Martha Jones book review
Rather than a traditional summery, the book review should focus mainly on description and historiographic analysis. The format of reviews should be patterned on those that appear in the Journal of Southern History, American Quarterly, and the American Historical Review. The book review essay is due in the week following our discussion of the text.
Post 1
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Jones’s study is significant because it draws attention to the complex experiences of black people in a country that did not recognize their rights. More importantly, it explores how these parties used the existing legal systems and political discourse to assert their views and position. Hence, it is impossible to ignore how the source documents how black people used their insights and knowledge of existing laws and petitions to protect themselves in an era where the Fourteenth Amendment was not yet established. Hence, before this change in law covered this population, there was a need to find alternative ways of using the law and political elements to protect black people’s lives. Furthermore, I believe the author based the study on Baltimore because it offers several examples of how black people fought the oppressive tendencies of American law. For instance, the source mentions people like James Jones, George Hackett, and David Pratt, who used petitions and the court’s authority to fend off oppressive patterns by creditors. Such actions showed how legally conscious African Americans were and their ability to use this knowledge to advocate for their rights (Jones 118). Thus, while many other locations had black people pursuing such efforts, Baltimore was a good example because several parties were engaged in such action. Therefore, basing one’s study on this area would offer significant insight into these events. Besides, these arguments of how black people engaged with the law to protect their rights exemplify their agency in asserting their belonging to the US.
In addition, they showed agency in their place in the nation by presenting the birthright citizenship argument. Essentially, black people actively argued for the in-depth assessment of the constitution and its declarations regarding citizenship. Through this movement, they pushed for reconsidering the racial elements that often undermined the rights described in the constitution. Such arguments would eliminate the ideology that black people were nothing more than slaves. (Jones 34). Instead, attention could be drawn to the fact that members of this community were people protected by a constitution whose details rendered them citizens by birthright. When the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, this matter became less vague, allowing black people an opportunity to secure their place in society (Jones 153). In addition, it offered them a better position to fight for their rights as US citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment laid the foundation for establishing anyone born in the US as a citizen by birthright. Hence, they were protected by the law and had the same rights as any other citizen. While such a declaration was still difficult to implement in a racially divided community, it gave black people a stronger footing by which they could fight for their rights and position within the nation.
I found Jones’ work relevant to contemporary society because it lays the foundation for understanding the plight of black people in a history that continually disfavored them. Furthermore, it portrays this community as strong-willed individuals with the intellectual acuity to know what they want, assess the constitution and use it to argue their position in legal cases. Such insights can inspire similar attitudes among modern African Americans, who have better access to knowledge and opportunities, pushing them to find ways to use the law to facilitate change in society and lay a better foundation for future generations. Besides, the insights provided in this reading align with those made in Blight’s biography of Douglass in that they both assess how black people’s prospects in American society changed through empowerment and implementation efforts to use the existing legal models to improve people’s outcomes. In both instances, this community is portrayed as capable of fighting for their wants through intellectual models and resilience.
Post 2
Birthright Citizens explores how black men and women navigated law and society to obtain rights in America pre Civil War, while challenging racist ideologies embedded in American society and the politics of America. I read this book in relation to the Douglass book where Blight navigated how Douglass and other black activists reacted to and experienced pre, during, and post Civil War and reconstruction. Jones expands on the Blight book where Jones reveals how black people during the pre Civil War era fought for their birthright citizenship in America through law and emphasizing the racist ideals immersed in American law and society. Emigration was a topic that Jones touched base on multiple times throughout her work where many black activists’ opinions on emigration varied. This reminded me of the Douglass book where Frederick Douglass faced the debate of emigration where he did not support the movement of black people out of the country, but understood why black people wanted to leave America. Jones expands on this debate that Douglass faced by demonstrating how emigration became embedded in American law and how black people responded to this topic. Jones noted that black activists organized against emigration where they would hold “public meetings” (38) to encourage black people to stay in America and fight for their rights.
Jones showed how black seamen observed laws during duties and experienced specific sea laws that applied to them and gave them certain rights as seamen. Through traveling, seamen also gained new insights of how freedom worked in other areas rather than the United States and Baltimore. Jones described a black sea man, George Hackett, observing Rio and how “Free people of color in Rio were citizens by law.” (56) Black sea men such as George Hackett gained opportunities to see what a future would look like with citizenship and when they would head home, they would bring these ideas to black activists to distribute throughout American communities to fight for citizenship.
Jones also described laws in Baltimore that required free black men to acquire gun licenses and travel permits where black activists noted the gun license and travel permits represented “self-sufficiency and self-protection.” (91) and that “the Second Amendment extended to free people of color.” (91) These laws were utilized by free black people who went to the court and sought out these small, but important “freedoms” to ask for travel permits and gun licenses. During these proceedings, specifically with travel permits, free black people asked permission from white men to give permission to obtain a travel permit where “white supporters signed their names expecting that they would carry weight with the court and give the permits authority.” (101) showing how free black people established allies with white people to gain small bits of “freedom.” By including stories of black men and women who challenged and took advantage of the courts, Jones’ work successfully reveals how free black people “are what drove lawmakers to refine their thinking about citizenship.” (9)
Post 3
When reading Jones’s Birthright Citizens, one cannot help but acknowledge the timeliness of her text within the context of Black people’s on-going struggle for political and judicial justice. In her text, Jones relates antebellum Black men and women’s struggle for and assertions of their rights and citizenship to contemporary predatory lending targeting minority communities (Jones 157-60). However, it is also worth noting the parallels between the circumstances described in Jones’s text and other contemporary conditions such as the on-going fight against the suppression of minority voters, with the ACLU stating limitations such as required “documents to prove citizenship or identification, onerous obstacles for voter registration drives, or limiting the window of time in which voters can register…disproportionately impact people of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities” have resulted in widespread “advocacy and litigation efforts aimed at protecting our fundamental right to vote,” thus reflecting the political and legal consciousness of racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and other minority/marginalized communities in twenty-first century America (ACLU).
Indeed, Birthright Citizens is an insightful and relevant text revealing how Black men and women factored into state- and nation-wide discussions on citizenship and asserted their citizenship through legal and political means to affirm their rights. Jones centers her study on antebellum Baltimore, a city situated less than a day’s journey away from the nation’s Washington, D.C. and located at the crossroads of the North, South, and the Atlantic world. Throughout her book, Jones centralizes the legal, political, and personal agency of Black men and women in antebellum Baltimore. For instance, Jones details how Black men and women were able to utilize the legal system to assert and preserve their rights. She writes, “For men like [George] Hackett, [David] Pratt, and [Jonathan] Trusty, the struggle for rights was one waged with the weapons that were legal papers.” Though African Americans endured “racialized marking[s] [that] functioned to distinguish and contain the legal agency of African Americans,” men such as James Jones utilized petitions to ward off aggressive creditors while “more prosperous men, like Hackett and Pratt, used paper and the authority of the court” to receive and extend credit and pursue debt forgiveness, illustrating a legal consciousness among Black people that translated into legal and judicial settings (Jones 118).
These assertions of agency and citizenship also manifested within a national context, with discussions on birthright citizenship urging a legal and political examination of the Constitution and the very nature of U.S. citizenship. Jones writes, “men like San Francisco’s William Yates wrote for newspapers, engaged in the vernacular study of law, debated in political conventions, and conducted themselves like rights- bearing individuals, all the while pressing for a radical redefinition of citizenship” and were “tied to a broader culture of race and rights,” effectively partaking in and initiating nation-wide conversations on citizenship, the rights of citizens, and the role of the state in preserving these rights that would manifest in conversations surrounding female enfranchisement (Jones 9, 68, 152). Jones contends that these were important conversations in the antebellum era, as understandings of citizenship were rather contentious and unstable, given that “citizenship had a piecemeal quality in antebellum America, defined only as needed,” inspiring free Black Marylanders to “study law” in order to garner a sense of citizenship and rights as antebellum Baltimorean “lawmakers found it nearly impossible to fix the status of free black Marylanders. Instead, they put in place a piecemeal scheme of requirements and restrictions aimed at curbing the very mobility and independence that life in the port city might invite….[Black people’s] rights and status, confused and uncertain, relied on no single text, ruling, or statute” (Jones 12, 24). This definition of Black citizenship and rights did narrow after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, as it guaranteed birthright citizenship, though black laws continued to pervade the legal and political systems of Baltimore, Maryland, and the United States, as noted in restrictions on “spreading incendiary matter among black Marylanders” and a failed effort to “free all persons imprisoned under laws related to slavery” (Jones 149). Nonetheless, the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment was a watershed moment in U.S. history that mostly resolved the precariousness surrounding birthright citizenship and “put African Americans…on a new footing before the law” (Jones 153).
Post 4
One of my takeaways that I found most interesting from Martha Jones’ Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America is that it expands Black Americans’ struggle for equal citizenship rights to the period before the Civil War. For example, in her Introduction, Jones discusses how twentieth-century historian Charles Wesley “placed historical writing during the civil rights era on a continuum that dated back to the earliest decades of the nineteenth century” (Jones, 6). In addition to enlarging our perspective of the chronology of Black Americans’ fight for civil rights, Jones encourages us to reconsider the possible manifestations of civil rights struggles; rather than focusing on written works, we should consider the ways that Black people asserted their legal identity in their day-to-day lives.
Jones demonstrates how ordinary people asserted their belonging by narrowing her scope not only to a specific location, Baltimore, Maryland, with a large population of free Blacks in an urban and cosmopolitan setting, but by following the trails of particular individuals. For example, through her study of the relationship between activists Daniel Raymond, Hezekiah Grice, and William Watkins, she illustrates how Black people formed connections with each other where they shared and fostered influential discourse about their political beliefs (Jones, 37). In other words, free Blacks forged and sustained a vibrant political culture, despite the existing ambiguity over their place in the United States, and this formed a foundation for the emergence of a broader, intellectual, social movement wherein African Americans pushed for recognition of their rights amid colonization efforts.
In addition to explaining the intellectual aspect of African Americans’ civil rights struggles in the antebellum era, Jones follows the lives of people like George Hackett, whose occupation as a seaman exemplified the contemporary ambivalence surrounding Black citizenship. Some states did not even allow Black sailors to come ashore, while other “authorities” gave them citizenship documents which allowed them to sail abroad while on duty (Jones, 52-53). And so, Hackett’s career potentially provided him with the unique experience of obtaining official citizenship documents at a time when Black citizenship was an uncertainty.
Jones also reveals how Black Baltimoreans pursued opportunities to access civil rights even after the Dred Scott ruling, like owning guns and suing in court. Jones asserts that Black peoples’ continued presence in court after 1857 demonstrates that Scott v. Sandford had a “symbolic meaning but little material effect” (Jones, 145). This is partly due to the actions of Black people that claimed their right to belong by showing up to court and petitioning for their rights. She also examines the efforts of James Deaver, Grice, and Watkins through the Legal Rights Association, who worked with a white lawyer to push for legal reform, demonstrating how, like in the twentieth-century civil rights movement, antebellum African Americans utilized a variety of tools at their disposal to push for widespread reform as well as a means of personal survival.
Throughout her narrative, she also acknowledges how, similar to the Garvey movement in the following century, antebellum African Americans were not always of one mind when determining whether or not America would ever treat them as equals. This aspect of Birthright Citizens compliments our previous discussion of Douglass’ changing perspectives about Black prospects in the US. It is significant that in these two books, we see that, before the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, African Americans believed they belonged in the United States. They worked to set the foundation for future Black Americans to return “a bad check, a check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” (Martin Luther King, “I Have Dream Speech”). They set in motion the intellectual movement wherein Black Americans like Dr. King would assert that the Founding Fathers forged our nation’s founding documents with the promise that “all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed to the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”
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