When Injustice Becomes Law, Resistance Becomes Duty! - Kellie Carter Jackson

Kellie Carter Jackson is a historian, author, and professor whose work explores Black resistance, abolition, and the intellectual history of Black political thought in America.

Shennette Garrett-Scott is a historian and author specializing in Black women’s economic history, examining how Black women used business, finance, and mutual aid to build power and autonomy in the United States.

This conversation is an exploration of how Black women use literature, history, and storytelling as tools of survival, resistance, and meaning-making. Moving fluidly between personal memory and scholarly insight, Kellie Carter Jackson & Shennette Garrett-Scott argue that literature—especially Black women’s literature—does more than represent the past; it cultivates empathy, restores interior lives erased by violent archives, and teaches readers how to live.

The discussion reframes historical method itself. Rather than striving for a detached objectivity, Kellie Carter Jackson & Shennette Garrett-Scott insist that bringing one’s whole self—emotion, ancestry, memory—into the archive produces better questions and truer histories. Empathy is not a weakness of scholarship but one of its most powerful instruments, especially when the historical record is fragmentary, brutal, or designed to dehumanize.

At the center of the conversation is the concept of “refusal”: refusal to accept unjust terms, refusal to surrender dignity, refusal to allow trauma to define the totality of a life. Through intergenerational stories—of mothers, grandmothers, and children—Kellie Carter Jackson & Shennette Garrett-Scott show how refusal is passed down as a form of spiritual DNA. Injury may leave a mark, but it does not dictate the shape of a life.

Crucially, the conversation resists the trap of defining Black history solely through suffering. Joy emerges as a political and communal practice, not escapism but fortification. Laughter, art, music, books, and gathering are framed as collective defenses against despair and erasure.

The dialogue also expands history beyond classrooms and books, emphasizing bookstores, podcasts, public talks, and community spaces as essential sites of intellectual life. History, they argue, matters most when people recognize themselves inside it—and when it helps them imagine how to act, protect, refuse, and build in the present.

Ultimately, this is a conversation about how knowledge becomes lived wisdom—how stories shape not only what we know, but how we love, resist, raise children, and remain human in difficult times.

This episode is part of the ongoing conversations hosted by Baldwin & Co., a Black-owned bookstore, café, and cultural institution based in New Orleans. Baldwin & Co. exists at the intersection of literature, ideas, and community—creating space for rigorous dialogue, storytelling, and intellectual exchange.

Through author talks, podcasts, live events, and community programming, Baldwin & Co. amplifies voices shaping how we understand culture, history, politics, faith, and the future.

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