastisement to my eyes, partly reads not just as a legal chastisement, but potentially even a physical one.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s what I was going to ask you is were they basically saying she can’t call him to a duel?

Joanne Freeman:

Not even a duel, but she just can’t physically confront this person in any way or cane him or whatever else that she has no way to chastise the person who attacked her. So I’m glad that you saw that too because I thought as this person who always focuses on political violence, that’s precisely the way it gets represented in print or in prose at the time.

Heather Cox Richardson:

There’s also that lovely line, “her daughters were just rising in life and they looked up to the mother as their only guardian and protector,” that says Matthew you slug.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes. So now back in Utica, Martha ends up using the legal system to try and protect her lands because there’s speculation going on and some of it has to do with the completion of the Erie Canal. She files suit to eject 35 landholders who claimed tracks that were in her domain and that had effectively been stolen from her decades earlier. She took that fight all the way to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York where she won the first of her land disputes in 1827, but the decision was overturned by a particularly partial judge, District court judge Alfred Conkling, father of Roscoe Conkling.

Now here’s the part that I love about Martha. She responds by publishing a 79-page pamphlet, which I just want to applaud. All the stuff that I’m talking about here this isn’t happening all the time. Martha is really stepping out into the open and doing things that women do not normally do and doing it under her name with real assertions of what her rights are.

So this first pamphlet that she publishes is entitled An Offering at the Altar of Truth: Dedicated to the Good Sense of a Free People, and she argues in it that America was giving way to rampant speculation and had abandoned a system of land rights. And she then goes on in the pamphlet to say, “In a republic, this is not how things should be.” It’s a sophisticated argument and an assertive argument and a political argument.

Now I just want to read two or three lines from that pamphlet as we sort of conclude Martha’s story here only because they ring familiar in some ways. She writes, “What have the last 10 years of the world been employed in, but in destroying the landmarks of rights and duties and obligations, in substituting sounds in the place of sense, in substituting a canting methodism in the place of social duty and practical honor, in suffering virtue to evaporate into phrase and morality into hypocrisy and affectation.” She’s really sweepingly broad in what she’s attacking here. She’s not saying, please this isn’t fair. She is saying asserting aggressively that’s not how this nation is supposed to work. And look at our times when we’re allowing things to work this way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and I also love that she is articulating early on the need of a society to protect its children. So often we think about women advocating rights in the early period or even later and think about them sort of attaching themselves to a male vision. In fact, I think you can read her and see that she is not just saying, well, I need to protect my babies. She is saying as a society uppermost should be the protection of our children, and that’s actually a very different balance.

Joanne Freeman:

And she’s also swimming in a moment of things like Mary Wollstonecraft and other tracks that are coming out that are asserting women’s rights that men often refuse to talk about with each other. But again, there are things brewing that are generally not having a huge impact on men, but that women are certainly aware of.

Now, just to draw her story to a close here, in the end, she does not manage to regain all of the land that she was due, but in the course of that struggle, she did successfully defend major parts of her land, inheritance, her credit, her reputation, her divorce. She accomplished a lot and basically all of them, particularly from a woman in this period, were major legal achievements. So she saw injustice and she fought for it, she wrote about it, she demanded it, she scorned people who denied her of it. That took hutzpah, right? That just took a nerve and a belief in justice that was particularly incredible in that time period.

So if people like Martha Bradstreet were trying to protect their own rights and re-envision society all of the time that they really have not gotten the public acknowledgement that they ought to. One of my absolute favorite characters in American history is Josephine Goldmark.

Joanne Freeman:

And you were very quick to bring up her name when we were talking about this episode. So she really is there at the front of your brain.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, like your Martha Bradstreet, she is swimming in a pool in which women have been explicitly denied rights, certainly denied voting rights after the 1875 Minor v. Happersett decision, which said that women are citizens, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they can vote. It separates citizenship from voting. And when that happens, a lot of women who are beginning to go to high school and then to colleges take their educations and their personal networks into the settlement house movement, trying to take a look at the rise of industrial capitalism and its extraordinarily sharp edges and trying to restore to American society a sense of community and a sense in which they’re almost trying to impose the concepts of small towns on the industrial cities. So people like Jane Adams move into Hull-House in Chicago. This happens in cities all over the country. Educated white women begin to work with immigrants in those neighborhoods to look at what society looks like and to think of ways to improve it.

Goldmark is born in 1877. She is the daughter of a Polish immigrant father and a Czech immigrant mother. So in 1891, her sister marries a rising star in the Boston legal scene, Louis Brandeis who’s going later to become a justice on the Supreme Court. He married Goldmark’s sister Alice. So he is Josephine Goldmark’s brother-in-law. He becomes a major influence in her life and her sister starts to push Brandeis’s politics more toward the left than they had been.

So Goldmark goes off to college. She graduates from Bryn Mawr in 1898 and she then went on to teach at Barnard College. While she is there, another one of her sisters, Pauline Goldmark introduces Josephine Goldmark to Florence Kelly. Florence Kelly is a leader in the anti-sweatshop movement and she is going to go on and file the National Consumers League. The reason I’m giving you all these names is because they’re all part of this expanding network of educated women who have been explicitly shut out of the political system after 1875, and yet are smart and active and determined to, as I say, file those hard edges off of industrial capitalism.

And Florence Kelly is actually the daughter of one of the early industrialists known as Pig Iron Kelly from Pennsylvania who was a leader of the Republican Party. She takes sort of those early principles of the Republican Party into this idea of creating a kinder, gentler, if you will, industrial economy. So in 1903, Josephine Goldmark becomes Kelly’s Chief Assistant at the National Consumers League, and from 1904 to 1908, she edits the National Consumers League Handbook of Child Labor legislation. And so doing, she becomes an expert on labor rights.

Now, at the same time, all these other people she’s working with are collecting statistics about the hours people work in the factory, the conditions in which people work, the numbers, hours of sleep, they get, what they eat, who’s going to school, what the city streets look like-

Joanne Freeman:

Actual data and facts.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, yes. Which is totally cool because this is going to be the real expansion of our understanding of what workers’ lives look like. It’s also going to be the expansion of the science of statistics and trying to take a real snapshot of a society.

So she starts to publish journal articles about the particular struggles that women are facing in labor regulations. In 1906, she wrote an essay called Working Women and the Law. And then in 1907, Florence Kelly and Josephine Goldmark are looking for somebody to represent the state of Oregon in the case of Muller versus Oregon. That’s a case before the Supreme Court that involves whether or not it is constitutional to limit the hours that female laundry workers put in at their jobs. Laundry is incredibly hard, really difficult work. So what do they do? They’re looking for a lawyer. Where do they turn? To Lewis Brandeis.

Brandeis takes the case, writes a two-page brief on the constitutional precedence for the case. Goldmark sits down and pulls together 110 pages of testimony, statistics, laws, journal articles, pictures of what it looks like to be a working woman in the United States in 1907.

Joanne Freeman:

I want to just jump in here to say 110 pages of data and articles and entirely invisible in many ways, right? Brandeis is the person whose name is really attached to this. So as you said earlier, Heather, and as we have been saying throughout, she’s there alongside him doing all of this work and in some of it the kind of work on that scale that hasn’t been done before and she doesn’t get necessarily included typically in the story of this kind of legal action in this time period.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, what she does is literally named the Brandeis Brief, the idea of taking statistics and testimony and data and making legal decisions based not on a bunch of dudes sitting in a closeted room thinking about the fine points of the law, but saying you can take your fine points of the law and have a lovely little chat about them over there, but this is the way they are playing out on the ground.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s your dude’s in a room voice.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, so I have to say I’m fascinated by the law and I’m fascinated by intellectual arguments and as you know, William Howard Taft who’s running around at this point, that’s his idea of his happy place. He just wants to sit in a room and talk about the logic of the law because those things-

Joanne Freeman:

Well, you can afford to do that if you have rights.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, exactly. So you sit there and you watch people looking at the logic of the law, which is itself a really interesting intellectual exercise. But then if you’re on the ground as a working girl putting in dozens of hours in a couple of days in a laundry, those guys sitting there talking about the fine points of the law, they could might as well be on Mars. So the injection of reality into the law through this use of statistics and testimony and data is revolutionary.

So what happens then is that the Supreme Court does in fact uphold the Oregon law that limits the working day of wage-earning women to 10 hours a day, which is still a huge amount in a laundry. Then in 1909, Brandeis and Goldmark follow up on the success of their approach in Muller v. Oregon submitting a 610-page brief in another 10-hour workday case in Illinois. And then in 1912, Goldmark published something really interesting, really interesting because she published a study called Fatigue and Efficiency in which she connected the idea of shorter work hours to increasing productivity.

Joanne Freeman:

This is someone who is not just collecting data, but she’s re-envisioning what she thinks is just working conditions and even just that title Fatigue and Efficiency. On the one hand, it’s broad and sweeping so it can play games with the guys sitting in a room talking about theory, but on the other hand, it’s about something very real in real life that can affect people’s lives.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and it too is an intellectual experiment, but one that’s based in the real world. So she’s taking the idea that capital and labor are not in fact at odds with each other. This is in a sense the outgrowth of the whole Republican from the Civil War era idea that everybody should be working in this whole system together and what’s good for the workers is good for the employers. And at the time when the so-called Robert Bears are saying, “We got to keep these people at work as much as we possibly can,” she’s saying, “No, you’re shooting yourselves in the feet. All of our relevant data says that people work better if they work less.”

Joanne Freeman:

So this is a passage from Fatigue and Efficiency that she wrote in 1912. “In the main, opposition to laws protecting working women and children has come from the unenlightened employer who has been blind to his own larger interests and who has always seen in every attempt to protect the workers and interference with business and dividends. To this day, it is the shortsighted and narrow-minded spirit of money making that is the most persistent enemy of measures designed to save the workers from exhaustion and to conserve their working capacities.” So she’s saying it right there, the employers are assuming that protecting workers cuts into business and dividends, and her point here is actually it’s the opposite.

The thing that strikes me about Goldmark and her data is that because as a woman she would not be given as much credibility in what she’s arguing, she has data backing her up to an extreme degree. A really smart way to enter into this kind of conversation where there’s still going to be a lot of resistance to hearing your voice with the seriousness that it should be heard.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it’s a lot of data. I’ve read some of these reports and they have very thorough investigations of what they’re talking about.

The way that this then becomes a serious challenge to the status quo is that in this period, as increasingly people are living in urban areas, both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party start to wonder what the government should look like and what it should do for individuals and who do they turn to? They turn to people like Josephine Goldmark. They turn to settlement house workers and say, “Hey, if we can’t bribe everybody, which is kind kind of the way machines used to work, how do we get people to vote for us? What policies do workers want? Well, who knows the answer to that? The settlement house workers. So people as diverse as Fighting Bob La Follette, who’s a progressive Republican out of Wisconsin, starts to talk a lot about Josephine Goldmark.

At the same time, Democrats in places like New York City are turning to people like Francis Perkins and saying, what should we be doing here to change the way government works in such a way that it’s going to attract working people? And it’s a really short step from that to say, “Hey, we better start listening to women as well as listening to the guys in the light filled room full of theories about the law.”

So Goldmark is one of my favorite characters in American history because first of all, she did all the work that then became labeled with her brother-in-law’s name. And second, because it’s this increasing focus on changing the American polity from the only position that a woman like her has. She can’t run for office herself. She’s not a lawyer herself. She’s got real barriers around what she can do. She ends up changing our entire legal system.

Joanne Freeman:

So like Bradstreet actually Goldmark, both of them are fighting for what they perceive to be justice, fighting for justice within the system as they can as women at that moment. Bradstreet feels very strongly right and wrong and justice and injustice. Goldmark goes further and by thinking about law and sweeping rights, she’s promoting a vision of that she has for America and workers within America and the nation and how those things shape it workers and the quality of their lives and using the system and all of the data that she collects to support and promote her vision.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So now quite naturally, we’re going to go to another woman, a woman named Rosa McCauley, and I’m going to let you develop that one, Joanne, who takes both personal rights and a vision of society, the next step into really changing the law permanently through direct activism. So I called her Rosa McCauley. She’s known by a different name.

Joanne Freeman:

She indeed is known as Rosa Parks. She was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her father was a carpenter and her mother was a teacher and she grew up in different places in Alabama. She began secondary education at a laboratory school set up by the Alabama State Teacher’s College for Negroes, but she ended up having to drop out to care for her mother and her grandmother. In 1932, she married a black Montgomery barber named Ray Parks, a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP. And at the time of their marriage, Ray was raising money for the Scottsboro Boys. They were nine Alabama black teenagers and young men who had been falsely accused of rape. And I will say at this point that throughout this section of today’s episode, there will be descriptions of sexual violence.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The relationship between now the Parks couple and the NAACP is going to be incredibly important in the civil rights movement in general. Rosa Parks joins the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP as secretary and as a staff investigator. So she’s going to start investigating cases of violence against African Americans. She joins that in 1943, and that is also going to be really important because this is ’43, middle of World War II, when it is increasingly highlighted for Americans of all ethnicities and races and genders in the United States, the real disparities between the way white Americans are being treated by the government and black Americans are being treated by the government. So the timing of this is really important and the history of the NAACP is really important because the history of the NAACP has been one in which they are trying to address the inequalities in American society by highlighting just how frequently southern states and local governments refuse to enforce legislation against white people when they have committed atrocities against black people. So she starts to investigate these things and she begins to focus on lynchings of course, but she also focuses on sexual assaults.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, she had, in addition to the broader concept of justice that we’re talking about throughout this episode, she also had a personal connection to her deep feeling of the injustice and the need to combat sexual assault. She revealed later in life in a letter that her passion for the issue came in part from a near assault that she experienced at the hands of a white neighbor in 1931. She wrote in the letter, “He offered me a drink of whiskey, which I promptly and vehemently refused. He moved nearer to me and put his hand on my waist. I was very frightened by now. I was ready to die, but give my consent, never, never, never.” I’m pausing here because to say she had a personal connection to it sort of almost feels as though it’s belittling the obvious injustice of it. But anyone out there listening can feel the fire in their gut when a question about rights and justice comes up that has touched you in some way. And you can see that fire within her and she herself saying that’s part of the fuel is the fact that I understand this because I felt it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And this plays out in the case of Recy Taylor. So in September of 1944, Recy Taylor, she was 24 years old, she was a sharecropper from Abbeville, Alabama, and she was walking home from church with her friend, Fanny Daniel, when seven white men came up to them in a car and they claimed that she, Taylor, had attacked a white boy in a nearby town. They forced her into their car, they blindfolded her, they took her to the woods, they gang-raped her and they threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the crime. She nonetheless told her father and they went to the sheriff, the man named Louis Corbitt who said he would investigate. Shortly afterward, one of the assailant, a man named Hugo Wilson confessed to the rape and identified six other men involved and the sheriff declined to arrest the man. At that point, the people in Abbeville turned to the NAACP. Rosa Parks goes to investigate, and she had actually lived in Abbeville for a while as a kid and was familiar with just how dangerous that community was.

During her initial interview with Taylor, the sheriff, Sheriff Corbitt burst into her house and said to Parks, “I don’t want any troublemakers here in Abbeville. If you don’t go, I’ll lock you up.” She went back to Montgomery where she launched the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. That’s going to be really important. Again, this is 1944 and this is one of the initial cross state organizing tools to begin to cry out for recognition of equal rights under the law for Black Americans. They very quickly had chapters in 18 states with very, very prominent people speaking up for them, and this is going to matter because that’s going to turn into larger and larger groups. She starts to generate a ton of attention, and that leads to the forming of a grand jury. The grand jury refuses to indict the men. She urges the network to write letters of protest to the governor, and she also wrote one of her own.

Joanne Freeman:

She wrote, “Alabamians are depending upon you to see that all obstacles which are preventing justice in this case be removed. I know that you will not fail to let the people of Alabama know that there is equal justice for all of our citizens.” In February of 1945, nonetheless, a Henry County grand jury refused to indict the suspects for a second time and the men were never prosecuted.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What Parks is doing in this moment really echoes for me what Goldmark and Bradstreet were doing, but highlighting it in an incredibly powerful way. That is what she is saying is this is not just about this horrific attack on this young woman, although it’s definitely about that too, this is about equal justice before the law. And if you were telling me that the American legal system cannot protect a young mother from a brutal attack by seven men, there’s something profoundly wrong with this system. That really visceral highlighting of the extraordinary gaps in that era’s legal system spoke again to the entire system, not just to we need to fix this little problem over here. It’s a shifting of the entire way we think about the U.S. government that had shifted so far from its original principles.

Joanne Freeman:

She has a sense here of justices she wants to communicate and she’s devoting consistently, assertively for a chunk of time promoting that idea of justice. And in the case of what you just said, Heather, when she writes that letter to the governor, not only is she saying in black and white on paper that here is my vision, here is everyone, but should be everyone’s vision, which is equal justice. She’s pinning that to the governor. She’s saying, “I of course think you will not fail to support this idea of equal rights.” Again, really powerful way to, on the one hand, work within the system, use the system, and then have an impact far beyond the system or potentially have an impact far beyond the system.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it’s worth remembering just how extraordinarily dangerous it was for Rosa Parks to be doing this work. Literally, she was highlighting the idea that the law enforcement authorities and justice authorities would not protect black people who were doing this sort of work, and yet she persisted.

I also love in terms of this episode, the fact that when people think of Rosa Parks, they often think of her as some lady who was part of the civil rights movement that was run by a bunch of men and she just didn’t feel like standing up.

Joanne Freeman:

Who made a mark by not doing something.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right. And I’d like to point out that the reason we focus nowadays as much as we do on the case of Recy Taylor and Rosa Parks is because of a book published in 2010 by historian Danielle L. McGuire called At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. And what McGuire does in that book is really roots the civil rights movement in the sexual violence that was ubiquitous for black women in the American South, especially in the first half of the 20th century. That idea of the civil rights movement, once again, centering out of the experiences of women and of women experiencing sexual violence, the fact that it was so overwritten as this is a movement of men for rights, I think is really fascinating because once again, this is our lifetimes. This is not that long ago.

Danielle McGuire’s book prompted the Alabama legislature finally to apologize for their lack of action about Recy Taylor’s rape. It said, “We declare such failure to act was and is morally abhorrent and repugnant, and that we do hereby express profound regret for the role played by the government of the state of Alabama in failing to prosecute the crimes.”

Joanne Freeman:

Now, it’s tempting to look back over the history that we’ve discussed today and see a lot of defeats, right? Martha Bradstreet ultimately did a lot of things, but lost a lot of things. Josephine Goldmark did a lot of work, promoted a vision, but again, her name isn’t really associated with what she did. And we just looked at Rosa Parks persistently, consistently working for rights and justice, particularly in cases of rape and sexual assault, and we see again and again, people not being brought to justice. So it’s tempting to look at all of that and feel a sense of a lack of accomplishment or feel these are stories that don’t show victory. Obviously, I think Heather and I feel very strongly that that is not the case.

Heather Cox Richardson:

No. What interests me in terms of our grouping of these three people together is not just that these are special women who did special things, but rather that they embraced a much more inclusive vision of what American democracy should be about and could be about. And in this moment, one of the reasons that I’ve gone back and reread a lot of these developments, especially among the settlement house workers, is because it seems to me that this is something that is very much on the table right now in American politics.

There are far more women in the legal system, there are far more women in politics, and there is on the part I think of the Biden administration, an attempt really to say with a soft power infrastructure act for childcare and elder care and education and childhood education, that in fact, we need to make the kinds of adjustments that Bradstreet and Goldmark and Parks talked about be part of our permanent form of government, so that in fact, we finally do make the shift that these women have been articulating for so long. That we protect children, we protect women, not because they’re weaker vessels and they need protection from the big, bad whatever, but because what democracy is supposed to do is to protect everybody and to address the needs of everybody, and that will create a government and a democracy that is far closer to the reality of what democracy is supposed to be than the things that people like Bradstreet were fighting about where she didn’t even have control of her property, or Goldmark was fighting about when she’s like, “You really shouldn’t be able to work your workers into the ground,” or that Parks was talking about when she said, you should not be able to rape and murder any Americans without having the legal system stand up for them.” It’s cool to think that we might actually be at a place where we can see that adjustment happening.

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely. I think that’s part of why these stories spoke to us and why we brought them together today is all of these women are fighting for justice in their lives and beyond their lives, but they’re fighting for justice and what they did matters regardless of outcome.

I think what’s particularly important about that in this moment is as tempting as it might be at times to feel outnumbered or to feel that the system is working against you or there’s a longstanding fight to quash rights that should be there, the fight matters. I think, to defend justice regardless of outcome is to name it. To name it is to claim it. And to claim it is to announce to the world that you deserve those rights, that you deserve equal rights for all. That’s what we just saw, and that’s precisely where we are today.