By Tammy L. Brown, Associate Professor of Black World Studies, History, and Global and Intercultural Studies, Miami University

My 94-year-old great-aunt, Paralee Wilmer — we call her Aunty Lee — voted for the first time after moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1944. Born to no-nonsense, small farmers in Millers Ferry, Alabama, and the youngest daughter of 12 children, Aunty Lee was one among many African Americans who moved from the South to the North in search of better job opportunities and greater freedoms during the The Great Migration. These freedoms included the right to vote without intimidation or any other hindrance.

Aunty Lee’s memory is a bit cloudy regarding whether the first time she cast her ballot was in an election for local politicians or a presidential race, but one thing she knows for sure is her pastor at the time inspired her to exercise her constitutional rights and fulfill her civic duties. He said, “When it’s time to vote, make sure you vote. When it’s time to do grand jury, make sure you go.”

At age 20, Aunty Lee understood the magnitude of her pastor’s advice, given the disenfranchisement of Black folks that she witnessed growing up in Millers Ferry — including poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright violence and intimidation that prevented Black people from voting. To be a Black citizen in America but denied full citizenship rights epitomizes the hypocrisy of American democracy. This is a sad truth that I repeat like a blues refrain to my students.

This summer — as the nation celebrates the 170th anniversary of the first major convention for women’s rights at Seneca Falls and the 98th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote — how do we reconcile widespread narratives of a triumphant, steady march towards women’s enfranchisement with the more complicated and painful reality of my great-aunt’s lived experience as a young, Black woman in Jim Crow America?

One word: intersectionality.

Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw argues that racism and sexism intersect in a manner that compounds Black women’s oppression. Although the above historical events occurred long before Crenshaw articulated intersectionality, this insightful theory should be applied to all historical narratives that do not fully engage with the lived experiences of African-American women.

What do we notice when we take an intersectional view of the events that transpired at Seneca Falls? How does our understanding of the history of all women’s political empowerment in the United States change?                    

When suffragists gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, they advocated for the right of white women to vote. The participants were middle and upper-class white women, a cadre of white men supporters and one African-American male — Frederick Douglass.  The esteemed abolitionist had forged a strong working relationship with fellow abolitionists and white women suffragists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. No Black women attended the convention. None were invited. 

Although women of color were profoundly absent at Seneca Falls, a greater degree of cultural inclusion was on the horizon. In May 1851, African-American abolitionist Sojourner Truth spoke at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. During her famous speech on the abolition of slavery and the promotion of women’s rights, Truth allegedly bared her breast and proclaimed, “Ain’t I a woman?”

It was a melodramatic act and statement, but as historian Nell Painter argues, it never happened. Instead, it was a quaint fiction crafted by convention organizer Frances Dana Gage and other white feminists who depicted Truth to white audiences as a genuine albeit primitive ally in the fight for women’s rights. Thus, the 1851 convention marked a modicum of progress, but this progress is tainted by white suffragists’ attempts to control Truth’s voice.

By the turn of the 20th century, Black suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell represented intersectional feminism at its best. Born to former slaves in Memphis, Tennessee, Terrell earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oberlin College and served as president of the National Association of Colored Women. In February 1898, Terrell spoke at the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington, D.C.

Her speech forced powerful white women attendees to reflect on the compounding oppressions and systemic violence that Black women endured during slavery. She ended on a more optimistic note — praising the sheer grit and intellect of freed women. Terrell’s rhetorical style echoed the American ethos of self-made men and women, but she oversimplified the historical reality that the paths to racial and gender equality are long, jagged, and still unwinding.

The history of women’s suffrage in America is not nice or neat, because the impact of white supremacy is broad and human nature is messy. Furthermore, a nation built on stolen land from Native Americans and stolen labor from African slaves is flawed from the start. We must constantly acknowledge this truth and engage in an intersectional celebration of women’s rights activists and landmark events.

In addition to celebrating the passage of the 19th Amendment, let’s celebrate the upcoming birthday of African-American suffragist Mary Church Terrell, who would be 155 on September 23. Let’s celebrate the lives and legacies of the true Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and suffragist Harriet Tubman, and Shirley Chisholm — the first Black woman elected to Congress and to seriously run for president. 

Let us celebrate and support current-day Black Lives Matter founders and organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, three queer Black women committed to “placing those at the margins closer to the center” of political leadership. Last but not least, let’s celebrate the lives of everyday people like my Aunty Lee — a Black woman born and raised in Jim Crow Alabama who sought out a better life in Ohio and has religiously exercised her right to vote for the past 74 years.  Let us celebrate these Black women while recognizing that the struggle to vote without obstacles continues.

The Trump administration claimed in court filings Thursday evening that it had met the court-ordered July 26 deadline to reunite the children it wrongfully separated from their parents. 

It did no such thing. 

In fact, what the government did was reunite upwards of 1,500 children it deemed eligible for reunification and whose parents it could find. Hundreds of children were not reunited for a variety of reasons. Some 463 parents were deported without their children — and the government isn’t even trying to reunite them — and the administration said it doesn’t know the identities of the parents of 40 children.

What’s worse, until last Friday, the government did not provide the ACLU with lists of the most vulnerable families in our class --- the ones who are at risk of imminent deportation. The lack of notification is particularly egregious because the Trump administration has said that it plans to immediately deport all of the parents who have final deportation orders once they are reunified, even though evidence suggests that many of those parents may have mistakenly given up their asylum claims. We and our allies are now working to get these families connected with lawyers, so that they can make decisions based on sound advice, rather than misleading or confusing information from immigration officers. 

In addition, the government provided lists claiming that 206 parents waived their right to be reunified with their children by either signing waivers or providing oral consent. The majority of these parents are now subject to immediate deportation. But on Tuesday, we filed a slew of affidavits showing that many of these parents desperately want their children back and did not realize they had relinquished their right to reunification. 

In some cases, the parents said the forms were not explained to them and that they felt pressured to sign. Some were not provided translation in their native languages and had no idea what they had signed. One said he was told that signing the form was the only way to prevent his daughter from being sent back to Guatemala.

Because of the confusion, the ACLU has asked the court to block any deportations for seven days after we are notified of reunification so that we can make sure families have the opportunity to meet with lawyers, are fully apprised of their options, and can make the decision that is best for them.

In our filing Thursday evening, we also asked the government to:

• Provide all information possible on parents who were deported without their children so we can begin tracking them down. We want to make sure that all of them can be reunited with their children or make an informed decision to leave their children in the United States. If any of them were improperly deported, we believe they should be brought back to the United States.
• Explain in detail what efforts are being undertaken to locate and make contact with the parents the government can’t find. That there are 40 children with no parental information is profoundly disturbing, and we want to know how this could have happened and what is being done to locate them.
• Provide a detailed list of the reasons parents were deemed ineligible for reunification with their children. The government has alleged that some of them have criminal histories and a variety of other factors, but it has not provided specific information about the crime. While we agree that some crimes may make a parent unfit to be reunited with his or her child, clearly not all crimes do, so we need the details.

We will be back in court in San Diego on Friday afternoon. Rest assured: We expect this will be one of many more appearances before all of the families the government wrongfully separated are reunited.

The Transportation Security Administration is engaging in covert surveillance of innocent fliers — and raising a host of disturbing questions in the process.

Internal TSA documents uncovered by The Boston Globe reveal that under a program called “Quiet Skies,” every day federal air marshals are tracking and shadowing dozens of U.S. citizens who are not under investigation or suspected of any actual wrongdoing. We aim to find out more by filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the Trump administration.

The documents show that the TSA is using secret criteria that include travel patterns and specific behaviors to determine which travelers to target. The marshals then secretly follow the passengers and document their conduct in granular detail, going so far as to fly with them on subsequent flights. The agency retains the marshals’ observations and reports in its internal files.

The red flags here are plentiful. First, federal law enforcement shouldn’t be tracking and monitoring travelers and then logging detailed information about them without any basis to believe that they’ve done anything wrong. That the TSA appears to be doing exactly that through the Quiet Skies program is at once troubling and illogical — it needlessly invades the privacy of thousands of Americans while flooding the agency’s databases with useless information on innocent activity.

This program also raises serious constitutional concerns. If the TSA’s secret targeting criteria rely on race or religion, it could amount to unconstitutional profiling.

The TSA appears to be using algorithms to decide who to target, which only aggravates these concerns. This is a problem because such artificial intelligence incorporates human biases and often operates without adequate oversight and accountability. We’ve called out the agency in the past for using a targeting algorithm to sort passengers according to the purported risk they pose because it’s at odds with fairness and due process.

Finally, the TSA refuses to learn its lesson on roundly discredited “behavior detection” techniques, which Quiet Skies also uses. While spying on passengers, air marshals note whether they exhibit any of a series of behaviors — “excessive fidgeting,” “exaggerated emotions,” or a “cold penetrating stare,” to name a few — that the TSA insists on viewing as suspicious. In reality, they are subjective, often commonplace, and can easily be skewed by marshals’ biases.

Experts, legislators, and the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general have sharply criticized these methods. TSA documents that the ACLU obtained through a lawsuit revealed that the “behavior detection” techniques were unscientific and unreliable. Their use in Quiet Skies or any other TSA program is unacceptable.

Like the old, debunked “behavior detection” program, Quiet Skies looks like the worst kind of waste. It expends the time and focus of federal officers while at the same time threatening our civil liberties. The Globe reports that numerous federal air marshals have complained about the program, with one calling it “nonsense,” and in a very unusual move, the Air Marshal Association criticized it publicly.

From what we know about the TSA’s secret surveillance program, it’s a bad idea. Now we need to know much more about how Quiet Skies works in order to make sure that the TSA is respecting the Constitution and Americans’ rights.