Join Pushkin+
Gain access to ad-free versions of 20+ podcasts from the Pushkin library along with exclusive bonus episodes and other member benefits.
Anita Hill speaks with her friends Emma Coleman Jordan and Beverly Guy Sheftall, feminists, activists and scholars, about their work and her friendships with them over the decades. The events of 1991 challenged each in different ways; together they forged a path forward with the support of each other.
Anita Hill
Getting Even is produced by Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can hear Getting Even and other Pushkin shows add free, and receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up on the Getting Even show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm.
We've known each other now for decades, and it's hard to believe it's been decades. It's gone fast for me anyway.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
It has.
Anita Hill
And we've had lots of phone conversations. We've had many in-person conversations. And every time that we've gotten together for an interview, you've interviewed me. So now it is both my pleasure and privilege to interview you today.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
I'm all set with that, but I think it'll be a conversation. But that will be good.
Anita Hill
This is what I know about Beverly. If you want someone to direct you, Beverly is the person you want. So this is going to be our conversation.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Yes, that we're letting people eavesdrop on.
Anita Hill
Absolutely.
That's my longtime friend, Beverly Beverly Guy-Sheftall. She's been at the forefront of the black feminist movement, teaching and heading the Women's Research Center at Spelman College.
Another one of my friends and co-conspirators is Emma Coleman Jordan. Emma was a colleague of mine back in the 1980s. We were part of a very small group of black female law professors.
Emma Coleman Jordan
I always wanted to be a lawyer. I thought of myself as a lawyer warrior, somebody who was going to be in law not to make money, but really to change the equality equation in my society.
Anita Hill
Emma and I have written and edited a book together, and planned numerous conferences. I sit on the board of the center that Beverly created at Spelman College, and I've spoken there often. At times, all three of us have collaborated. These friendships have sustained and strengthened me for decades.
I am Anita Hill. This is Getting Even, my podcast about equality and what it takes to get there.
On this show, I've been talking with people who are improving our imperfect world. People who took risks and broke the rules. In this last episode of the season, I'm sitting down with two change-makers who are also my friends.
We remind each other to keep going when change seems impossible to achieve. First, I'm talking with Emma Coleman Jordan, who's an author and professor at Georgetown Law. She was there for me in 1991, during the Thomas hearing. Emma helped organize my legal team.
What made you want to support me? What made you go to that extra effort to become really actively involved?
Emma Coleman Jordan
Well, actually I started just by asking you if you needed some law students to help out. And then when I saw that wasn't going to be adequate to the task, I became personally involved myself.
I had some experience in Washington. I had been a White House fellow. I had been a special assistant to the Attorney General. And during that time, one of my responsibilities was to prepare for the confirmation hearing for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
So my antenna were up. I thought, uh-oh, she's going into a buzz saw. And I could see the posturing that was being done in the news. Even though Democrats were in the majority, I could see the positioning in public statements that the Democrats were going to attack you. So that was just my reading of the tea leaves based upon my experience in Washington.
Anita Hill
Well, that's all the more reason I want to ask, why in the world then, that you decided that you were going to step into that mess? Because I could see, and I'm sure there were many people that fit this category, that you would've just walked away. And there were others who did just walk away.
Emma Coleman Jordan
Yes, I know.
Anita Hill
But you decided that you were going to be not only active, you were really essential to the formation of the legal team. But also, you were essential really in connecting me and understanding who I was. And one of the things that you did involved faith.
Emma Coleman Jordan
Yeah.
Anita Hill
And our shared faith. Can you talk about that?
Emma Coleman Jordan
Yes, I'm glad you mentioned that. It's something that's not widely known. But I'm a Baptist. You also. And I thought, we're going into the lion's den. We need to pray. And I called my minister, H Beecher Hicks, who was then the minister in charge of Metropolitan Baptist, and asked him would he come and pray with us.
The night before the hearings, and then on the day of the hearings, he came to the hearing room. So we were in an anti room, you, me and Charles Ogeltree and Reverend Hicks. And he held our hands in a circle, we held hands in a circle and he said, let us pray.
And I remember feeling that whatever happened, I had the faith of my parents and my grandparents with me. And I thought, this is the right thing to do. I identified with you as a young woman law professor teaching commercial law. And I thought, this is not going to be a fair fight.
There were so many powers stacked against you, all of the powers of the presidency going to be against you. It wasn't just Clarence Thomas.
Anita Hill
Yeah.
Emma Coleman Jordan
I cared about fairness and equality. Opportunity for an African American woman who'd achieved at a very high level. And I thought, let's get in there and do it.
Anita Hill
I still wonder if it was my personality or my legal training that helped me to do the testimony. Part of what we know about these public hearings now, and what we learned really from 1991, was how the person presents herself is important.
Part of my ability to testify had to do with the fact that I had been trained as a lawyer. I had been trained in part to see the law as a mediator. But also to see it as separate from personal interest, and to take almost a detached approach. Do you see that as part of how I used my voice on that day?
Emma Coleman Jordan
I think there was a fusion of identities there. Your religious belief, your family connections. The most vivid moment for me was when your family came into the hearing room. You had that confidence that you don't learn in law school, a confidence in the rightness of your being. And I had that too.
Anita Hill
Well, We are definitely sisters in the law in that respect.
Emma Coleman Jordan
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Anita Hill
After the break, you'll hear from Beverly Guy-Sheftall. In the months following the hearing, she helped me navigate the fallout from my testimony.
I'm Anita Hill, and this is Getting Even. In the first half of this episode, you heard from my friend and colleague, Emma Coleman Jordan. Now I'm speaking with longtime friend Beverly. Guy Shek. Beverly is a black feminist scholar, writer, and editor. She's taught at Spelman College for most of her career.
We didn't know each other when I testified before Congress in 1991, but she was watching the hearing at home in disbelief. As soon as it was over, she took action. She joined a collective called African American Women in Defense of Ourselves. That group took out an ad in the New York Times in response to my testimony. The ad is striking. It's an open letter surrounded by 1600 signatures.
Before I ask you to talk about that, I want to say, it just went such a long way in restoring me. And assuring me that my black identity and my black identity as a woman was not going to be forgotten. You signed the ad. So tell me more about why you signed it, why it was done, and what it meant to the 1600 women who signed onto it.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Okay, so let me just say that not only did I sign it, but I got it framed and it's in my office. I'm looking at it now. It's to my right. And so I see it every day that I come into my office, and students also see it.
So that mobilization, that mobilization of primarily black feminist academics in terms of its genealogy, we were trying to decide, what can we do publicly? What can we do publicly to disrupt this racial script that goes back to the 19th century that says that black women cannot out African American men? That our primary loyalty is to race. And that any kind of loyalty, any kind of gender politics or any kind of gender loyalty is something that we cannot do. This is a script that we get and we learn.
And so black feminism emerges going back to the 19th century because of an intersectional lens and an intersectional politics which says that we are committed to the eradication of all isms. Racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism. And there's no contradiction at all in struggling to eradicate all of those.
And that even though we know we've got the script, we are going to speak out about violations, gender violations, including when African American men are the perpetrators.
We were very upset about the placement of you, or the construction of you, also as a paw of white feminists. As if there were no black feminists in the world. And so we wanted to make it very, very clear that white women had nothing to do with your decision, or your black feminist politics. That there's a black feminist history that goes back to Mariah Stewart, and that you were a part of that history.
Anita Hill
It's interesting that we were not able to have that heard in the same way that the lynching claim was heard. But it's not surprising because our history teachers teach about lynching now.
We have the signs, we have the pictures, we've got the old postcards. But we didn't have any of that evidence that was available to show what was going on in the lives of black women throughout the period even of lynching.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Yes.
Anita Hill
And so it was really hard to get that message through, and I think we're beginning to do that. But all of this was going on at a very different time.
And then you and I met. It was 1992. We met because Spelman invited me to speak at the college. None of the other HBCUs did at the time. The invitation itself was important, even before I set foot on the campus. Just having that invitation was important.
What were you expecting or hoping for, for the students? What did you want them to see?
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
So our students are accustomed to seeing black women who are successful. Because you can be successful without being controversial, or without taking difficult public stances around race and gender issues. So we can invite corporate women, lawyers, other presidents. We can invite those kinds of amazing and wonderful black women to campus at Spelman, which we have done.
But we thought it was also important for them to see a black woman dissident, D-I-S-S-I-D-E-N-T. What John Lewis would say, "A person who's making good trouble." To be courageous in public, even when it is controversial and even if your stance is likely to produce, which is what you experienced, of being demonized. Being rejected, being called all kinds of names. But we wanted Spelman students to see that there are models for women like you.
Anita Hill
Well, I got there, and I hope that's what they saw. And I spoke in Sisters Chapel. To me at the moment, it was this incredibly impressive space. So paint a picture for us.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Okay. So Sisters Chapel is probably the most sacred, and I don't mean sacred in the religious sense per-se. I can remember because I was a student from 1962 to 1966, seeing amazing people speak in Sisters Chapel, but they were mostly men.
I heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Sisters Chapel. It's the place where Martin Luther King Jr's casket lay for two or three days so people could visit. So it's the kind of place that people associate with these towering, big figures. So being invited to speak at Sisters Chapel, as opposed to other places on campus, signaled to the community that this is really, really important.
We were not sure, Anita, what the audience was going to be like. You advertise, you say to students and faculty members, please get your students out. And we a little bit worried about the fact that we might show up in Sisters Chapel and have a tiny audience. Especially given the fact that the hearings and you were controversial.
There was buzz during the day. But when we walked into Sisters Chapel and saw that audience, it underscored for us why it was important to invite you to Atlanta, Georgia, the home of the Civil Rights Movement. And to Spelman College, because of its connection to black women's leadership. And in more recent years, it's connection to black feminist politics.
Anita Hill
I remember feeling wonderful when I looked out at that audience. Because it was, of course, the students from Spelman. But there were a number of folks that were clearly community folks.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Yes.
Anita Hill
I had sort of taken a chance to come to Atlanta. Because I didn't know what to expect. I knew what I had been getting. But I didn't know what it would be like in-person. But I knew that I had to go.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Good.
Anita Hill
Because that was the only way to confront what I had been experiencing, the resistance. And I remember giving that speech, and I talked about speaking out against sexual harassment, and the role of black women in history on the issue. And the role that we play, and the value that we are to our community. But I think part of what stood out among the people in the audience was what I didn't say. Didn't say anything at all about Clarence Thomas.
And I think there were people who were expecting me to finally just sort of be angry, and maybe even vindictive, or to talk about the unfairness of the hearings. Which, there was plenty of that to talk about. But we realized, we both realized that all of the things that I could say, that would be true, may not help us move forward.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Yes.
Anita Hill
You say the buzz was still out there. There were still all of these questions about what to make of that hearing. It was important for me to try to create a path to move forward in. And I just wanted you to know how important Spelman was in that path, as part of that path. To be really a plea to join with me.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Yes.
Anita Hill
Because I wasn't a foregone conclusion.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
I remember you're saying that you were going to go back to your regular life as a professor in Oklahoma, and that you would not be on the lecture circuit and out and about. And so I said, I think that's a really good move on her part.
Anita Hill
And it was a good move until it wasn't, and it was time to come out.
You're right. I had no intention of it. And I tell people, two days after I'd been back to Oklahoma, I was in the classroom teaching. Of course it was not great teaching. But I have to say, the classes that I taught that year, even the first year law students who have their own anxiety, they pulled it together and pulled me through so many classes.
They were patient, and caring, and supportive in ways that you just don't expect law students to be. What you're observing are all of the things that I think stick out to me too. The family, and friends, and the witnesses who came, stepped up. We did what we came to do, which was to be heard. And we were heard. Now, we didn't change the outcome, but we were heard. And 30 years later, we're still being heard. And nobody expected that.
If you had to pick one lesson, what would that lesson be for sort of moving us even further?
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
The work is really important and you do it over the long haul. You just can't give up. And you can't say, well, I've done this for about 10 or 20 years and now it's somebody else's work to do.
So I just have said to myself, Beverly, you will be doing this forever. The joys outweigh the challenges. I've always been very clear, having grown up in the Jim and Jane Crow South, how challenging it is within African-American communities to center gender politics. That is a big challenge, and it is a lifetime project.
And if you add sexuality, if you say, I am as committed to the freedom of LGBTQ queer people, you are going to get talked about as a man-hater, and as a traitor to the black community. Which should be familiar to you.
And you say, that's fine. And you're going to get all kinds of bad names. And you basically have to say, this work, as you said, is not about me.
Anita Hill
You say it's not about you. But I want people to understand, that doesn't mean that it isn't personal. It is deeply personal, the work that we do. It's not about you alone, but it's about all of us, and all of our experiences. And in 2003, you wrote about your experience with partner violence.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Yeah. And Anita, I don't think I've ever said this to you publicly, or even privately. So let me just say now, meeting you in 1992, as a result of those hearings, this was actually five years after the, what I am calling domestic terrorism that I experienced for over a year. In and out of court for assault, car theft, arson even.
And so when you came to Spelman, and you don't know this, when you came to Spelman in 1992, I was still dealing with that emotionally. So when I saw you giving that talk, I said to myself, one of these days, I don't know when it will be. One of these days, I'm going to speak publicly about my experience with sexual assault.
And since your book, since your new book, Anita, I'm now for the first time, calling myself a survivor. Which I have never done publicly, or even privately. As horrible as the physical part of that experience was, the thing that I also wrote about is that he put my name in public male bathrooms and telephone booths in Atlanta, Georgia.
So strange men would drive by my house, and called me in the middle of the night. And again, getting back to friendship, Bell Hooks, a long-term friend who was visiting me, she and I went out at night with Windex and paper towels to remove my name and number from public spaces.
So thank you, Anita. Our evolving friendship is what motivated me to speak publicly for the first time, or write about my experience with intimate partner violence.
Anita Hill
Friendship is important in so many ways. Because, I'm going to quote another pioneering black feminist who's well ahead of her time, Polly Murray. And she wrote that, "Hope is a song in a weary throat." Do you ever get weary?
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Nope! And I think that I don't get weary because of my friendships. I mean, no one has ever asked me that question. But no, I don't get weary. You get weary when stress begins to consume you.
And I find all kinds of frivolous ways to have joy. Shopping at TJ Max is one. So no, I don't get weary. Because I also feel like, you know what my sister says? My sister Francine says, "Beverly, you are surrounded with angels." And so I think that if you have angels, and I'm not talking about in the Christian sense, and you have friends, and you have important work, you don't get weary.
Anita Hill
I say all the time, "I am ever hopeful." And I honestly believe that. And really, just to be with friends, and I come from that huge family of 13, and I have five sisters. But they're not the only sisters that I have.
So Beverly, I'm just proud to have you as a sister. And have you as a guide, actually, for the work that is being done. And it still needs to be done.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Thank you.
Anita Hill
As the poet Audre Lorde wrote, "Without community there is no liberation." With these friendships, making change feels possible. You could say that Getting Even was the product of conversations I've had with Emma and Beverly over the past 30 years. From reclaiming black girlhood, to critical race theory and the transformative power of art, they helped me develop my thinking on pressing issues I presented in this series.
And as I wrap up this season, I think back on various conversations I've had and how they've elevated the voices of all of us who have been dismissed or even deemed unimportant. And after these conversations, I'm more determined than ever to help our society get even.
Getting Even is a production of Pushkin Industries, and is written and hosted by me, Anita Hill. It is produced by Mo LaBorde and Brittani Brown. Our editor is Sarah Kramer. Our engineer is Amanda Kay Wang, and our showrunner is Sasha Mathias.
Luis Guerra composed original music for the show. Our executive producers are Mia Lobel and Leital Molad. Our director of development is Justine Lang. At Pushkin, thanks to Heather Fain, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Moreno, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Mary Beth Smith, Jordan McMillan, Isabella Narvaez, Carly Migliori, Royston Beserve, Maya Koenig, Daniella Lakhan, Jake Flanagin, Jason Gambrell, Ian Peksa, Sarah Bruguiere, Julia Barton, Jon Schnaars, Christina Sullivan, Carrie Brody, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell.
You can find me on Twitter at Anita Hill and on Facebook at Anita Hill. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at Pushkin Pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter pushkin.fm.
If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin plus. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can hear Getting Even and other Pushkin shows add free, and receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up on the Getting Even Show page in Apple Podcast or at pushkin.fm.
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.