♪ ♪ ♪ >> Marcela Howell, the President and CEO of In Our Voice: the National Black Women's Reproductive Justice Agenda.

Next on "The Chavis Chronicles."

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♪ ♪ >> Here at "The Chavis Chronicles," we're very pleased to have the president and CEO of In Our Own Voice: the National Black Women's Reproductive Justice Agenda, Marcela Howell.

And I should say, attorney Marcela Howell.

Welcome.

>> Thank you very much, Dr. Chavis.

>> So glad to have you on the program.

You're originally from New York?

>> I was born in Tacoma, Washington.

I grew up for the most part in New York City.

>> Alright.

>> Right in the middle of Harlem.

>> Well, you couldn't find a better place to grow up than the cultural mecca of Black America -- Harlem, New York.

>> A few blocks away from the Apollo.

>> Oh, well, you were right in the mix of things.

>> So, yeah.

>> And then went to undergraduate school in the Midwest.

>> Yes, I went to school at a place called MacMurray College, which was a Methodist college that I ended up going to because I got accepted into Columbia, but my mother told me I had to live at home, so of course I rebelled.

>> And you got a master's degree from Saint Louis University.

>> Right.

A Jesuit school.

Loved it.

Got married there.

Had my son there.

Taught at Washington University.

>> Right, also in Saint Louis.

>> In Saint Louis as well.

So, I lived there for quite some time before I moved to California and then moved back out to the East Coast.

>> So, while you were in California, you went to prestigious Pepperdine University.

>> Yes.

>> And got your Juris Doctor, your law degree.

>> Yes.

Never practiced law, though.

>> Okay, but you -- >> Just went because I thought it -- You know, I wanted to learn about law.

>> But you got that degree.

>> It was important, yeah.

>> And it probably helps you in your work today.

>> It does indeed.

It helps a lot.

Especially working with Congress.

>> Tell us about what you do with In Our Voice.

>> Mm-hmm.

>> How did you get into this work?

'Cause, you know, in the Black community, to talk about women's rights, in particular, women's reproductive rights, sometimes some may say is controversial.

>> Yeah, well, what I found out in working with -- I've been working with women's rights for a long, long time through high school and into college.

But what I found out was that Black women are probably the most supportive of reproductive rights in this country.

They don't talk about it a lot, but, you know, when you poll them specifically, they will talk about how they support abortion rights, how they support family planning issues, contraceptive issues, primarily because historically we have not had control over our bodies.

And so they're very supportive of Black women having control over their bodies and making sure that they are not barriers to them exercising their rights to reproductive health.

And so it is -- it is indeed something that we don't talk about a lot, and part of what we have been trying to do in In Our Own Voice is to get Black women to speak out about that, to talk about their stories, to talk about their advocacy.

And it's been very successful.

>> You wrote a book.

Tell us about this book you wrote some years ago about the role of Black women in the larger women's movement.

>> Well, the name of the book is "Walk in My Shoes," and it's a book that is specifically around helping young Black women navigate the women's movement, because the thing about the women's movement is it's been portrayed as being predominantly white.

But the reality is Black women have been in the forefront of almost every progressive movement, including the women's movement.

It was -- You know, Black women were involved with -- >> Sometimes Black women are not given credit.

>> Exactly.

>> They're the worker bees, but they're not given credit for leading these movements.

>> Exactly.

And that's -- that's one of the reasons why I wanted to write a book is to really show younger Black women the role that Black women had in the women's movement, in the reproductive rights movement.

While white women were fighting for the right to have abortions or to terminate pregnancies, Black women were fighting for the right to have children and not be sterilized.

So, in that same '70s year, 1970s, Black women were fighting for the right to make those choices.

>> That's interesting, 'cause, you know, I'm from North Carolina originally, and North Carolina probably led the United States with a eugenics board.

>> Right.

>> Where they routinely and sometimes illegally sterilized thousands of Black women sometimes against their will.

>> And it wasn't -- You know, it wasn't that far in history.

I mean, there -- Black women were being sterilized in, for instance, in the prison system in California as recently as the '70s and '80s, and sometimes into the '90s.

We have cases in immigration that happened in Georgia where Latinas were being sterilized, and so -- and that was just, you know, in the '20s.

>> I'm gonna [indistinct].

What is the root cause of this?

What -- I mean, is it fear of population growth?

I mean, what is -- What do you think is behind these regressive and repressive measures that are targeting particularly women of color?

>> For the most part, control.

We know that in the United States right now there are -- the highest growth and population is among Latinas and API -- Asian-American Pacific women.

And that means that white men primarily -- but white women as well -- are not gonna have the power that they had in the United States -- >> 'Cause of population -- >> 'Cause of the population changes.

>> The browning of America.

>> Yes, exactly.

If you have these kind of laws that stop people from exercising their right to choose abortions or not to choose them, you would think that that would be something that white supremacists especially or, you know, white men, older white men who are in power, would want to have Black women and Latinas and API women being able to exercise the right to abortion.

But what that means is that then white women would also have those rights, and what they're trying to do is to make sure that no women have those rights in order to change the population makeup.

And, you know, part of what we've been trying to do in our work with white women's organizations is to make sure that white women understand that these regressive kinds of laws don't just impact Black women or poor women, but they impact them as well.

>> From the very beginning, women of color were very much involved in getting the right to vote for all women.

But, you know, the history books sometimes get revised and sometimes the narrative of the women's movement does not necessarily accentuate or focus on the role that women have played from the very beginning of the women's movement.

>> Mm-hmm.

And, you know, and that's again where Black women are being erased in history.

And the thing that's fascinating about, you know, the right -- the fight to get the right to vote is once the 19th amendment got passed, and that was supposed to be women have the right to vote, the deal that white women cut with Southern states was that they could then pass all these state laws that would restrict Black women being able to vote.

And so that's what happened.

You know, women got the right to vote, but then Black women lost that right because of state laws.

And so we had this whole history of Black women having to fight to get that right to vote just as Black men had to fight to get the right to vote, even though they were given the right in the 15th -- you know, with the 15th amendment.

So you had the voting rights fight, and the voting rights -- Black women were right in the leadership of that.

But again, history doesn't tell that.

History basically says that Black men were in that fight and Black women were sort of behind the scenes.

But we weren't.

We were out there fighting for those rights.

Black women were getting beaten up on the Pettus Bridge along with Black men.

We were there.

>> I'm glad you mentioned that, because -- because normally when people talk about what happened at Selma and the Bloody -- Bloody Sunday, there's a lot of focus on a lot of the men that were beaten.

>> Mm-hmm.

>> But not that much focus on the women that were also beaten bloodily on that Blood Sunday across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

>> Right.

And that's the -- that's the reality.

And, you know, Black women were being beaten.

Young Black girls were -- had dogs turn-- you know, police dogs turned on them, fire hoses turned on them.

There was a big march -- the children's march.

It was both Black boys and Black girls who were being attacked by the police because they were demanding the right to vote as well.

>> And that's why it's important to make sure that these authentic stories are told to be inclusive of the reality of the role that women have played intergenerationally... >> Mm-hmm.

>> ...in the women's movement, in the civil rights movement.

And the environmental justice movement, women has played a vital role.

>> Right.

And that's one of the things that we do at our organization.

One of the reasons that it's called In Our Own Voice is to say Black women have a voice in all of these movements, and we want to make sure that our voice is heard.

Too often, especially in the reproductive rights movement, the media would go to talk to white women about the impact of some of these laws on Black women.

And essentially, we came together with our organization with eight Black women's reproductive justice organizations across the country to simply say if you want to know the impact of these laws on us, ask us.

And that's why it's called In Our Own Voice.

>> Well, when was In Our Own Voice first started?

>> We came together in 2014 to talk about whether or not we were gonna do a national sort of movement and to actually talk about starting the organization.

Now, reproductive justice was first named in 1994 when Black women gathered at a conference and realized the entire -- the whole discussion about the fact that the pro-choice movement -- as white women's reproductive freedom movement was called at that time -- really didn't address all the different pieces that was -- were about Black women's lives.

And so they came up with the phrase of reproductive justice, which was taking reproductive pieces, merging it with social justice movements, and saying that our movement, reproductive justice movement, was really an intersectional movement.

You couldn't just say, "We're only gonna talk about one thing," because we don't live those kind of siloed lives.

And it was more to say when Black women talk about, you know, raising their children, they are also talking about clean water.

They're talking about good jobs.

They're talking about housing.

They're talking about all these different things.

They're talking about voting rights.

All of those things go together in the lived experiences of Black women.

And so they came up with the term reproductive justice, and that's really what it's about.

It's understanding how Black women's lives are impacted altogether by different kinds of laws that get passed by state legislatures, Congress, all of those kind of things that impact our lives.

Impact them in a whole lot of different ways.

>> In your 40-year tenure in the board of women's movement and now leading In Our Voice, the National Black Women's Reproductive Justice Agenda, is the women's movement much more multicultural, multilingual?

Is it much more inclusive than, say, 40 years ago when you first started?

>> Yes, it is much more inclusive than 40 years.

That inclusiveness, however, you know, ebbs and flows.

Like, we work very closely to make our movement multicultural.

We work with an organization called National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice and an organization called National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum in what we call Intersections of Our Lives.

It literally is to look at things like economic justice, reproductive health, immigration and how it impacts each our constituencies sometimes differently, but sometimes the same.

And so we try to work together to sort of address those things.

And, you know, we go to Congress.

We have meetings with members of Congress together.

We do fact sheets together.

We do these briefings on the Hill.

We do polling together.

We just recently did a poll of women of color to talk about what motivated them to come out in 2020, what issues motivated them, and it's fascinating.

'Cause when we break them down, the issues are the same.

We may approach them differently, but the issues are the same -- voting rights, immigration issues, issues dealing with environment, environmental justice issues, especially around clean water.

Comes up constantly when we talk to women of color.

And, you know, and so when you look at that, you know that there are these different issues that sort of go across the spectrum, and we've been able to get these organizations, these bigger white women's organizations, to join us.

For instance, we had these meetings where the reproductive freedom groups joined us in pushing for voting rights, meeting with senators to push for voting rights, because we were able to tell them that this really is something that if you can't have the right to vote to choose your own politician who embraces the same values that you have, then you lose.

And that's the same way as having control over your own body, your own work, your family, your communities.

All of those things go together.

>> You've talked about the importance of having...correct thinking, right thinking, progressive thinking, people at state legislatures and in the Congress.

Let's talk about the Supreme Court of the United States.

>> Right.

>> Currently, the Supreme Court is very conservative.

Six to three.

And there is prospects overturning abortion law, abortion rights law.

How would the Supreme Court overturning the current constitutional law affect particularly African-American women as well as other women of color?

>> Well, the reality is is that having that law has helped women of color exercise their rights to access -- >> Roe vs. Wade.

>> Roe v. Wade has helped us exercise our access.

However, Black women and women of color have never really lived in a full Roe v. Wade world.

The reality is that, because of the states that Black women live in, the Southern states, that's where they have the highest barriers to exercising that right.

>> Well, let's say this again.

Are you saying, then, where African-American women and other women of color are concentrated, that's where the biggest challenge to their reproductive rights exists?

>> Right.

Because of the state legislature.

>> But it seems to be if you have more population, you should have more rights, not less rights.

>> Exact-- You would think so, but those are also where you have the most conservative governors, the most conservative state legislatures, and they have passed barriers.

They can't overturn Roe, but what they've done is they've passed barriers to, like, demanding waiting periods.

And they have also passed barriers that have closed down a number of women's clinics in some of these states.

Texas used to have a large number of clinics.

Texas legislature passed a law that basically demanded that those clinics be set up like surgical centers, which meant that many of them had to close down because they couldn't meet those criteria.

Now, that law was overturned by the Supreme Court, but it didn't -- those clinics could not come back, because one they were closed down, they lost their zoning, they lost their funding.

So there were fewer clinics for people to go to, which meant you had to travel longer distances.

All of these things do prevent you from actually accessing -- >> That's another interesting intersection.

In the state that has the most voter suppression laws is also the state that has the most oppression on reproductive justice laws.

>> Yes.

And that's why we've been able to convince the reproductive rights movement that these things are linked together and that they should join us in pushing for better rights laws with the Senate, because it will impact their rights as well.

Many of the women who go looking to get an abortion usually have other children, and they make that decision to terminate a pregnancy because they cannot afford another child.

So now they're being forced to carry a pregnancy to term and have another child, which will push them further and further into poverty.

So there are those kind of laws in the South -- Georgia, in Mississippi.

There's a case before the Supreme Court right now from Mississippi that is a 15-week ban.

And if that passes, we expect that there will be a whole lot of states in the South who will pass the same kind of ban.

>> Because of your leadership in the reproductive justice movement, you're also a leader of the women's movement.

What's your reaction to all of swirling controversy about the prediction and the affirmation that the next Supreme Court justice will be an African-American woman?

>> Well, my first reaction is it's about time.

I mean, the reality is, you know, this will be the first Black woman on the Supreme Court as long as the Supreme Court has existed, just like Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman on the Supreme Court.

And it's interesting because when Ronald Reagan decided to name Sandra Day O'Connor, nobody screamed about, you know, whether she was gonna be qualified or anything.

They basically said, "Okay, Ronnie.

Good idea."

They rallied behind, you know, Barrett being named by Trump.

And all of a sudden now because Biden has said he wants to name a Black woman on the Supreme Court, there are these questions about whether or not she will be qualified, which is the same thing that they always do.

We saw it when Biden named people to be in the Justice Department, and again they went after those Black women and women of color as whether they were qualified or not.

Well, you know, Black women are qualified for almost any job in this country, including being president.

And we're gonna see, you know, how these -- the Justice -- you know, how the Judiciary Committee responds to having a Black woman named.

We expect to have women in the Senate speaking up because, you know, there are no more Black women in the Senate since Kamala Harris became vice president.

But we expect those women in the Senate to speak up.

We expect the women even on the Republican side, who profess to be with us on issues, to speak up as well.

And we're gonna push them to do that, and we expect to see that.

We expect to see that from women who are not necessarily in the reproductive rights movement, but women in business, women who are in the environmental justice movement.

We expect that to happen, and we will hold them accountable if it doesn't happen.

We expect the progressive women who profess to be progressives to actually be there as well.

>> Well, we will all witness and we shall see what transpires.

And, of course, in order to attain these issues, one has to vote.

>> That's the other piece we really have to start pushing.

We may not get the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act passed out of the Senate, but we can work on the ground to make sure that Black women, Black people, Asian-Americans, Latinas, all are in there voting, turn out to vote in spite of all the kind of laws that are being passed to suppress that vote.

We know that turnout is going to be important, and we know that making sure that people understand what laws exist in their state and what they have to do to overcome some of those suppressions.

>> Marcela Howell, thank you for joining "The Chavis Chronicles."

>> Thank you very much for having me, Dr. Chavis.

♪ >> Major funding for "The Chavis Chronicles" is provided by... Reynolds American, dedicated to building a better tomorrow for our employees and communities.

Reynolds stands against racism and discrimination in all forms and is committed to building a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

American Petroleum Institute -- through the core elements of API's Energy Excellence Program, our members are committed to accelerating safety, environmental and sustainability progress throughout the natural-gas and oil industry in the U.S. and around the world.

You can learn more at api.org/apiEnergyExcellence.

Over the next 10 years, Comcast is committing $1 billion to reach 50 million low-income Americans with the tools and resources they need to be ready for anything.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪