New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and political scientist Melvin Rogers, author of The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought, explore the ways key African American intellectuals and artists—from David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and W.E.B. Du Bois to Billie Holiday and James Baldwin—reimagined U.S. democracy. Thomas Donnelly, chief scholar at the National Constitution Center, moderates. This conversation was originally streamed live as part of the NCC’s America’s Town Hall program series on Nov. 14, 2023.
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This episode was produced by Tanaya Tauber, Lana Ulrich, Samson Mostashari, and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Greg Scheckler and Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Yara Daraiseh, Cooper Smith, and Samson Mostashari.
Participants
Jamelle Bouie is an opinion columnist for the New York Times, where he covers history and politics. A former political analyst for CBS News, he previously served as chief political correspondent for Slate magazine and staff writer at The Daily Beast.
Melvin Rogers is professor of political science and associate director of the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Brown University. He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy, coeditor of African American Political Thought: A Collected History, and editor of John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems. His recent book is The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought.
Thomas Donnelly is chief content officer at the National Constitution Center. Prior to joining the Center in 2016, he served as counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, and as a law clerk for Judge Thomas Ambro on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Additional Resources
- Melvin Rogers, The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (2023)
- Melvin Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (2008)
- Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (2021)
- Jamelle Bouie, “How Black Political Thought Shapes My Work”, New York Times (Feb. 11, 2023)
- David Walker
- David Walker, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829)
- Jamelle Bouie,“Why I Keep Coming Back to Reconstruction”, New York Times (Oct. 25, 2022)
- Martin Delany
- Jamelle Bouie, “What Frederick Douglass Knew that Trump and DeSantis Don't”, New York Times (June 30, 2023)
- Jamelle Bouie, “The Deadly History of ‘They’re Raping Our Women'”, Slate (June 18, 2015)
- W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Excerpt from Interview: Melvin Rogers discusses how African American thinkers, like Martin Delany, challenge both laws and societal views to achieve racial justice.
Melvin Rogers: One of the things that these figures, these African American thinkers sort of bring to the table is the idea that that, look, my willingness and my interest in respecting your freedom partly depends on me regarding you as a member of the community and being taken by the community as being a member of it. And that partly depends on the ideas that are in circulation about you. And in the case of African Americans, they were not viewed as being members of the community. And so when they engage in a sort of critical evaluation of the United States, of the practices of slavery, they are both challenging the laws and institutional structures on the books, but they are also simultaneously challenging the ideas and beliefs and habits that are in circulation that habituate white Americans to disregard them as human beings. And the thought was that you have to challenge both of these in order to sort of render stable a racially just society. And one of the things that comes out of this and sort of studying these figures of the past is that what it helps cultivate in us is a kind of sort of intellectual agility, right? An intellectual agility in the sense that we become aware, as Jamel said, to the ways in which those in the past understood their world and tried to grapple with it.
And sometimes that casts into relief things about us that have developed in a positive direction. And sometimes it casts into relief things that have fallen away or that we have lost and the necessity to try to figure out how to re-enliven them, but in the face of our concerns, in the face of our problems. Now, this idea of re-living things in the face of our concerns and our problems partly depends on whether or not you think your fellows are up to the task of being transformed. And Martin Delany, who is typically identified with the tradition of Black nationalism, is writing, in the 1850s, he got into Harvard Medical School, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Admitted him, and then he was subsequently kicked out because students and faculty were simply beside themselves that a Black man was permitted to attend Harvard Medical School lectures. And in 1850, we got the Fugitive Slave Law. And so in 1852, Martin Delany wrote his very important treatise, The Condition, Elevation Immigration and Destiny of the Colored People. And this is a document, a treatise, in which he argues that, because the condition, the first word in that title, because the condition of African Americans is one in which they are not recognized as political equals.
It means that they cannot participate in the political system and thus provide for their own elevation. Thus, that's the second word in the title. And thus they need to leave. They need to immigrate, which is the third word, and if they do that, and go elsewhere, they then can provide for their own political destiny, which is the final word in that title. And so Delany did not see the United States as susceptible to transformation. But that's because, quite pessimistically, Delany thought that anti-Black racism, or what we would call anti-Black racism, was constitutive of the American polity and the political identity of the United States.
Excerpt from Interview: Jamelle Bouie argues that legal changes during Reconstruction laid the foundation for the Black freedom struggle, with efforts like Randolph's fight against war industry segregation advancing equality.
Jamelle Bouie: Institutions, law forms the ground on which much political contestation actually happens, right? Sort of the opening up of the American political system in the wake of the Civil War during the Reconstruction period is not just, it's, obviously, it was a good fitting, but it also enables sort of an entirely new form of political activism and political activity amongst African Americans. And so one of the interesting things is that when you're tracing kind of the long history of the Black freedom struggle, you very clearly see the kinds of institutions and relationships and opportunities built and taken during this brief period of Reconstruction enabled by these changes in constitutional law, these changes in actual sort of federal law. You see how those become the foundation for later movements, for later efforts that you can't reduce this struggle to simply the struggle for changing laws and for changing this, the foundation on which these struggles happen. But generations of activists have recognized very clearly that this is part of the battle, both in a major way, but also in things we might call relatively minor. So the example I like is Philip Randolph's efforts to win, to end the segregation of war industries at the start of World War II, really sort of American involvement in World War II.
In one sense, it's sort of like this isn't like a big expansive battle. But in another, Randolph recognized that sort of this was not just a battle for connecting Black workers to well paying jobs, but also a battle for establishing the equal regard of Black Americans by the government and also by the public at large. The public at large sees Black Americans, Americans as participating in this effort in a full way. And that is that, that sort of institutional struggle was also part of the larger ideological struggle, larger cultural struggle. They all kind of act together. And so I see, you know, I very much see as someone who writes quite a bit about the Constitution, who writes for quite a bit about law, I think those are not things to be disregarded, those are things to be taken very seriously as part of the, taken very seriously in the sense that changing them is part of the project of building a more free and equal society.
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