What Is the Pond You're Swimming In?

The most prominent structure of black political organizing after the Civil War became the mass meeting. The community already knows what pond they're swimming in. It's the outsiders who don't know. Women are much more enabled in terms of speaking in public than maybe white women in Victorian America. They had as much at stake when they broke the rules, when they went to secret meetings in the woods. Everybody's life was at stake equally.