Introducing Politically Sound

Hey, David Chalian here. Today we're going to give you a preview of our new weekly podcast. It's called Politically Sound. There, CNN senior political reporter Nia Malika Henderson and I go in-depth on the news of the week and connect the dots to show you what really matters. Don't forget to find it and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Sounds of the Democratic National Convention. Four years and what seems like an eternity ago.

This year, it was different. The cheering crowds were replaced by speeches recorded at home. Good evening, everybody. As you've seen by now, this isn't a normal convention. taped musical acts, and a roll call vote that went from sea to shining sea. As an Arizona Latina, I proudly cast our votes. New Mexico proudly cast. North Carolina cast. Idaho cast. Georgia cast. Florida cast 57 votes for Bernie Sanders and 192 votes for our next president, Joe Biden.

The nation's first virtual major political party convention was awkward at times, enjoyable at others. But more than anything, it was historic. It was a chance for a Democratic Party to showcase to the world. that it is the party of diversity and inclusion. When you were watching the convention on TV, you probably noticed the party put women and particularly women of color front and center.

America needs all of us to speak out. We live in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a black woman speaking at the Democratic Convention. She was called an instigator. A rule breaker. When our constitution was written, women couldn't vote. To win the vote, women marched and fought and never gave in. We stand on their shoulders. You are disadvantaging her because of her sex.

There was also the historic pick of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's running mate. That I am here tonight is a testament to the dedication of generations before me, women and men who believed so fiercely in the promise. of equality, liberty, and justice for all. Women, especially women of color, have walked a road filled with struggle in this country. This week marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment.

And we celebrate the women who fought for that right. Yet so many of the black women who helped secure that victory were still prohibited from voting long after its ratification. Harris's presence on the DNC stage was part of a major theme of the convention. Women of color are the party's future. In fact, they're also the unsung heroes in many ways of its present and certainly its past.

They were undeterred. Without fanfare or recognition, they organized and testified and rallied and marched and fought, not just for their vote, but for a seat at the table. These women and the generations that followed worked to make democracy and opportunity real in the lives of all of us who followed. And these women... inspired us to pick up the torch and fight on. The intersection of the 19th Amendment anniversary in this unconventional convention matters. We're not often.

taught their stories. But as Americans, we all stand on their shoulders. This week, you saw history unfold right in front of you. But you might not know about all the women who paved the way. So in this first episode of Politically Sound, we are going to tell you why and how everything fits together to empower you, the listener, to better understand the stakes of this election. Hello, everyone. I'm CNN political director David Chalian.

And I'm CNN senior political reporter Nia Malika Henderson. It's time to tune out the noise and tune in to What's Politically Sound. Later, Nia is going to walk you through the overlooked role of black women in the fight for the right to vote. But first, let's discuss some of what we saw this week and what it means for the future of the Democratic Party.

Nia, this week was clearly about Joe Biden, but it was also about his promise to bridge to the next generation. What stuck out to you this week? I was transfixed this journey across the country. people in their different communities, diverse communities, speaking different languages and telling the story of this diverse nation. So that, to me, was one of the key takeaways from this convention. And of course...

Kamala Harris, this historic figure embodying all of that, the daughter of a Jamaican father, an Indian mother, and now taking her place alongside other historic figures like Shirley Chisholm, like... Fannie Lou Hamer, Black women who really pushed the Democratic Party forward in this nation for trying to help Americans really reimagine who could be at the seat of power. And so there she was making that all plain. to the nation with her speech.

I thought about my grandmothers all day yesterday. Bertha May from Canada and Katie Ruth from Mississippi. Women who didn't get to participate, fully participate in all the opportunities that white Americans have gotten to participate in. centuries, and they're trying to push this country forward in the way that they could in sort of their quiet struggles. And of course, my parents benefited from that greatly, and so do I. And what was also...

Amazing to see was these two historic figures, Obama, the nation's first black president. passing the torch to Kamala Harris, who is certainly his heir, standing on his shoulders, standing on Hillary Clinton's shoulders as well. So that tableau of history and also the fact that...

Kamala Harris wrapped herself in that history, wrapped herself in the legacy of Black women, something that we hadn't often seen with other firsts. I think Barack Obama certainly acknowledged the history, but oftentimes it was sort of in the backdrops. same with Hillary Clinton, the idea that maybe you didn't want to emphasize that difference too much to voters.

You saw Kamala Harris really embrace this moment and say that the Democratic Party is about diversity and making history with this pick of Kamala Harris.

And David, the Democrats were facing the task this week of not only hammering Donald Trump, but they are also showing people what they as a party stand for. Do you think they actually accomplished that goal? It's such a good question, Ian, because there was...

a whole lot of Trump bashing going on. And understandably so, right? I mean, these Democrats are trying to set the stakes as high as possible for the election. I think nobody set them higher than Barack Obama in terms of making the election not about a presidential election. but about actually saving the democracy and course correcting in some way. So there was a lot of Trump bashing going on. But the other elements in the convention...

In addition to the Kamala Harris and Joe Biden biographies and just getting them more introduced to the American public, I saw Peter Hart, the Democratic pollster, was quoted as saying, you know, Joe Biden's well known, but he's not known well. And I thought that was like, so there is still an education about their stories that needed to happen. And clearly that was part. But then there were the two other things. The thing you ask about, are they making sort of the.

positive case for the Biden candidacy that is absent of Donald Trump, right? Is that accomplishing? And certainly Joe Biden used a chunk of his acceptance speech Thursday night to do just that. For love is more powerful than hate. Hope is more powerful than fear. And light is more powerful than dark. This is our moment. This is our mission. May history be able to say.

That the end of this chapter of American darkness began here tonight as love and hope and light join in the battle for the soul of the nation. The undercurrent here throughout the entire week is amazingly consistent, I thought, for where Joe Biden started his campaign about 14 months ago when he came out the gate and said, this is a battle for the soul of the nation.

everything sort of came back to that. So whether it was moments of talking about Democratic policy goals on climate change or guns or immigration, or it was the Trump critique, or it was the national security, whatever it was, this sense of... a return to normalcy. Here's the guy that can do that for the country and actually restore the soul of America. To me, it's an amazingly consistent narrative, 14 months in the making.

And it's amplified by what everyone is going through, right? This health pandemic and this racial pandemic, which has only been amplified by COVID-19 revealing all of the structural inequities. People are worried about racial inequities, class inequities, points you heard Kamala Harris in her speech touch on, the idea of systematic racism, the idea that there is no vaccine for racism, she said at one point. So I think the moment.

really only amplifies this original point that Joe Biden made and really, I think, shows how savvy in some ways Joe Biden was, that that is why he wanted to get into this race.

When we come back, I'll tell you about the history of the women's suffrage movement you might not know and why the story of the 19th Amendment overlooks the struggles and perseverance of Black women suffragists. Mia, let's go back in time a bit to talk about the big milestone this week, the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and what it meant for women of color.

The story of women's suffrage our listeners are familiar with, that they read about in high school history class, that's not actually the whole story, is it? Not at all, David. In reality, the struggle for women's suffrage that ended with the 19th Amendment was only for white women. Black women are very much still fighting for the right to vote. My great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells, was involved in the suffrage movement. She looked at voting as a tool to combat social injustice.

That's Michelle Duster talking about her great-grandmother, the journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wills. In the early 20th century, Wells was famous for exposing racist lynchings in the South. She also fought for years to secure the vote for Black women. She was 58 years old.

when women got the right to vote in 1920. So she lived almost her entire life without having the right to vote. So the fact that now women can vote... but also, you know, become politicians at state and national level is really a lot of progress. Across the country over the past few months, Americans have faced a reckoning over institutions and narratives that are rooted in racism. The commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment is no exception.

Even as Black women like Kamala Harris are reaching new heights in politics, there are hundreds of women like Wells who are typically left out of the stories told about women achieving the right to vote. They're excluded for one simple reason. They were black. Women like Mary Church Terrell, Lottie Rollin, Mary Ann Shad Carey, Henrietta Purvis, and Mary B. Talbert. Here's the story of women's suffrage that you probably do know.

A group of white, middle-class women led by familiar heroes like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony fought a decades-long struggle for women's suffrage, culminating with the ratification of the 19th Amendment on August 18th. 1920. But the real story is not as idyllic. In reality, the achievement of the 19th Amendment was made at the expense of women of color.

Born in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, the suffrage movement... The Seneca Falls Convention is often credited as the start of the women's rights movement, and many prominent black women abolitionists and suffragists attended, spoke, and later took leadership positions. But by the end of the Civil War, the movement splintered over the passage of the 15th Amendment, which granted Black men the right to vote.

As one of the movement's first prominent male allies, Frederick Douglass, said at the time, I believe in women's suffrage, I always will, but the black man needs it first. My people are being killed. Most white suffragists were trying to achieve equal standing between white women and men, while black women were fighting for universal equality for all people.

It was a split that exposed the racial prejudice of many of the respected leaders of women's suffrage. As historian Sally Roche Wagner told CNN in a documentary airing this weekend, Women represented the 100-year battle for equality. I also want us to remember the racist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She never acknowledged that she grew up in a slave-owning household. I think she never really took accountability for her racist statements.

After this split, Black women faced discrimination within various national women's rights groups, and many Black women, like Ida B. Wells, founded their own suffrage clubs. Michelle Duster describes how her great-grandmother Ida B. Wells and her fellow Black suffragists were asked to march at the back of a landmark suffrage parade in 1913. She went with the Illinois delegation, which was integrated. And once they got to Washington and she was rehearsing with her white counterparts from Illinois.

They were told that there was a request that Black women march in the back of the parade. Wells refused to march in the back, instead joining the rest of the white Illinois delegation. halfway through the parade. She said, either I go with you or not at all. I am not taking this stand because I personally wish for recognition. I am doing it for the future benefit of my whole race.

By 1915, the white supremacist ideology of the Jim Crow South was the biggest roadblock to the passage of the 19th Amendment in Congress. Negotiating with those Southern Democrats is where white suffragists made their intentions clear. Black women were expendable. Suffragist leader Alice Paul assured the Southerners, Negro men cannot vote in South Carolina and therefore Negro women could not if women were to vote in the nation. We are organizing white women in the South.

Another suffragist leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, wrote, quote, white supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened by woman suffrage. In the lead up to the passage of the 19th Amendment, women had slowly gained the right to vote in a number of states across America. Eventually, they had mounted enough support and momentum that the Democratic Party decided to support the bill, hoping it would help them stay in power. But this political calculation only materialized

after it was made clear to Southern Democrats that they could use other methods to suppress the votes of non-white women. First state ratification came from Illinois, where Governor Loudon affixed his signature... to be followed by enough states to put the amendment into effect. The campaign for women's right to vote ended with the 19th Amendment. But Black women struggled with the same systemic disenfranchisement and voter suppression efforts as Black men.

When America voted in November of 1920, Black women had the right to vote in many states in name only. While the 19th Amendment does not explicitly deny Black women the right to vote, it also does not guarantee it. While states could not stop someone from voting because they were a woman, they could for other reasons. Poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests, all prevalent in the Jim Crow South, were ultimately used to disenfranchise and restrict the voting rights of many Black women.

In fact, for many Black Americans, voting rights were only truly made a reality with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Even still, Black Americans' right to vote remains under attack today. As we remember the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave so many women the right to vote, it is important to keep in mind that Black women were left behind.

But black female trailblazers also persevered in the face of often insurmountable odds. Women like Ida B. Wells, Shirley Chisholm, Charlotta Bass, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Carol Mosley Braun. The achievements and political power of these women has never been fully recognized.

Without a doubt, Joe Biden choosing Kamala Harris as his running mate is a step forward for a party resting its electoral hopes on Black women. That's something Michelle Duster thinks her great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells, would have recognized. She would obviously be proud that 89 years after she died, we have a woman of color who is the candidate for the second most powerful position.

in our country's government. And so that is a really big step from what was going on during my great grandmother's time. But Duster acknowledges there is still work to be done to secure the right to vote for everyone in the United States. When it comes to women in politics and in our society. there are some things that she might be a little disappointed about, like all these efforts right now to disenfranchise people through all the voter ID laws and closing down polling places and purging.

voter rolls and now all of this debate about mail-in ballots. And so I think that would be a little frustrating to her. As we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, we should look back at the true history of the movement and pay homage to many of the Black women who were pushed aside but continue to fight for their freedom and their rights.

And yet, even as a Black woman stands for the first time to be nominated by a major party to seek the second highest office in the land, that fight still continues.

Thank you so much for sharing this important history. Adding to this story and the questions we all have about how to properly commemorate this anniversary, on Tuesday, President Trump announced he was pardoning Susan B. Anthony. What does that say to you? I just want to go on record saying this. I think pardoning dead people is really dumb, right? I mean, Susan B. Anthony, I think she died. She died in like 1906 or something. She's like really, really dead. So a pardon just seems silly.

to me. I know it's symbolic and it's been done with other people, but I just think it's such a dumb idea. And it's especially dumb because Susan B. Anthony wouldn't have wanted to be pardoned. She wanted to be arrested. She was arrested for exercising what she thought then. was her right to vote. And she had, I think, a $100 fine, which she never paid. So it's just not really what she would have wanted. And I think, listen.

Donald Trump is no historian. He's certainly no historian of women's history at all. But this was clearly symbolic and something that he thought he needed to do. And David, I imagine you know why he thought he had to do this.

sort of symbolic act in regards to Susan B. Anthony. Well, this is the thing about Donald Trump and the way he practices politics. It's like there's nothing subtle about it ever, right? It's the most amazing thing to me. I've spent my whole career covering politicians who really try to...

be sly and work in their various appeals to different constituencies in less subtle ways. Not Donald Trump. He's just like, I'm pardoning Susan B. Anthony this week to commemorate this because I desperately need white suburban women to... to stay on board with me, some of whom were with me last time around. I need them again. They've drifted away. And maybe I can make a nod to, you know.

the suffrage movement and like somehow get those voters. It's so ham handed. And what is also amazing is like sometimes it works for him, right? Like sometimes the non-subtle approach actually does have return. But this seemed rather ham-handed and obvious to me this week. Totally.

Nia, this is our first show, and it's been a very big week. We have the Democratic Convention, the historic anniversary, and that's not to mention everything Donald Trump was doing this week. Nia and I are going to try to end each week by connecting the dots for you and explaining why what we talked about in this episode matters. So, Nia, to you, what's your biggest takeaway of the week?

It's got to be the history of it. And I have to say, you know, I covered Obama, you did too. And there are moments in covering Obama, I would look at Obama, look at Michelle Obama and say, I can't believe that this country has a black president. myself. Thinking the same thing when looking at Kamala Harris, looking at the Democratic Party, openly embracing and really elevating women of color. And of course, the biggest elevation being Kamala Harris in all of the stories.

of America that she brings to the fore. Her story of being the child of civil rights activists, her story of being a Howard University grad, an AKA, all of these stories she talked about. And then, of course, her mom, Shamala. as well, that to me was really powerful and kind of letting...

Kamala Harris do something different, which was to come across as very warm, talk about her American story, and introduce herself. So I thought that was very strategic. On the one hand, she is this historic figure. On the one hand, they want to embrace that. and say that she is in the line of all of these great women who came before her, but also say, listen, there is a little danger here in kind of invoking some of the stereotypes that people have of Black women, this sort of idea.

of an angry black woman. I think you saw them really sidestep that very strategically. So that was one of my takeaways. What about you, David? What really stood out to you? You hinted at my takeaway from the week. It was the Obamas. To me, it was sort of a tag team operation, right? Her Monday speech, his Wednesday speech, they had similar themes that connected her more from like the concerned mother and... American, like, from the living room, right? You know? And then he...

basically giving a presidential address to the nation, not a political convention speech at all. It was more like an Oval Office address from a serious location commemorating the American Revolution and... raising this entire campaign season, this Trump versus Biden matchup, above the electoral political realm to that there's nothing short of our democracy at stake in this election. He almost was... Pleading with Americans to course correct here. It was unprecedented to hear a former president.

So. You make such a smart point about seeing a different rhetoric, a different kind of public persona out of Michelle and Barack Obama this week. And that is because it seems to me the Trump presidency has forced them to still write their roles in the history of the country. And part of that role is trying to pave the way for more history, which would be Kamala Harris, right? I think if she ends up being the vice president and Joe Biden ends up being the president, this speech...

We'll figure into why that happened in many ways. So they are, again, historic figures trying to pave the way for another historic figure in Kamala Harris, who is the exact opposite. of Donald Trump who is the exact opposite of the world that Donald Trump imagines is the better world, right? And you can hear in his rhetoric often that is certainly the case. So there you had Michelle Obama and Barack Obama trying to pave the way for Kamala Harris, who would be so different.

has such a different story than Donald Trump. That's it for this week's episode of Politically Sound. Thanks so much for listening. And if you could take a few minutes to give us a rating and a review, that'd be awesome. And please subscribe, if you haven't already, wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode of Politically Sound was a production of CNN Audio. Megan Marcus is the executive producer, and Haley Thomas is the senior news producer. Raj Mukija is our technical lead. Our episodes are produced by Will Cadigan and Mimi Mutesa. and engineered by Francisco Monroy. We'll see you all next week.

Podcast. I am your host, Michael Ian Black. Our country's doing so well economically. It's doing so incredibly well. Question. Trivia question. Is the country doing economically so well? Um, Joe, do you want to handle this? Yeah, I think I would ask the people who just got their food stamps cut off. So, yes, I think it's doing great. They no longer need assistance, food assistance. That's why they're getting cut off, right? Because most people aren't hungry anymore.

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