Lunch and Learn: Martha S. Jones on "The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir"

Co-presented with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights

This spring, grab your favorite lunch at noon and tune in to virtual conversations with the Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System on topics from repairing the effects of racial injustice to fighting for equitable access to recovering from exile and loss. Let’s learn together!

Lunch and Learn returns with special guest Martha S. Jones in conversation with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George's County Memorial Library System discussing her new book, "The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir."

Registration not required. Click on the YouTube video linked below to stream the program live or watch the recording later.

About the Book:

An “intimate and searching” (Natasha Trethewey, New York Times–bestselling author of Memorial Drive) memoir of family, color, and being Black, white, and other in America, from “one of our country’s greatest historians” (Clint Smith, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of How the Word is Passed)

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?”

Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives. But the color line was shifting and jagged, not fixed and straight. Some backed away from it, others skipped along it, and others still were cut deep by its sharp teeth. 

Journeying across centuries, from rural Kentucky and small-town North Carolina to New York City and its suburbs, "The Trouble of Color" is a lyrical, deeply felt meditation on the most fundamental matters of identity, belonging, and family.

Find the book in our collection: Book | Ebook | Eaudiobook

~From the publisher 

About the author: 

Dr. Martha S. Jones is a writer, historian, legal scholar and public intellectual whose work aims to understanding the politics, culture, and poetics of Black America. She can be found at work in seminar rooms, at podiums, in front of microphones, and on the pages of books, newspapers, Substack, and social media. Her happy place is the archives where she never tires of the adventure of discovery. 

Her creative practice is rooted in the personal essay. Her latest book, "The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir "(2025) recounts her family’s encounters with race and color through the story of five generations. You’ll recognize signs of a historian’s research skills, but you will also discover how she felt about inheriting the troubles of the jagged color line – from slavery and sexual violence through passing and colorism and on through civil rights and today’s “mixed-race” generation. Venues from CNN to the Michigan Quarterly Review and Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute nurtured the stories that have taken full form in The Trouble of Color.

She is the author of prize-winning histories that survey the vast American past, from slavery and the founding, the Civil War and Reconstruction, women’s suffrage and Jim Crow, on through modern Civil Rights and present day race and identity. Her 2020 book, "Vanguard" chronicled a long struggle for the ballot that extended 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, legal claims-making, and persistence. Her work is grounded in women’s history, including her foundational first two books, co-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).

Her by-line has appeared in the New York Times on culture and travel, including the widely-read “Enslaved to A Founding Father, She Sought Freedom in France” about Abigail, a woman held by the family of John Jay. Her opinion columns have appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Politico, Talking Points Memo, and USA Today. You can also hear or see her 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 19th*’s Amendment have given her opportunities for long-form conversation.

Book prizes from the American Historical Association, the Organization for American History, the American Society for Legal History, and the Los Angeles Times brought her writing to even broader audiences. Her research has been supported by the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advance Study,) the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Library of Congress Kluge Center, and the American Historical Association. She is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Society of American Historians, and the American Society for Legal History, which named her an honorary fellow in 2024, the society’s highest distinction.

Behind the scenes, her expertise supports media productions and cultural institutions. She has 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. She has joined television and film productions, in front of and behind the camera for Netflix, Arte (France), and PBS American Experience. 

At Johns Hopkins University, she teaches for the Department of History and the SNF Agora Institute. She directs the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project where her lab investigates the history of slavery and racism connected with Johns Hopkins University and Medicine. She has also taught and engaged with 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. She is indebted to the educators in my own family, and her teachers. At the CUNY School of Law, she was trained by mentors such as Patricia Williams and Victor Goode, and at Columbia University she studied under Eric Foner, the late Manning Marable, and Alice Kessler-Harris.

Her parents, a full decade before Loving v. Virginia, married despite the threat of the color line. She 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. She 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 her see how she might mix social justice and academic research. That has been her purpose ever since.